baddo

First, did you search this forum to check if this problem has already been discussed? If not, then it could be a good time to do it... Secondly, check the ArmA Community Bugtracker if there is already something about this problem. Thirdly, try older graphics card drivers and *cross your fingers*

It's possible depends on where the limit is.

It's overheating try to move the air more around your graphics card and see what happens. If you didn't try it yet, then don't shoot it down. I had GPU temperature on "normal" too and got visual problems in ArmA after some time of playing... solved by increasing airflow. Everyone who has similar problems really need to try if the problems go away by putting a big fan to blow into the open side of your computer. Remove side panel of your computer case and target a fan to cool the graphics card. But I must say, I don't accept this kind of problems! Using a big fan is not a solution, it is part of the problem. One more proof that this cursed PC platform is not actually suitable for entertainment products. It is by design unreliable and too complex to get right.

I haven't tested but you could test if you can affect it with different damage values by using setDamage scripting command.

I sure dont agree on that, crashes can't be handled by test performace. And its near impossible to code a test performance that acuratly sets settings acording to all hardware configurations in the market today. And when it fails? should the developer tell the customer "well, now you have to edit that little config file in that folder...". What are you talking about? Crashes have nothing to do with what I said... it's completely different issue. And... surely you can write code to measure the frames-per-second, no matter the hardware? Surely you can measure how steady the framerate stays, no matter the hardware? If target framerate isn't achieved, then settings are dropped. Do it over and over again until target framerate is reached. If you run out of settings, then that's what you get. Lowest possible settings. If you code such a test, you need not to know what kind of hardware the user has! You just watch the framerate, adjust settings if needed, and that's it.

Do a search here in the forums, I recall that people have presented ArmA & OFP scripting solutions for finding the framerate. It is probably in the mission editing forum but I'm not sure. Edit: One thread (but I think there is more discussion about it than just this thread): Release: In-game FPS counter, frames per second script by sbsmac Edit: changed post to reflect the fact that this is at the OFP board...

Probably they want to be prepared for a bigger war. That's why they refuse to tailor their equipment only for conflicts such as the war in Iraq. Conflicts such as the one in Iraq are not threatening the safety of the UK. Well some trains and busses might blow up but that is small compared to what kind of attacks you will get if you get into a fight with some big European country. It is a question of do you believe that wars such as WW II will break out again or not.

If any game shipped without settings I'd either boycott it or wouldn't buy it at all. You can't make the fanbase suffer for a few handfuls of ignorant or impatient folk. Sorry but I think you missed my point. This is not about who is smart and who is not! So drop that argument right now please I am questioning the technology. There is a major difference. One can rightfully question why there is a need for you to know about all those settings in the graphics options. In my opinion you need not to know! There is now possibility to view either basic or advanced settings, but I think that is not good enough, the system is designed so that it leads too easily into a situation in which users try to beat the system and lose, and then complain here about it. I have spent a good amount of time studying product development & product design, and also have worked in product development projects, so I didn't just pull the ideology from the hat. Even though not from the sector of software development, it doesn't matter, the exact same ideas can be applied here as well (and really should). I am not sure if this term translates right but here in my country we speak about "technology blindness", and people who insist they must have this and that option in the graphics option suffer at least from a mild form of the said blindness. If you insist you need to know, then uuh well... why do you bought the game, oh you bought it so that you could get to adjust antialiasing and friends? I don't think that is the reason why you bought the game. I described in my previous post what could be a potential solution to people complaining because the game doesn't run smooth enough as they think they should be able to use high quality settings. An obvious solution to such a problem is that we take the buttons away from the user, to protect the user! AND then we can tell the "people like you" that there is the settings file somewhere, go find it and adjust it BUT if you do that then we give no support! Of course there would be lots of work for the programmers to come up with a reliable test process to determine the capabilities of the users' hardware. But I think it would in the end benefit the programmers as they then would in my opinion get less complaints about the game's performance. Best Regards, Baddo.

