baddo

Hmmm... From best to worse: Finnish  (Native) English  (This has been forced on me through TV and computer, but I think it's a good thing...?) Swedish  (Written text is quite easy to follow, spoken is another thing. This was actually compulsory for me in school.) German  (Basic understanding, can get the idea of what is going on. Vocabulary is not large so that brings problems.) I'd absolutely love to master all of the listed languages, plus learn new languages like French, Spanish and Italian. We'll see how life goes for me in this regard. I'd practically have to live in the other countries to have the motivation to learn new languages so not all will likely happen.

For applications like Solidworks, Catia V5 etc., the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) is crucial for having good performance. 2 gigabytes a minimum in practice, but the performance really skyrockets when memory is boosted to 4 gigabytes, according to my experiences. Compared to having only 1 gigabyte of RAM (256 MB is actual minimum req. for Catia V5): a large 3D model assembly (hundreds of different models, multiple instances of many models) can take even 20 minutes to generate a drawing from or save when only 1 GB RAM is available. With 4 GB the same assembly could be generated into a drawing or saved in 1-2 minutes. There is a huge difference in between how the minimum requirement system performes and what kind of system actually works satisfactory in practice. Differences calculated in tens of minutes during one working day will add up quickly to the costs of running a commercial company. From a personal point-of-view, I will never ever again do such work with a "standard setup" computer (the 1 GB RAM computer was such "approved" system), such painful and annoying the experience was. I think the same goes for computer games. What is stated to be a minimum requirement, is what the devs promise to get the game working on but doesn't speak about the visual quality or frames-per-second achieved with that setup. In case of professional CAD software, minimum requirements make it possible to use the application but if you are actually going to work with it 8 hours a day 5 days a week for years, you'll definitely want much better hardware than what the minimum requirements say. I think where the game developers could do better would be to more clearly state what kind of computer allowes what kind of game settings to be used with satisfactory performance. The settings screen in ArmA should tell people clearly that "if you adjust this setting to high even when we say you shouldn't, it's your problem then". Maybe if the game devs took more control of what settings are adjusted, according to a performance result from an automatic benchmark run, there could be much less complaints here. For hc-users there should be the possibility to take control of the whole process but they would then be forced to read a warning in big red letters that they are stepping into something the game devs take no responsibility of. Currently I have a under-minimum-specs computer for ArmA, and it does not run with satisfactory performancem which is not a surprise. But I can play it. I'll wait and see if it is worth to buy new hardware for ArmA only. The latest public beta patch has serious problems, I can't use it at all as the game either has serious graphical problems or it just crashes, unlike earlier versions. Also, I have become more convinced that the consoles are a much easier platform to develop games for. One stable setup of hardware versus the complete mess we have with personal computers. Even though I have always owned only a PC, not consoles, if I were to start game development as a business, I would seriously consider forgetting the whole PC scene and concentrate on consoles.

Hehe... is that even funny... Tools. You bought a computer game not a tool package, right? At least that's what I believe I have done. Don't get me wrong friend, I am waiting to see the "tools" too, but a little bit more patience is needed I think. As we all know by now, BIS & publishers released a way too buggy game. Unacceptable but irreversible now. If it weren't so we could probably have the tools already. But I think we have to live with the situation as it's not upto us when the tools are going to be released. I am sure BIS knows we want the tools, and I am also sure they work as they have planned and prioritized. It's useless for us to start planning their work, as we are not BIS managers. VBS2. Hey friend, I think you bought the wrong product accidentally then... I mean you can't seriously think that you are entitled to have the same features in Armed Assault as in VBS2?

Some kind of statement from BIS regarding Game2 would be good. I am one of those people who are almost stopping playing computer games altogether. BIS could keep my interest up with little bits of information about their future products. There is a danger that no game developer will get my money anymore as I am losing interest in computer games. BIS has my acceptance over the ideology of what they are doing and thus they have the best possibility of all game developers in having a little bit of my money. If they are interested in taking it... For Armed Assault I would need a new computer to be able to play it with proper quality. I have refused for now to spend a lot of money in expensive hardware that I might even not use for playing games (which would mean it is a complete waste of money to buy new hardware). Game2 could be the thing that keeps me interested in playing computer games and eventually forces me to buy the new hardware?

