baddo

Oh yes I see what you mean... but I think you gain nothing as ArmA will load the island on-demand and not all at once. You gain nothing performance-wise. Just to add, if such an addon is made it is completely mad if for only the purpose of splitting the island and not doing anything else to it, as you would only create an annoying situation where players would need to download your "special" island and gain nothing as a result compared to just using the original Sara island for your missions.

FDF Mod sound pack mod folder is installed into ArmA game folder and it seems to work.

FDF Mod sound pack mod folder is installed into ArmA game folder and it seems to work.

Aha! Thanks for the info Kegetys. In this case the players are ordered to destroy the bridge. For marking the objective done when the bridge is destroyed the workaround is needed. By the way I tried to blow the bridge section by placing the 3 satchel charges on a same spot on top of the bridge and that did nothing to the bridge. Maybe it could be destroyed from the top also by using even more satchel charges, but that is not feasible in a mission anymore. And I think the object ID's will change if the island is updated, so that is a problem too (which has the same solution). In some wrp editor program this happens even if island is not modified, I don't remember which one it was.

I don't think that's the case... I think you are talking about the problem that occurred when the East Border island was updated and all existing missions that relied on object ID's thus became broken. When the island was saved in a wpr editor program, the program saved the object ID's in a different order than in the previous time. Maybe the FDF Mod crew even deleted/added some objects which further ensures the object ID's won't stay the same. That is why the FDF Mod crew then instructed us to use other methods than using the object ID directly, to ensure the missions do not break if the island is updated. I had a test session on the subject of this thread and at least the buildings I used to confirm that my script worked, did match the object ID number that was visible in the editor (I used object ID directly in a script to monitor the damage value). And as I said, when using setDamage 1 on the specific bridge section and then using damage to check the damage value in the specific bridge section using the object ID directly, resulted in a value of 1 being returned from damage, when it in the start was 0 of course. <s>So that confirms that the object ID visible in the mission editor pointed to the correct object.</s>

Hmm... never tried destroying those bridges. But. Maybe they can't be destroyed? Did you try to read the damage value of the bridge after the destruction attempt? Edit: It seems if you put the satchel charges on top of the bridge, they won't do anything to the bridge. But if you put the satchel charges to the support column under the bridge then the bridge section collapses. But still the damage value seems to stay at 0. It seems to require 3 satchel charges placed near the column to make the bridge section collapse. When using (object 1) setdamage 1 the damage goes up to 1 but the bridge shows no sign of damages. So the solution for your problem is to instruct players in the briefing to place 3 satchel charges under the bridge close to the support column... or let them figure it out by themselfs (and get frustrated in the process).

Well I think they would ban handguns at least if the yearly death toll caused by them would rapidly grow every year, despite of what some amendment in some very old paper is saying... which is even debated if the meaning is understood correctly. So yes it's also a question of how many people they allow to get killed before they do something about it. Or... would it go as with Josif Stalin, if the death toll is ridiculously high it would then only be statistics? I don't think so...

Hey friends I talked about mentality. Are you an attacker or a defender? I am a defender. I defend myself, my family and my country with the help of the police and with the help of the Defence Forces. I have the impression that many people in the U.S. have handguns for self-protection, which I find a dangerous decision by nature, as I already said in my earlier post. If you carry a handgun with you to protect yourself, you should have made the decision in your mind that you are actually able to use your gun to kill someone. If you have not prepared yourself mentally for such an action, then do not carry a handgun with you please, as I think you put yourself into greater danger by having a gun with you and not being able to use it. I know I don't want to shoot anyone, as does CrashDome and others here too. But again, I have an impression that in the U.S. people have a lower step into using their gun to shoot someone. I am in the belief that the people who make the decision to carry a handgun with them, made the crucial decision somewhere in the back of their heads that they actually can use their guns to shoot other people. Otherwise, I think, they would not be carrying a gun. It is true that there are a lot of guns in other countries too, like in Finland as CrashDome so well pointed out. Hunting is popular here. I personally know several people who go hunting. They have only hunting rifles and hunting shotguns as far as I know. I appreciate their hobby, I have no problem with it. I have yet to meet persons who carry handguns with them, excluding police officers. Again, I have the impression that if I go to U.S.A. it won't take long until I meet a person who carries a handgun, and is not a police officer. Only an impression and not yet any experience to back it up. It would be interesting to see statistical information about how many of all the handguns in Finland (or any other country of your choice) and in U.S.A. are being carried with their owners on a daily basis. I admit I make a guess here when I say that the percentage in the U.S.A. is significantly higher than in Finland. That is the mentality I am talking about. Yes, I made a guess and have no statistical data to back it up. If someone can point out such researched data then please do so. Statistical information about how many guns there are in each country per capita does not tell us enough, as has been pointed out by several people by now. I think the nationality of the person in question in this one shooting does not tell much. He might have taken example of the gun-carrying habits of his American friends, or not. Maybe he had been carrying a handgun with him even before he came to U.S., or not. Quite impossible to prove that into any direction. A fact is that the shooting took place in the U.S. and not in any other country. In fact the nationality of the shooter brings into my mind a question I asked myself already many years ago: does the fact that there are so much immigrants in the U.S. make the violence rate go up? No matter what we say here, it won't bring anyone back. I apologize that I have not yet said so here but I grieve the victims of the shooting(s) and I wish their families strength to get over it. Best wishes, Baddo.