You did it again nephilim Quite interesting thing I have to say. It's going to be interesting to see this working in-game

BIS told in a gamasutra.com article, which they wrote about the development of Operation Flashpoint, that next time they will try to make much better graphics quality, even if it looks insanely detailed to the hardware they are using at development time. So, in ArmA they did that, put so much detail in, that now you can't expect to put the settings on maximum quality with a reasonable computer. Operation Flashpoint had quite low quality graphics, even though it looked just fine in 2001, but it was clear there were a lot of textures in it which were not well done. They admitted it themselves and made much better quality graphics for ArmA. About OFP people said graphics were not good. Now they face complaints that Arma is too demanding on hardware. It's a situation in which they always get complainst no matter what they do. What kind of a solution I could think to this problem? I would try to direct (force) the users AWAY from the graphic settings control panel altogether! And make the game manage the settings according to the abilities of the hardware it is running on. A method for doing that would involve a benchmark run after installation. This is done by many games I think. At least several that I have played had this kind of performance test. A stress-test comprising of a demanding scene would be run. Some frames-per-second value would have been set as a target, and the game would adjust its settings so that the FPS would be at least in the level of the target FPS. If it means drop to lowest graphic detail then that's what you would get. Now the "Ãœber-geeks" who just love to tweak their computers (because they have Teh Skill and Teh Knowledge and what else) start crying, "but I want to control my anisotropic filtering! It's my favourite setting!" For these people the game could have a "warranty void if you press this button" section in the options dialog. It would include a long, daunting text written with the help of lawyers, to make it clear for people that what they are doing is not going to get any support from BIS. Or better yet, don't have such settings in-game at all. If people then get their settings adjusted somehow (finding the hidden, encrypted&signed settings file and modifying it), it is not something BIS would need to give support for.

Sophion-Black, it is great that you have found the reasons for the war... I prefer to hear it from the White House though, and as far as I know, the White House has been unable to prove that the reasons they gave to the public were true. Â If they could have proved that the reasons were true, they would certainly have done it already, don't you think? I am sorry I used the word "soldier". Now that I look at it again, and think about what you said, I understand I should not have done so. My sincerest apologies. Best Regards, Baddo.

I've had no problems regarding the closed-source nvidia driver this far. Has always worked, and regarding the little OpenGL programming I have done, I never noticed anything going wrong. It surely doesn't mean there aren't any bugs, I just haven't done enough to notice. Weird thing has been the inconsistency when installing Debian: sometimes no problems, x-server is up and running, sometimes I must install nvidia driver and only after that I can get the x-server running. As the hardware stayed the same, this indicates to me that this inconsistency problem lies in the Debian/nv module/x-server side and that is something nvidia is not to blame for. BUT yeah, the problem with the 'nv' module not being sufficient to get x-server running might have something to do with the fact that nvidia is unwilling to give driver sources! Obviously they consider the driver includes business secrets and so it is not a wonder that they are protective...

I have faced many times a problem that the x-server didn't start on Debian Woody, Sarge & Lenny after installation despite of selecting 'nv' as graphics driver module. Only after installing the real nvidia driver, the x-server started. But this behaviour was not necessarily consistent! I've done a couple of Debian installations. Sometimes I didn't have this problem, but sometimes did, and I don't know what made the difference (hardware stayed the same between the working and non-working installations so I think it was Debian's fault). I always got it working but it would be nice if all the hassle could be avoided... So, I would say that x-server not starting after installation is a common problem, my mind is prepared to face it whenever I install Debian Don't get me wrong, it is definitely NOT acceptable to have problems like that! If you get problems after updating the system, like for example if you do OpenGL programming and suddenly your programs just stop working, then it is probably time to re-install the graphics card driver. When some packages in the Debian distro are updated/installed, it is possible that they will overwrite stuff that your graphics card driver installer installed, or there are incompatibilites to the X library. Look for 'mesa' or 'x' packages to cause this problem. Also a kernel update will mean that the nvidia driver needs to be re-installed to suit the new kernel, otherwise the x-server won't start. And if anyone is going to use a 'testing' or 'unstable' version of Debian as an everyday desktop system, don't do it! Stick to the 'stable' version! I'd say this is also true at least for the distros based on Debian. At first it might seem to be working okay and having no problems, but when you do just that 'one small update' too much then all hell *will* break loose. Stick to the stable version. I think all this applies to Ubuntu as well.