Well... If you try to determine if a soldier is psychologically able to kill other people based on how many shots he fired and how many enemies he killed with those shots. I am saying that kind of comparison is not going to be reliable. Or at least there must be huge amount of error in such conclusion. I emphasize that now we are speaking only about the psychological side of killing. If you look only at how many shots were fired blah blah, and say "it is now clear these soldiers were not psychologically able to kill" is nonsense, as it leaves all other factors out, many of which I mentioned in my previous post. Physical ability of the soldier in question, environment, what kind of weapon is used, how enemy is protecting himself, you just can't leave those kinds of things out as they inevitably affect how many enemies you are able to kill. In my opinion the psychological side is quite small (if we talk about sane, well-trained, well-lead and well-organized normal people and not about already crazy people who can't control themselfs under stress) compared to the other factors. So. To sum up what I am saying. The article, which is based on the book, makes a comparison between number of shots fired versus enemy casualties, and then draws conclusions of the psychological state of the soldiers based on this ratio. Such direct comparison leaves all other factors out! Like there are no other things than psychological ability to kill enemies... this simply can't be true, which is, the whole point of my argument.

"Soldiering" might be well documented but such documents also must make sense. In this case this article, which is based on the book, makes such a conclusion that I just have to say it's not well-researched information but just speculation. In essence, the article, which is based on the book, has looked at some statistical data in wrong way and came up with a highly questionable argument. This is not at all uncommon in scientific field. There are lot of research papers that do similar mistakes (draw stupid conclusions from lots of numerical data). Edit: Ive seen it on discovery channel, they compared to hit ratio on the shooting range/training exercises compared to the hit ratio on the battlefield, the ratio on the battlefield was much, much lower and it wasnt just stress/confusion alone. And hey, just grab a brick and try to beat someone to death, wanna bet that you feel for that poor bastard The first paragraph in your post is really something I have not argued against. Yes I understand that I will not shoot as well at a real battlefield as in a peace-time shooting range. But just comparing the number of shots fired to how many casualties you get tells us nothing about if you are psychologically able to kill other people or not. This is my point, don't convert it to something else please What if you are a mad killer but you are blind? There goes the theory of comparing number of shots fired to how many casualties you got... What if you are in a perfect state-of-mind for killing, but just unable to do it because of materialistic (weapon is faulty etc.), environmental (weather, terrain etc.) or because of your own physical problems like missing eyes. Also, I really don't know what that last paragraph in your post is trying to say to me? It's not related to anything I have said that is for sure. Only thing I can think of is that you missed the point I was making. I am not arguying that there is no problem in hurting people.

Well. It doesn't matter if you bring a book to me which makes the same claims. I say again, you can't draw a direct relation between the number of shots fired for one enemy casualty and psychological readyness of your soldiers to kill enemies. It is obvious from the web page article that that is exactly what the book is also saying. Or tell me what kind of other research they could have done. Exactly... they just looked at the number of shots fired versus casualties, as that is information they can reasonably have available to them. I say once more: your psychological readyness to make a kill can't be determined based on the number of shots you fire in a war and how many kills you got.

Still I say, the web page you refer to gives no evidence to back up many of its claims. It just says "a fact" but gives no proof. I am not swallowing such claims without seeing what kind of actual research was done and even then it depends on what criteria you use to analyze the research data. Some quotes from your reference and my comments on them: What kind of proof backs this up? Reference? It says "a fact" so there must really have been a reliable research done? How? Where? By who? This is, in my opinion, not a valid argument into this discussion at all. We are discussing the psychological side of killing. While it is more than likely that not all pilots get kills in a war, you can't draw a conclusion from that that the pilots who didn't get any kills didn't want to kill anyone or were unable to kill anyone. Especially this part catched my attention and made me suspicious towards this article: Now, there the article draws a direct relation between the number of shots fired and the casualties caused by those shots. This is complete nonsense in my opinion, when we are talking about the psychological side of killing enemies. You can't draw such relation; the maddest of all gunmen can shoot millions of rounds without getting any kills. Does that make him not psychologically ready for killing? Of course not, and that's why I brought up the questionability of this article. ...and the article does it again: Again, my argument is no such direct relation can be drawn from this information. You can miss your targets but that in no way makes you not psychologically able to kill enemies. ...and same again: You just can't say if they wanted to hit their targets or not based on how many shots they fired for one kill. But this article is saying you actually can say it, which is nonsense in my opinion. Notice that I am not saying that all of the information presented on this source is not true. I'm just saying this information source has some very questionable claims, which I pointed out for you above. The parts I quoted from the article made me think those parts are someone's personal opinions, formed after looking at some statistical information table about number of shots fired and casualties caused etc. Such information in my opinion tells nothing about the psychological state of the soldiers. It tells they fired a lot of shots but not if they were psychologically ready to kill or not.

Well the military training and experience I have all comes from the military service I did in the Finnish Defence Forces. I don't have war experience and I don't want it. I feel sorry for those who have such experience. The number one reason why we have a military here is to make it not worth it for anyone to attack us, i.e. to show that your losses will be so high it would be stupid from you to attack us (if only J.Stalin would have understood this before attacking...). In other words, our goal is to not get war experience.