Hmmm... ignorant and dumb? I was talking about how resources are directed. U.S. targets a lot of their resources into something else than to the well-being of their own citizens inside the borders of their own country. Wouldn't directing more resources into issues inside the U.S. make it less likely that the people in U.S. go mad and kill others? I am sorry if that sounds ignorant and dumb to you. If a war in a far-away land is sucking resources away from healthcare, education etc. then I can't change that fact or can I? Again, sorry if this sounds ignorant and dumb to you. Somehow I just see that the huge amounts of resources thrown into wars could instead be directed to make the U.S. a better place to live in. Fighting a meaningless battle in the other side of the World is something I do not see as making these gun attacks inside U.S. reduce... quite the opposite I think.

CrashDome. Even if I were allowed to own any kind of gun here in Finland. I wouldn't want to. Do you want to know why? Because I know that I would only put myself into danger if I carried a weapon. As I am very reluctant to harm other people, the weapon could serve no purpose for me, other than making myself a target. That is the reason I will never carry a gun with me. War would be an exception, I am trained to use an assault rifle and for sure I could use it against someone who is directly threatening our nation. But in this civilian life, no way. No guns in my life, no matter how freely we are allowed to have guns. That is what I mean. In general, the people in the U.S. want to have guns. I don't. We have the police, we have the Defence Forces, that is all we need to protect ourselves. So, in general the people in Finland do not want guns into their lifes. It is also question of mentality. Are you an attacker or a defender? Judging the U.S. and its citizens from the factual news I have read during my life (violently conquer large part of North America, kill native inhabitants etc...), I can only say that the U.S. and its citizens are more attackers than defenders. CrashDome. Please do not go down to personal attacks. My opinions have formed during a long time and I assure you I don't make hasty judgements, quite the opposite. Do not see my words as an insult towards U.S. or any of its citizens as that is certainly not my intention.

I am blaming their society, culture and national heritage. Let’s take the high number of handguns possessed by the citizens of the U.S. as an example. As we all know by now, in the U.S. people have a lot of guns. Why? Let's take the U.S. police forces as an example. There have been many cases where the police officers have really gone over the top with their gun usage, resulting in death of suspects who did not have guns and did not threaten to kill anyone. Why do the U.S. police officers so eagerly use their weapons? Let’s take the political leaders of the U.S. as an example. I am sure I do not have to mention which conflicts are perfect examples of the political leaders of the U.S. ordering their military to start an attack on foreign soil for very questionable reasons. The U.S. military is a very dangerous weapon and as such, should only be put into use if there is absolutely no doubt that it is needed to defend the U.S. It is very irresponsible from the political leaders of the U.S. to use such a weapon against people who do not pose a real threat to the U.S. Real threat as in, must be able to prove the threat with facts and not with lies or assumptions. Why do the political leaders of the U.S. so eagerly use their military? Let’s take the people who vote the political leaders of the U.S. into power as an example. Why do they vote people into power who like to use their military so eagerly? Why do they allow their political leaders to spend huge amounts of money into attacking a foreign nation instead of using all that money into healthcare? Why do they vote such people into power who do not direct more of their huge resources into making their own neighbourhood, workplace and school a better place to be in? The answer to all of the above questions is: because they want to do so.

