Aurvan

Hello, On the multiplayer list there are a number of servers with a red X that says there is a version conflict or something similar when trying to connect. When I look at the server version it says 1.08 (which my client is as well), but still get the error message. Several servers I enjoyed playing on in the past is like this, and an example of a server is the coop server by jolt.co.uk if anyone wants to check if they have the same issue. So, my question is... what is the issue? Thanks.

AH! I then that must be it. I have only a sound mod. Too bad I can't use it, though, as I've gotten used to the new and much improved sounds.

Here is a short clip from a documentary where you see a Comanche in flight. It looks to be about the same size as the cobra, but I am not sure how much better it performs. But if you can fly sideways at the speed in the video, shouldn't you be able to turn from side to side with the tail rotor at the same speed? http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zkQJOsqV8rw

Maybe GIMP is worth a try as well, since it's free. I have no idea if it supports what you're looking for, though, but since it's free you can always install it and try. http://www.gimp.org/screenshots/

What software do you recommend for making movies such as these? I am finding Windows Movie Maker lacking...

I just thought of the SWAT series, and most recently SWAT 4 + The Stetchkov Syndicate. There you have clear rules of engagement that you need to follow (shout "Police! Drop your weapons!") before killing anyone, not injure civilians etc.) if you want to succeed. You need a certain score to advance, and that score is pretty high on higher difficulty settings. In SWAT 4 there are a lot of civilians. Some are shot by terrorists if you don't save them, some cooperate immediately, some cooperate but complain when you cuff them (it's procedure to cuff everyone) with comments like "Hey! We're not the terrorists!". Others simply refuse to cooperate, and run away, simply refuse to turn their backs and kneel, or even start to fight back if you push them. You have to beat them into submission somehow, and at the same time worry about terrorists. There are a lot of people that hate the police without being terrorists, and this makes the missions more dynamic since civilians doesn't all behave the same. And there are women in the game (but not children, except one mission where a mad cult had killed and buried all their children in the basement, but you only saw graves), and I especially remember a mission where I had to slap an old woman around and spray her with tear gas to get her to cooperate so we could advance and eliminate her son, which had kidnapped some people. The terrorists are also similarly different in behaviour. Some throw down their weapons and kneel down as soon as the police arrives. Others need some shouting to comply, while others need to taste some less than lethal weapons to comply. Others need a bullet in the leg, while some never surrender and you have to kill them before they reach a hostage or kill you. I'm sure it's possible to implement some of this to a war game like ArmA, obviously with some modification since you only have lethal weapons in war, and you don't have the same ROE.

As I'm a long time roleplayer, I approve of adding what I like to call "roleplay" elements to the game (moral dilemmas, multiple ways of solving a problem, consequences for your actions). I guess too many people think roleplaying elements mean that you level up your character, and sadly that's all you do in most of the so called computer RPGs. But a few good ones do have some good old roleplaying elements that can be transfered to most other genres. Another thing that would be nice was if you could interact with the civilians in a way. Ask them if they had seen any enemies nearby, and they would have short replies like "Yes/No/Not for a while" depending on if they have seen any or not. They could also be lying, depending on the player's relationship with that town's population. And if they found a weapon, they could pick it up and start shooting at what they perceived as their enemy. But about children... even a fairly mature game like Vampire: Bloodlines, where you do stuff like enter a strip joint and butcher a stripper with a fire axe before you suck her blood, doesn't have any children in it. The only game I can remember that had children you can kill is Icewind Dale. A lot of games have cows and dogs you can kill, though. COW KILL!

Hello, I am having some difficulties getting the mouse really responsive. When I move the mouse quickly to one side, there is a slight lag which makes me over shoot the target since the crosshair travels a short distance after I have stopped moving the mouse. We're talking a very short lag, so it's not very bad, but it's definately noticable when I need to aim accurately (which is almost all the time in this game). Is there something I can do to improve this? Does it have anything to do with the overall graphics setting? It seems to be running smooth to me with pretty high settings. Any help and comments would be welcome. Thanks.