Well the military training and experience I have all comes from the military service I did in the Finnish Defence Forces. I don't have war experience and I don't want it. I feel sorry for those who have such experience. The number one reason why we have a military here is to make it not worth it for anyone to attack us, i.e. to show that your losses will be so high it would be stupid from you to attack us (if only J.Stalin would have understood this before attacking...). In other words, our goal is to not get war experience.

Well first of all I think the web page you refer to really is only speculating and not showing how it ends up in such conclusions. I mean, did they count the number of bullets fired in a war and then compared that number to the total casualties? Like, if a bullet didn't hit anyone then the person who fired it didn't want to hit anyone? Quite nonsense in my opinion... also the point "Some pilots didn't shoot down a single enemy plane." really tells us nothing, it could as well be that the pilots that didn't get any kills just were not engaged in such battle situations, or they were so bad they couldn't hit anything even if they wanted to. That article really doesn't give us proof to back up its arguments. It just throws some "facts" at us but doesn't tell how those "facts" were found to be true. Significant problem with the reliability of this information source, I say. But to answer the question: I picked #1 but with a condition. I would have to be serving in the Finnish Defence Forces and facing an enemy which is trying to invade our country or something similar. So I would do it only as a defensive measure and when my actions are backed by our legislation and government. I have given an oath in which I promise to protect this country and as part of fulfilling that oath I would need to kill other people if that is what the commanders of our country are telling me to do in an event of war. As a civilian I will never shoot anyone, I am confident about that. I am by nature a person who does not want to hurt anyone. You can force me into hurting other people but as I said, it requires our nation to be under direct threat. If I get into a "to kill or not to kill" situation as a civilian, I am more likely to choose "not to kill" and find some other way out of the situation, as the "to kill" choice would most likely get myself into prison for a long time and that's really not what I want. If I had to shoot someone in a war, I am sure the nightmares would disturb me for the rest of my life. So I believe that I would have conscience problems despite of the fact that I now say I could kill someone while at war. I would do it for my nation but it would have a high price, there is no doubt about that.

Well first of all I think the web page you refer to really is only speculating and not showing how it ends up in such conclusions. I mean, did they count the number of bullets fired in a war and then compared that number to the total casualties? Like, if a bullet didn't hit anyone then the person who fired it didn't want to hit anyone? Quite nonsense in my opinion... also the point "Some pilots didn't shoot down a single enemy plane." really tells us nothing, it could as well be that the pilots that didn't get any kills just were not engaged in such battle situations, or they were so bad they couldn't hit anything even if they wanted to. That article really doesn't give us proof to back up its arguments. It just throws some "facts" at us but doesn't tell how those "facts" were found to be true. Significant problem with the reliability of this information source, I say. But to answer the question: I picked #1 but with a condition. I would have to be serving in the Finnish Defence Forces and facing an enemy which is trying to invade our country or something similar. So I would do it only as a defensive measure and when my actions are backed by our legislation and government. I have given an oath in which I promise to protect this country and as part of fulfilling that oath I would need to kill other people if that is what the commanders of our country are telling me to do in an event of war. As a civilian I will never shoot anyone, I am confident about that. I am by nature a person who does not want to hurt anyone. You can force me into hurting other people but as I said, it requires our nation to be under direct threat. If I get into a "to kill or not to kill" situation as a civilian, I am more likely to choose "not to kill" and find some other way out of the situation, as the "to kill" choice would most likely get myself into prison for a long time and that's really not what I want. If I had to shoot someone in a war, I am sure the nightmares would disturb me for the rest of my life. So I believe that I would have conscience problems despite of the fact that I now say I could kill someone while at war. I would do it for my nation but it would have a high price, there is no doubt about that.

There are many cases where file extensions are the same but the file formats are completely different. This is one of those cases.

Incorrect, P3D is an open-source format developed by Carnegie Mellon University: [P3D Format] To me it looks like the text in the page you gave a link to indicates that that P3D file format has nothing to do with BIS' P3D file format. Visit this page http://orion.math.iastate.edu/burkardt/data/p3d/p3d.html and look at the example P3D files there, like for example at the beachball.p3d. Does it look the same to you as the BIS P3D files? Quote from the page: I've studied the BIS P3D file format to some level and I think it is no where near a Lisp program.

Be sure to let Nvidia also know your opinion. I agree that in general the quality of software products can be awful at times. Unfortunately it can be said about ArmA's initial release too. In my opinion it starts to get ridiculous when a game needs hundreds of megabytes of patching after initial release... One explanation to problems in this industry is that large software programs are very, very complex beasts and thus it is no wonder the developers often fail. A bug-free large software program is in my opinion impossible to achieve. I believe the developers do what they can with the time and money they have available. In my opinion even increasing the number of developers is not an automatic solution as it can in itself create even more problems than it solves. Human beings have a hard time managing such complex beasts as there is required so abstract level of thinking that it goes over the top for most of us and also for the developers it seems. Maybe the beta testing model should be revised. Give the product to public beta testing for a large group of people way before deadline. At least then those people know that they have a beta version. I do not accept the bad quality present in many software products but unfortunately that's what we get. Some time ago I said consoles start to sound quite good after reading about all the hardware etc. problems here in these forums... one stable platform to develop for, sounds much better for a game developer than the hell-ish personal computer scene where you can have probably millions of combinations of components that the software developers have practically no chance to verify how it works with their products.