Better performance yes. Menu different to full version with latest patch to this date. Download and you'll see.

Atari website says May 01.

Hey Thrott, I don't know about caching but the RAM usage of the ArmA process is about the same with this US demo version and with the full game with latest patch to this date. So there is practically the same amount of data loaded into memory as in full version, on my computer. Memory usage for ArmA process on this computer has been around 250-280 MB with the maxmem=512 argument, now it was 277 MB after playing this US demo version for some time. And in full game version the memory consumption was measured while playing on the large Sara island, now the memory consumption is practically same in the US demo version with SaraLite. So no, you can't say that the performance improvement is because there is less data to handle. Just to add, maybe data size for some objects has been reduced, like salisan suggested vegetation maybe has been changed. We can't say about that for sure now. But the total memory consumption seems to be the same on my computer. If the size of some objects are reduced in bytes, then it could mean that the total number of loaded resources could be higher, which could reduce the need to stream data from the hard disk drive. But this is just speculation.

But... it has been improved! On my "under minimum requirements" I didn't notice a graphic bug! Where is it? And I even adjusted the settings higher than before! No graphics bugs? Why? What happened BIS? I played the Sanitization mission and it worked smoothly? On this old and slow computer? Hey, one thing I don't like. Maybe it can be adjusted from the settings but anyways; when I aim with the weapon and stop moving the mouse, the hands and the weapon still move quite a lot, makes aiming at an enemy soldier feel quite odd. I think you overdid it compared to how it was in some earlier version. In full game latest patch to this date I noticed the same effect at least on some weapon already. That is something I'd adjust... I think I can stop the movement of my hands more quickly and accurately even if holding an assault rifle, it doesn't have so much inertia. Anyways, looks like a good job but don't let this fool you BIS, keep on working on it!

This is way too usual in the USA... when I'm getting used to reading these kinds of news from the USA, it is a scary situation or what... as it is not a surprise at all that these kinds of things happen in USA. Maybe the people over there could do something about it?

Grep is a wonderful program, there are also Windows ports.

Before you start putting markers into the map in a multiplayer session, make sure you have an appropriate radio channel selected. It affects who can see the markers you put onto the map. I am sure you can imagine how much the enemy side laughs at you when you put a marker on the map where you give away your position. More experienced players have been seen doing this "error" intentionally to fool the enemy side though, by giving false information in their map markers. Best Regards, Baddo.

Yes, but if you try some other tools you will see how much more efficient and easy 3D modelling can be, when there are more advanced (but still easy-to-use) features available. Oxygen is a simple program so it is a very good starting point for beginners, that is true. Best Regards, Baddo.

Yup that is very true... somehow when I brought that up some time ago, people jumped on my throat. I don't know why that happened as I only said a fact. There is no need to be so protective over Oxygen when we say non-arguable facts. We can argue about matter of taste but not about obvious facts, I think. In facts there is nothing to argue about What matters is, Oxygen is free, and unavoidable at some point. I don't know what this http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/GateBuilder Oxygen clone/copy? can do, but that is an option too maybe. Then there is the free http://www.blender.org/, which is a powerful program but harder to learn compared to Oxygen. Blender has, in my opinion, a significant flaw in its ideology though; they refuse to support closed-source 3D navigation devices (like the ones from 3dconnexion), even if they could do it so that no GPL'd source code is mixed with closed-source code. Well many other tools too don't support 3D navigation devices so Blender doesn't lose anything to them in that aspect. Cheers, Baddo.

Well the game played in this thread is "How to force Windows to use more of the RAM we offered to it?" With the streaming system in place in ArmA I think it is quite hard for us to get it do what we want; it is a BIS programmer decision to decide how much RAM ArmA asks from the operating system. They can tune it up or down, to decide to keep stuff in RAM instead of dumping it and loading it again in a few seconds. My opinion is, unused RAM is wasted RAM when we are talking about a computer game that could fill the RAM but doesn't. The BIS programmers might have, ahem, a bit more experience and knowledge in programming, so maybe they have a really good reason to keep the amount of utilized RAM down. Some say it is wise use of resource to not take all into use, but I think when it's about a computer game which we normally do not use at the same time with many other RAM-hungry programs, then it is questionable why RAM utilization is low and then we have the problem of textures and models not loading fast enough from the HDD... I have only 768 MB of RAM and I certainly would like to see it almost full when playing (there's plenty of it free when I play ArmA with maxmem=512, ArmA uses something around 250 MB I recall), as clearly the constant loading of resources from the HDD does not happen quickly enough on this computer. Let us fill our RAM!