I stole this from another forum I found using Google. I posted this because there has been some discussion about VSync and performance, and how disabling it improves your FPS. Original thread here: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=928593 I recently learned that how I thought vsync worked was wrong, and now knowing the way it really does work, I think it would be worthwhile to make sure everyone here understands it. What is VSync? VSync stands for Vertical Synchronization. The basic idea is that synchronizes your FPS with your monitor's refresh rate. The purpose is to eliminate something called "tearing". I will describe all these things here. Every CRT monitor has a refresh rate. It's specified in Hz (Hertz, cycles per second). It is the number of times the monitor updates the display per second. Different monitors support different refresh rates at different resolutions. They range from 60Hz at the low end up to 100Hz and higher. Note that this isn't your FPS as your games report it. If your monitor is set at a specific refresh rate, it always updates the screen at that rate, even if nothing on it is changing. On an LCD, things work differently. Pixels on an LCD stay lit until they are told to change; they don't have to be refreshed. However, because of how VGA (and DVI) works, the LCD must still poll the video card at a certain rate for new frames. This is why LCD's still have a "refresh rate" even though they don't actually have to refresh. I think everyone here understands FPS. It's how many frames the video card can draw per second. Higher is obviously better. However, during a fast paced game, your FPS rarely stays the same all the time. It moves around as the complexity of the image the video card has to draw changes based on what you are seeing. This is where tearing comes in. Tearing is a phenomenon that gives a disjointed image. The idea is as if you took a photograph of something, then rotated your vew maybe just 1 degree to the left and took a photograph of that, then cut the two pictures in half and taped the top half of one to the bottom half of the other. The images would be similar but there would be a notable difference in the top half from the bottom half. This is what is called tearing on a visual display. It doesn't always have to be cut right in the middle. It can be near the top or the bottom and the separation point can actually move up or down the screen, or seem to jump back and forth between two points. Why does this happen? Lets take a specific example. Let's say your monitor is set to a refresh rate of 75Hz. You're playing your favorite game and you're getting 100FPS right now. That means that the mointor is updating itself 75 times per second, but the video card is updating the display 100 times per second, that's 33% faster than the mointor. So that means in the time between screen updates, the video card has drawn one frame and a third of another one. That third of the next frame will overwrite the top third of the previous frame and then get drawn on the screen. The video card then finishes the last 2 thirds of that frame, and renders the next 2 thirds of the next frame and then the screen updates again. As you can see this would cause this tearing effect as 2 out of every 3 times the screen updates, either the top third or bottom third is disjointed from the rest of the display. This won't really be noticeable if what is on the screen isn't changing much, but if you're looking around quickly or what not this effect will be very apparant. Now this is where the common misconception comes in. Some people think that the solution to this problem is to simply create an FPS cap equal to the refresh rate. So long as the video card doesn't go faster than 75 FPS, everything is fine, right? Wrong. Before I explain why, let me talk about double-buffering. Double-buffering is a technique that mitigates the tearing problem somewhat, but not entirely. Basically you have a frame buffer and a back buffer. Whenever the monitor grabs a frame to refresh with, it pulls it from the frame buffer. The video card draws new frames in the back buffer, then copies it to the frame buffer when it's done. However the copy operation still takes time, so if the monitor refreshes in the middle of the copy operation, it will still have a torn image. VSync solves this problem by creating a rule that says the back buffer can't copy to the frame buffer until right after the monitor refreshes. With a framerate higher than the refresh rate, this is fine. The back buffer is filled with a frame, the system waits, and after the refresh, the back buffer is copied to the frame buffer and a new frame is drawn in the back buffer, effectively capping your framerate at the refresh rate. That's all well and good, but now let's look at a different example. Let's say you're playing the sequel to your favorite game, which has better graphics. You're at 75Hz refresh rate still, but now you're only getting 50FPS, 33% slower than the refresh rate. That means every time the monitor updates the screen, the video card draws 2/3 of the next frame. So lets track how this works. The monitor just refreshed, and frame 1 is copied into the frame buffer. 2/3 of frame 2 gets drawn in the back buffer, and the monitor refreshes again. It grabs frame 1 from the frame buffer for the first time. Now the video card finishes the last third of frame 2, but it has to wait, because it can't update until right after a refresh. The monitor refreshes, grabbing frame 1 the second time, and frame 2 is put in the frame buffer. The video card draws 2/3 of frame 3 in the back buffer, and a refresh happens, grabbing frame 2 for the first time. The last third of frame 3 is draw, and again we must wait for the refresh, and when it happens, frame 2 is grabbed for the second time, and frame 3 is copied in. We went through 4 refresh cycles but only 2 frames were drawn. At a refresh rate of 75Hz, that means we'll see 37.5FPS. That's noticeably less than 50FPS which the video card is capable of. This happens because the video card is forced to waste time after finishing a frame in the back buffer as it can't copy it out and it has nowhere else to draw frames. Essentially this means that with double-buffered VSync, the framerate can only be equal to a discrete set of values equal to Refresh / N where N is some positive integer. That means if you're talking about 60Hz refresh rate, the only framerates you can get are 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, etc etc. You can see the big gap between 60 and 30 there. Any framerate between 60 and 30 your video card would normally put out would get dropped to 30. Now maybe you can see why people loathe it. Let's go back to the original example. You're playing your favorite game at 75Hz refresh and 100FPS. You turn VSync on, and the game limits you to 75FPS. No problem, right? Fixed the tearing issue, it looks better. You get to an area that's particularly graphically intensive, an area that would drop your FPS down to about 60 without VSync. Now your card cannot do the 75FPS it was doing before, and since VSync is on, it has to do the next highest one on the list, which is 37.5FPS. So now your game which was running at 75FPS just halved it's framerate to 37.5 instantly. Whether or not you find 37.5FPS smooth doesn't change the fact that the framerate just cut in half suddenly, which you would notice. This is what people hate about it. If you're playing a game that has a framerate that routinely stays above your refresh rate, then VSync will generally be a good thing. However if it's a game that moves above and below it, then VSync can become annoying. Even worse, if the game plays at an FPS that is just below the refresh rate (say you get 65FPS most of the time on a refresh rate of 75Hz), the video card will have to settle for putting out much less FPS than it could (37.5FPS in that instance). This second example is where the percieved drop in performance comes in. It looks like VSync just killed your framerate. It did, technically, but it isn't because it's a graphically intensive operation. It's simply the way it works. All hope is not lost however. There is a technique called triple-buffering that solves this VSync problem. Lets go back to our 50FPS, 75Hz example. Frame 1 is in the frame buffer, and 2/3 of frame 2 are drawn in the back buffer. The refresh happens and frame 1 is grabbed for the first time. The last third of frame 2 are drawn in the back buffer, and the first third of frame 3 is drawn in the second back buffer (hence the term triple-buffering). The refresh happens, frame 1 is grabbed for the second time, and frame 2 is copied into the frame buffer and the first part of frame 3 into the back buffer. The last 2/3 of frame 3 are drawn in the back buffer, the refresh happens, frame 2 is grabbed for the first time, and frame 3 is copied to the frame buffer. The process starts over. This time we still got 2 frames, but in only 3 refresh cycles. That's 2/3 of the refresh rate, which is 50FPS, exactly what we would have gotten without it. Triple-buffering essentially gives the video card someplace to keep doing work while it waits to transfer the back buffer to the frame buffer, so it doesn't have to waste time. Unfortunately, triple-buffering isn't available in every game, and in fact it isn't too common. It also can cost a little performance to utilize, as it requires extra VRAM for the buffers, and time spent copying all of them around. However, triple-buffered VSync really is the key to the best experience as you eliminate tearing without the downsides of normal VSync (unless you consider the fact that your FPS is capped a downside... which is silly because you can't see an FPS higher than your refresh anyway). I hope this was informative, and will help people understand the intracacies of VSync (and hopefully curb the "VSync, yes or no?" debates!. Generally, if triple buffering isn't available, you have to decide whether the discrete framerate limitations of VSync and the issues that can cause are worth the visual improvement of the elimination of tearing. It's a personal preference, and it's entirely up to you.

