Col. Faulkner

Rabbit is a national delicacy on Sahrani. Every year the Sahranis have a mass slaughter of the long-eared vermin and serve them in a variety of delicious traditional Sahrani dishes: Rabbit and potatoes. Rabbit Bagango (Potatoes with rabbit). Rabbit in the Hole (rabbit, potatoes and rabbit). Rabbit surprise (rabbit...with potatoes). Rabbit-a-touille (rabbit and vegetables...mostly potatoes). Rahmadi Rabbit (rabbit on toast with melted cheese...or potatoes).

I like the way they adopt their "death pose", fly a hundred feet in the air and glide gracefully back to the ground (well, not really). It's not a "next generation game", but I don't think it was ever advertised as such. It's just the old Op. Flashpoint with some lipstick on and a new hairdo.

Wasn't there a JGSDF mod for OFP? "Battle of Hokkaido" or something? Have you tried to contact them?

Isn't some modder working on a real time editor system already? I seem to recall seeing a video (unless it was another hallucination)

Normal maps would require a lot more new modelling work though, wouldn't they? (I'm having trouble getting my head around that concept at the moment - regarding what benefit it imparts to a model apart from surface details).

Holding the knife in both hands like a golf-club!? I hope it'll be possible to create some proper "knife-fighting" (or at least "knife-holding") anims. That'd also be nice for the commandos I'm still valiantly struggling to do. Here's a WIP picture of their De Lisle silenced carbine and their Lee-Enfield rifle: (clicky)

Birds have been tipping off enemy positions since ancient times. Roman historian Livy writes of the Gaulish attack on Rome in 390 BCE: "So silent had their movements been that not only were they unnoticed by the sentinels, but they did not even wake the dogs, an animal peculiarly sensitive to nocturnal sounds. But they did not escape the notice of the geese...[who made such a bloody row that they alerted the Roman guards who then proceeded to give Asterix and his pals a right old Roman shoeing...]" I do recall seeing a promise that that sort of feature would be included - maybe in "Game 2" (if that ever comes out)?

Looks like a set of excellent "adjustments" there! I particularly like the removal of the "arcade game" UI features and the ammo counter.

Yes, but what will a player actually do in the mission? Rahmadi is tiny, you could bicycle all over it in an afternoon, and buying "Cars and Gunz" will be fun for about 6 seconds.

The Sahrani island obviously isn't meant to represent a scale model of a real island. It's just meant to offer users a cross-section of environments to fight toy-soldier battles over. It does that job quite well. Complaints that there are no post offices, hospitals or sweetie shops and attempts to calculate the population of the island are rather missing the point. I always used to play OFP with the "very high" terrain detail switched on. The resulting bumpy terrain was in no way realistic looking, but it did at least notionally represent a more irregular terrain and helped relieve the "fighting on a golf course" feeling. Both OFP and ArmA suffer badly from a lack of small-scale detail in the topography. There are no knolls, depressions, ditches, banks, field boundaries, stream beds, sunken roads etc. - in fact very little that can be used as defilade positions or individual cover at all.

It rather depends on whether "fun" or historical authenticity is wanted.  The fact is that 50 round drums were regularly used by the real MG42 gunners in real combat and were explicitly mentioned in the WW2 German infantry training manuals, and that alone justifies their inclusion in any mod with any pretence to authenticity. The MG42 (and all similar belt fed squad support guns) can all be fired from the hip if required. The WW2 German technique was to sling it from the shoulder, couch the butt under the right arm and hold the folded bipod legs or grab one of the extended bipod legs. The German squad gunners were fully expected to be ready to participate in the final assault on a position firing their  guns from the hip. For example, the WW2 German manual "Ausbildungsvorschrift fuer die Infanterie" explicitly  recommends a drum magazine on the gun and that (quote) "...the gunner takes part in the assault, firing on the move". Wartime evidence shows that these official recommendations were generally followed in the field. The WW2 German "Anleitung" for the MG42 states that 4 or 6 round bursts are to be used and continually enjoins gunners to practise proper fire discipline. A 50 round drum (or the 50 round belt length) is perfectly adequate when the gunner disciplines his fire like this, and is convenient when he needs to move rapidly. He is more likely to hit a target, the gun is saved from overheating (thus avoiding dangerous stoppages) and ammo is conserved. The 250 round boxes (actually 5 of the 50 round non- disintegrating belt lengths clipped together) were only really practical with assistant gunners and/or when firing from prepared positions. Regarding recoil, I don't think there is any dispute about the MG42 kicking hard. I have once fired a Bundeswehr MG3 (descendant of the MG42) and I remember its recoil to be very vigorous but still controllable when fired sensibly. Finally one would never fire any weapon from the hip at any range much over about 50 yards and reliably expect to hit anything (not even a submachine gun), so the statement about "firing long range like that" is also rather naive.

The point was just that it is perhaps a bit disingenuous to glibly say to beginners "you can just make them yourself".

Would that it were really that easy... I'm going crazy trying to make a damn boat...a boat...!

Your website is light on information and your mod introduction is not very clear at all. It reads as though you will be offering German, Soviet, and Allied troops and missions from almost every campaign in the ETO from 1939 to at least 1944. Is that right!?

So does the Kingdom of Sahrani have an active and innovative aviation industry or did they buy these 30 year old tech demonstrators from a General Dynamics/NASA boneyard somewhere?

You could give it "thought impulse operated avionics" like in "Firefox" (the Clinty Eastwood movie, not the web browser) "You must think in Sahrani patois..." Â Â

I'm sure with bit of extra effort maybe two or three different statures (and sets of anims) could have been done, and it'd have added some realism (but I do find it rather hard to sweat over this when there are so many other more crucial deficiencies in the simulation). As regards everyone in skin-tight clothes; I think BIS were perhaps expecting more from their normal mapping than was actually delivered, which is why the figures all look like they are wearing inflatable trousers.

Well, I told you that already weeks ago but you've been incommunicado lately for some reason. Anyway, all of the Spearhead stuff I've made would need to be redone from scratch to come up to ArmA standards. Right now, I'm not too thrilled at the idea of redoing it all again and quite frankly I don't really think it's worth it. No matter how good I could make the stuff look, the game experience at the end of the day still tends to fall flat so I've shelved it all in frustration for now. That's not to say that I might not restart this if certain elements of the game can be improved, but at this moment it's definitely all on hold.

But for all you know ArmA may as well be simulating your clothes getting shot to ribbons but just not showing it. It can't even show you realistically where you're hit anyway.

That would really hurt frame rate  Why would it hurt frame rate?

Is that a female insurgent?

"SD ammunition" IRL just implies that the bullets are subsonic. Physical differences are usually that the propellant charge is reduced and the bullets are lubricated and seated less firmly than normal cartridges. Subsonic loads often use heavier bullets than normal cartridges too. The US Navy SEALs often claim to have invented it first, but in fact, special subsonic ammunition is not a recent idea; it was used already in the 19th century so gentlemen could shoot rifles indoors for sport.

Sounds like a great title for a cynical/comedy/satire thread "If real combat was like ArmA..."

Thanks again to all who have expressed interest, but I have stopped working on this project now. I have concluded that the in-game experience with Armed Assault is simply not good enough to justify the huge amount of time it requires to make these addons.

Only if you're an amateur.