Well obviously ArmA does not try very hard to realistically simulate driving, the cars and the motorcyles have unrealistic driving characteristics at least. I've never driven a tank but I know the principle of a tracked vehicle and how such vehicle turns in general. If you try to make a 180 degree turn with a tracked vehicle very quickly, by braking the other track (possible even putting it to reverse) and by throttling the other track, it is possible to make a tracked vehicle to turn in its place (no advancement into any direction happens). But under higher speed there is an unavoidable slide into the direction the vehicle was originally heading (law of physics and thus unavoidable). Such a quick turn would require that the vehicle is driving on an easily-slideable ground. Otherwise the vehicle might not have enough power to make the turn so rapidly; too much contact forces caused by friction to overcome. This could be the problem with tanks, I don't know. With lightweight tracked vehicles it for certainty is possible to turn around 180 deg very quickly. If a tank has enough power then should be possible for them too to turn quite quickly into opposite direction. So, what I am saying is that you can turn a tracked vehicle very sharply in short amount of time. Put the other track full speed forward, the other track full speed backwards (even if vehicle going forwards, the track can slide to other direction already and make the turn quick). It will not be nice to the driver/passengers but it is possible in theory and in practice, I've done it many times myself with other tracked vehicles than a military tank. I'm not saying it is realistic for a tank, only saying it is possible, as I've done it many times on an appropriate surface with a lightweight tracked vehicle.

Hey Olle Stolpe, if you are serious about 3D modelling, then I suggest you take a look at 3D navigation devices too. Of course you need to use a program which supports one. This rules using only Oxygen out. We'll see if there is support in the next version release of Oxygen by BIS. With a 3D navigation device the rotating you normally do with your mouse, will change into the 3D navigation device making your modelling work more efficient and a bonus is that the strain on your mouse hand will reduce which can be quite significant gain (at least for me it made a big difference in how much my hand hurt after a working day). At least http://www.3dconnexion.com/ makes good 3D navigation devices. They also offer a SDK to integrate support into your own programs without fee, so BIS could provide this in their own modeling program as well. Best Regards, Baddo.

I would say that your next step could be to examine the files the game has. Goto http://www.kegetys.net/arma/ and download the "ArmA Tools" package. There you find programs cpbo and unRap. When you go looking in the ArmA directory, you will find files that have extension .PBO. cpbo opens these packages. Think about them like the ZIP packages you have probably encountered. If you've unpackaged a PBO you will get a directory containing files and possible subdirectories. The config.bin files are the configuration files. You use unRap to make those files become config.cpp files, which are readable in a text editor. That's a start. Texture files have extensions .PAA and .PAC. 3D models have extension .P3D. For more information about the file types etc., go to http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Main_Page and of course, search this forum! Oh yes, almost forgot, one place you MUST read through is http://www.ofpec.com/. There's a whole lot of information in their forums and elsewhere in the website, be sure to spend lots of time there. Don't mind if some documents there are for OFP, chances are very good you are reading information that is still valid for ArmA. Now, go explore!

Hmmm... surely there are more of these old people who are over 50, who are OFP/ArmA fans... it is quite fascinating that OFP/ArmA has fans of so varying ages, think about a multiplayer deathmatch: a 53-year-old, probably a senior manager at some company: "KICK THIS XXXXXX HE STOLE MY JEEP!!!", a 10-year-old replies "you n00b! your mother is a xx!!11" ...I am 28. Started playing computer games first with my friend's Amiga 500 (Populous, Test Drive etc... friend fell asleep many times when sitting next to his computer, me playing there... if you think you are this friend then drop a message!), then got my own Commodore 64 and later, after getting a 386 DX 40 MHz PC it was so exciting, 120 MB hard disk drive etc. luxuries! Even a math co-processor! Thinking of the best games I've experienced during the years (that I would still enjoy playing), maybe F1GP (the first version) by Microprose, Monkey Island I, OFP. ArmA maybe but we will see after some time if I still play games and if I bought a computer that can play ArmA like it is meant to be played. Currently ArmA is a promising title to belong to the all-time-favourites list but it is too early to say. Best Wishes, Baddo.