Number one thing is of course adjust ArmA's graphic settings lower and just accept the lower visual quality, that's what I am forced to do with this 1.4 GHz computer. One thing I usually do is close as much of the other processes running on my computer as possible before starting a game. Like for example if you play single player then unplug network cable and turn off all anti-virus and firewall software. Also if you examine what other processes are running you will probably find many that are not needed especially while playing a game. They all take their share of system resources. Defragment hard disk drive. Make sure hard disk drives are running on their fastest possible operating mode. Often it is already so but Windows can automatically drop the speed setting of hard disk drives if it notices something is not right (like loose power cable which causes the drive to turn off and quickly on again).

I don't think that is a problem. It's plenty. One more tip: SEARCH for CreateVertexBuffer from this forum's OFP Troubleshooting section there seems to be other threads that have discussed this subject already One probably good thread to read is http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....t=39502 So it seems (as the CreateVertexBuffer function name indicates it is related to video memory) that your video memory is filling up for some reason.

Well you can use for example the Windows File Explorer (or whatever it is in English, can't be sure now) and right-click on the drives - then "Properties" or something like that to check how much free space they have. Edit: One guide to doing that: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/check_free_space_on_windows_xp.html

Have you run out of free hard disk drive space? Edit: Also make sure you are definitely running a clean copy of OFP. Re-installing doesn't take too long to try that too. Just backup your addon/mod/Users folders.

Well just today I had thoughts of throwing my whole computer out of the window and smash it to little pieces. It didn't happen yet but if I get so lucky that I actually manage to do it, then I won't be here anymore as a side effect. Oh yeah, not caused by this or any other forum, just about what else is happening (or to be more precise, not happening) in my life.

Have you upgraded your graphics card driver recently? If yes then might be worth a shot to try a later version again. Also try the command line option -nomap if not already in use. If in use try without it

The RK - 62 throws the shells to the right too so that might be one good reason for left-handed people to use it on their right side. Good point is also which one of your eyes is better - if your other eye is clearly weaker than the other one then there is no point using it even if you need to change to your "secondary" hand then. In games like ArmA I would like to see more variety in the soldier models. Maybe left-handedness could fit in too. Another thing is how much it actually improves the experience for the left-handed people? Mainly, would it be worthwhile for game developers to consider it.

Yes, yes, I believe it is difficult. I didn't say I am sure about how people used their assault rifle at the shooting range. My memories are old and it might have been so that some people used their rifles left-handedly. I just don't remember seeing anyone do it. For parades I am 100 % sure that everyone had to keep their rifles in exactly the same way. That is understandable and I believe not a big problem for left-handed people, as it is not a battle but just show. As I said, in a battle it doesn't matter how you keep the rifle if you get good results  It would actually be foolish to start telling people to keep their rifle in some certain way if they then would not be as effective.

About how left-handedness is dealt with in a military. While I was serving in the FDF I didn't see anyone using their assault rifles "left-handed". If I recall correctly (9 years have passed since then, so it's not in fresh memory anymore) it was even told to us in weapon training that everyone should use their weapon in a similar manner, on their right side. This is definitely true and necessary for parade situations when the group must look uniform. When we were at the shooting range my memory tells me that everyone kept their weapons similarly there too. But to say again, this starts to be an old memory. In a real battle situation I think you can hold the weapon with your toes if it gives better results than holding it in your hands. About the equipment I can say for sure there was no separate equipment for left-handed people, everyone got the same stuff and had to deal with it. I'm right-handed so I didn't have any problems with that. I think it is not needed in ArmA. But what do I know anyways, it's "right" for me

No one here has said civilians should not have any guns as far as I know. Stop riding on that, it makes you look like you can't read or understand what others are saying. You are going crazy over-protective about your right to bear arms because some people just want to apply some common sense to what kind of guns civilians should be allowed to have and to whom guns are given. You are going crazy for nothing. As I said earlier in this thread, your constitution can be kept unmodified. From what I have read about the "amendment" which gives citizens of USA the right to bear arms (in a disputable form put let's put that aside now) does not state what kind of "arms" it is talking about. So it leaves quite a lot of room for common sense. Question and the problem is, do the people of the USA want to apply common sense or not? Do you need automatic weapons? No you don't. Do you need semi-automatic weapons? No you don't. Do you need to give a small baby a gun permit? No, you don't need to do that!