I think it's fine, since a mix between army and marines is explained with the storyline. I agree that it's a bit strange with the old anti-air weapons, though, but I suspect this has to do with balance. An AI controlled Shilka is enough to shoot down my Blackhawk pretty quickly if I foolishly get within range. But if they included any of the more modern AA weapons included in this list, flying would be even more dangerous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antiaircraft_weapons Also, it's a bit strange that a small nation owns SU-34s, which happens to be the most modern fighter-bomber/strike aircraft in the world! But we can pretend they are Russian test models they got for testing purposes And in the same spirit, the US friendly part should get a couple of Comanche choppers for the same reasons (instead of just putting them in the chopper graveyard). Yes? Yes?!

I usually play a chopper pilot in multiplayer coop games, and I have noticed some issues with helicopters. -Re-arming the Cobra is a nightmare. It wont re-arm no matter what I do. -It's impossible to turn off the engine after you have landed since the chopper will ascend if you don't hold down the key that keeps it on the ground. -NV goggles (as mentioned) are useless in the Cobra. -There is a parachute bug where people that jump out of my chopper are dropped from the parachute before they reach the ground, resulting in their deaths. Anyone else having the same problems, or have a solution?

I can confirm that the NV goggles doesn't work properly in the Cobra. Last night on multiplayer I got shot down because I couldn't see anything and got too high up in the air. Damn Shilka...

This is the story with all games with any kind of copy protection. It's easy to bypass any copy protection with an illegal copy of the game, while the copy protection gives legitimate buyers a world of trouble. This is the same old story with any game, and some publishers have simply stopped using copy protection all together. And I wish more would, as the "protection" it gives is just theoretical.