You can also have unofficial addons arranged into folders like this: ArmA\mods\FDF_Sounds\AddOns ArmA\mods\BW_Flecktarn\AddOns Et cetera. In addition to the "AddOns" folder you might have something else in the mod folders too, but that is specific to the mods you are using. Cleans up the ArmA directory quite nicely. Then the -mod parameter would look like this: -mod=mods\FDF_Sounds;mods\BW_Flecktarn Et cetera. One very good way to control what AddOns directories are prepared for the game when you start it, is to use ArmA Launcher made by Kegetys. You can get it from http://www.kegetys.net/arma/ It let's you also easily customize other startup parameters, like the maxmem parameter. Also let's you create a multiplayer server list.

I'm sure you can do better in your life than to go to Iraq as a soldier. If you do that, you must be a firm supporter of the war, otherwise it really doesn't make sense. Have you really had a good thought about the reasons why the war was started? If yes, and you still think it's a good idea, then go for it. No one here is going to stop you. You are serving your country as you see the best. Your comment sounds to me like you really think you can make the situation in Iraq better by going there as part of the U.S. Military. And if people aren't ready to do that, they are cowards? That's how your comment sounds to me. Just remember, if you do go to Iraq as a soldier of the U.S. Military, bear in mind that you were not invited. Thus, Improvised Explosive Devices are to be expected! It isn't a surprise that an American says that people are "overdramatizing" the current situation in Iraq. That's what people/nations often do when they f****d up in front of a big crowd, they try to play it down and make it look like it's nothing. Seriously, wasn't it the Americans who overdramatized the situation in Iraq? Weapons of Mass- what? MOBILE weapons laboratories? Where? You need to consider very carefully if you want to be a part of the destruction going on in the Middle East. Your life would be much better if you took part in something constructive. Best Wishes, Baddo.

Hello, I recommend familiarizing yourself with ArmA Launcher by Kegetys, can be found from: http://www.kegetys.net/arma/ In the options dialog of this program you can easily adjust the maxmem parameter. Among other things it lets you do easily is managing which addon folders you want to load. Best Regards, Baddo.

You should probably have a look at arma.RPT file. I have it here: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\ArmA\arma.RPT Replace <username> with the username you are logged into when you play ArmA. On my computer it is a hidden folder so you probably need to enable "show hidden folders" from file explorer to be able to find it. From that file you could get some clues as to why ArmA crashes. ArmA.RPT file has date & time written every now and then, so you can check if you see any correlation to any log entries in that log file compared to when your problems started.

Dear vilas, I'm sure every regular visitor of this forum knows about your 'arma performance sucks' grief, vilas. It 'sucks' on my computer too, and I have absolutely no problem with it, as my computer is clearly under minimum requirements! you should've tried the same approach, run it on a computer which is clearly too slow, so you would have been positively surprised when you even got the game running! That's what happened to me, it was really a surprise to me that the game could even be played somewhat-enjoyably with this old computer! I certainly didn't expect that I could play ArmA without buying a new computer, but the performance I get is enough to not justify the huge amounts of cash that would have to be spent to buy a new computer. Everything else I do with this computer really doesn't need more power so I'm quite reluctant to buy new hardware. I think you should just get over it now... there's so much more serious things that could go wrong in your life, why worry about some stupid computer and about a stupid game? Next time you will be more careful before you buy, that's a positive side in this isn't it! Best Wishes, Baddo. P.S. I'm looking forward for ArmA II and seeing how the console version(s) turn out. Maybe it's time to leave the problematic PC platform as a gaming platform altogether!

There is already a DLL made which can be used to interact with OFP/ArmA, through ArmA's own scripting language. For OFP there was released "fwatch" by kegetys. For ArmA there is "Arma Extended DLL" by voyager. http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....voyager Fwatch comes with source code. It can be found somewhere in this forum, it doesn't have a release thread of its own but is buried in some thread. Edit: here is a package containing everything that kegetys gave for download, fwatch itself and some related stuff: http://www.kolumbus.fi/baddo/ofp/tools/fwatch10d_all.zip You could take a look at the source code and see what you can do. If you release something which is based on fwatch, then be sure to release the source code with it too, as instructed by kegetys. You could maybe even just use ArmA Extended DLL as is and write your own little program to read/write a data file which would be shared with ArmA Extended DLL. This methodology means that you would have to write ArmA scripts too.

Campbell gets errors when installing patch 1.08. No matter where Campbell downloads it from, same thing happens. I interpret Campbell's words "says file courrt" so that the patch installer gives a file corruption error.

Source code should be released, similarly as to what kegetys did with his fwatch. Then people can go and read the source code, and compile it, to ensure what the program does. It is not impossible to get a false alert from an antivirus program. It is possible that the way this program works, is also the way how many viruses work. Thus, antivirus programs can flag it as a virus to be on the safe side. But we do not know for sure! That is definitely a problem. Releasing source code could help. Otherwise, many people will never touch this program, just to be on the safe side.

The PC platform technology is horrible, if you haven't yet seen that then you must open your eyes please If someone is saying they want to do games for consoles as the PC platform has too many problems, it's far from being insane. It's just looking for a better platform to create entertainment products for. Maybe for some people troubleshooting the endless problems in the PC hardware and software is entertainment, but I dare to say that for the majority of the people living on this planet called Earth it is not. I don't have a console but I consider to buy one. Probably depends on how ArmA II turns out. I've played console games though, and I certainly enjoyed the problem-free gaming. Things Just Workedâ„¢ and I bet money on that you can't say the same when you try to play games on your PC.

Not very useful I think. A wheeled or tracked vehicle will beat it on most terrain easily. On slopes this has the advantage that it can keep its body straight by adjusting the length of the legs. Another advantage is that a machine walking on legs can be nicer to the terrain (turn a tracked vehicle and it will tear the terrain). But the weight of the machine is actually spread to a larger area on wheeled/tracked vehicles and this is a disadvantage of a machine walking on legs. It means it will sink into the terrain more easily. A Finnish company made a forest harvester machine which walks on legs (steered by a human), but that machine isn't in production as the machines on wheels are generally much better, and cheaper to make. Also the demand isn't high for these kinds of machines. Anyway, interesting research and prototypes were made, which is enough at this stage. Here is a link to a video showing that machine walking down a slope: http://www.techeblog.com/index.p....machine Some prize the company received for making it: http://www.ict-prize.org/winners....SESSID= For some special use a walking forest harvester machine could be used, but in general its practicality, and thus also usefulness, is limited compared to the machines on wheels. Basically, if you want to collect trees from your forest without damaging the terrain too much, I suggest to use a horse for the job. My vision is that these kinds of 'walking machine' products will never reach commercial profitability on large scale, thus if such a machine is marketed, the marketing has to be targeted on some very specific task. Or it has to be an entertainment product.

Quite interesting... Carter says U.S. tortures prisoners http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/10/carter.torture/index.html Related articles: Bush: 'This government does not torture' http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/05/bush.torture/index.html Debate rages over secret Justice memo on torture http://edition.cnn.com/2007....ex.html I've been thinking about these kinds of things about the USA for a long time. The little bits of information I get through media does not help in believing that the USA represents the values of freedom and democracy. A small group of people controls the nation as they want, and it seems no one can do anything about it. For example, if you have a problem getting some law approved, simply remove the people who are opposing your opinions with the kind of people who favour your opinion, and voila. Democracy? Worrying is also that some of the new Presidential candidates are singing the same old songs, which, to be honest with you, is not what we need. What the World needs from the USA is a major change in politics, and that is not going to happen by people who want to keep the things started by The Bush Administration going, and even start new disasters on top of the old ones. As my influence on the US politics is limited to say the least, I hope the people of the USA are paying attention and start caring more about their nation and about the values it has advertized to be its most precious ones.

A place to check for latest versions of Mikero's tools is at: http://andrew.nf/ It looks like Eliteness is in version 2.18. I use cpbo though.