If the Euro version had StarForce I would not have bought the game. Securom is less intrusive, so I can accept that.

I've had no drop in performance that I have noticed. Usually between 20-30. I have most settings above normal. I have a GeForce 7800 GTX btw.

I found out that I had to bind a new key to the GPS, sow it's working - nice. I also found out that you can only switch seats in the cobra by landing, get out, and then get in to the other seat again. I guess that makes sense. So I use an AI gunner since manually controlling the machine gun while flying has limited movent. I'm still not sure how to aim laser guided bombs from planes, though. Overall I like the improvements.

I've noticed that forcing VSync OFF is a BAD idea in this game. When I turned VSYNC ON (application controlled) the game ran MUCH better. Just as a warning if you tried turning it off for some reason. Also, how do you: -turn on the GPS -change to laser sight mode in the harrier -change to gunner seat in the cobra (so you can move the sight around without turning the chopper)

Does this work for anyone? Â Is there anyone with vsync and a refresh rate of 60 who ever sees 40 fps, as should be possible with triple buffering? Â Or do we all have 'buggy drivers?' I tried to enble in the driver settings, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I jump between 30 and 60 FPS (not very often as I rarely get 60 FPS. So I have no idea where I am suppose to be. Maybe even above 40!

Holy hammer! I did the same thing... I toggled VSync to application controlled, and then Trible buffer to ON. On a particularly bushy mission I used to get like 10-15 FPS. Now I suddenly got a constant 30! Obviously it wont go above 30 unless it can do 60, which is the monitor limit. So when I look directly down it jumps between 30 and 60 instead of stopping by 40 and 50 on the way. But I don't really care. Even if it shows 30 instead of 35 or whatever, that's way better than 15 FPS anyway! Baffled! What's going on here? Also, even with the way ArmA handles the buffering (ehich doesn't seem to work with me) how about an option to enable Triple Buffering within the game?

When I first started reading about VSync I didn't know what tearing was, so I didn't get a whole lot of it. I notice it if I look for it, but it doesn't bother me that much. My FPS sometimes drops all the way down below 20 in graphically intensive areas, so VSync would probably not be a good idea for me since it wont stay stable. Anyway, here is a screenshot of what tearing looks like in case you're not sure:

It is? That's tragic, as the new version is horrible compared to the classic one.

yeah, where do we have to change that value ? I found it when I changed my NVIDIA display panel to 'classic view'. The modern one is pretty hopeless IMHO.

Yes, I came to the same conclusion. I had the game on Very High by default, and it seemed to run fine most of the time. When I put up and FPS counter I noticed how the framerate jumped between 40-10 FPS! And the control lag increased accordingly. So I turned the default slider down to normal and disabled AA altogether. Now I get ridiculous high FPS in open areas, and acceptable FPS in towns with a lot of foliage and explosions. The biggest impact was drawing distance for me. I think I have it at 1200 now. It used to be well above 2000. It's a bit foggier now, but I can live with that. Anyway, the test I did was to move to 3rd person view, and then quickly tap the move forward key. If I have a good setting, my dude will take a small step forward, and stop moving instantly. If I'm having it too high, my dude will not react right away when I tap the forward key, and he will still be moving a step after I have released it. So I kept tuning my settings until he moved very accurately. It's still a slight delay in a overgrown town with vehicles, smoke, explosion and bullets everywhere, but much easier to kill tangos than before.

Thanks for the replies: I posted it in general because the technical forum has this text: "This forum is for reporting hardware/driver issues with ArmA as well as for reporting serious bugs." It isn't a serious bug, and wasn't aware that it was a hardware/driver issue. I also searched for "mouse lag". I got this message: "Sorry, but we did not find any matches" I have a GeForce 7800 GTX. I already had v-sync deactivated. I guess I will try the coolbits thing. Can anyone explain what seting 'render frames ahead' to 0 means? Unlike a previous poster my view doesn't jump 1m after I stop moving. It's just a small lag so I have to correct my aim after I stop panning. I'm not sure if it's suppose to be a realistic weight effect, because I think it happens when I move upwards as well (against the pull of gravity).

Hello, I am having some difficulties getting the mouse really responsive. When I move the mouse quickly to one side, there is a slight lag which makes me over shoot the target since the crosshair travels a short distance after I have stopped moving the mouse. We're talking a very short lag, so it's not very bad, but it's definately noticable when I need to aim accurately (which is almost all the time in this game). Is there something I can do to improve this? Does it have anything to do with the overall graphics setting? It seems to be running smooth to me with pretty high settings. Any help and comments would be welcome. Thanks.