Col. Faulkner

I've never succeeded in sneaking right up on an AI standing out in the open (even at night). That's hard to do in reality anyway, so that's OK. It is usually possible to wait quietly around a corner or behind some cover and get the drop on an AI going past though.

I always liked this slow-motion film comparing an M16 and an AK47 firing (the AK47 flexes and bends like a...a...flexing bending thing): http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=G6BpI3xD6h0 Yes, I know it's technically an AK74 in the game (same old Kalashnikov rubbish though) ps. If you want to buy an AK here's your chance (joke film): http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=H_3BWv3FYg0

OK, thanks. That's what I said and he bit my head off. Boo hoo...sniff...

Then they could of at leaste made it Britsh and Argintine Forces >,< Would of been much better. Yes, but not if they wanted to actually sell many copies: British vs Argentina fighting over the sovereignty of some scabby useless islands 25 years ago (Say what? Â Â ) US vs some evil bad guys in an oil-rich Middle Eastern sorta setting in the present day (Yay! Â Â ) Â Anyway the resemblance between the ArmA campaign and the Falklands war is as follows: 1. Both take place on an island (although the geomorphology is totally different). 2. Harrier type aeroplanes are included. That's it.

The BIS "sniper" soldiers apparently have a lower value for their "camouflage" variable which means that the AI are supposed to have more trouble seeing sniper soldiers than they do seeing normal infantrymen. You might want to experiment with this yourself, though, if you want to play as a sharpshooter/sniper/scout in the game.

Yay! Captain comic! The first video game I ever played (knackered the space bar on my crappo 240K 8MHz Amstrad  playing him, I did)!

Yay! Captain comic! The first video game I ever played (knackered the space bar on my crappo 240K 8MHz Amstrad  playing him, I did)!

If we tell you will you stop saying "bf2 is better" and shoving a huge bf2 sig in our faces?

I was amazed to find out recently that Commando comics are still being published! I used to read as many as my pocket money would allow when I was a kid. Twice a week I could enter a world where plucky squaddy or dashing Spitfire pilot always heroically triumphed in a contest of honest Britisher against dastardly evil... Â Well done, that man! Best bolt-action military rifle ever made (forget Mausers and Mosins and all that nasty foreign tat! ) Â Anyway I've now also started on the assault boats for the plucky squaddies: an LCP(L) (aka "Higgins Eureka") and an LCA. The LCA is the one seen in the famous film of Canadian assault infantry going ashore on Juno on D-Day (Normandy 1944). Getting the ArmA AI retards to run through the armoured doors and down the ramp should be "interesting" (if not "impossible"). At least the LCP(L) is a "no ramp -jump over the gunwhales" type of boat:

We need a "Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch" addon! Â Actually, I hope horseys will be done sometime. Riding over the fields on Sahrani might be fun. Maybe even a fox hunt mod "view halloo!" Â Â I could play cruel Lord Cholmondely- Smythe, who has his sport by making the local Sahrani peasant lads play as live foxes, muhahaha!

This behaviour drives me mental too. Time and time again you can set up with your machine gun and pick them off one by one as they come around a corner like lemmings, adding their riddled corpses (all riddled all in the same place, of course) to the growing pile.  The ArmA men (even the elite troops) always behave like untrained civilians - no fiddling with waypoints fixes this fundamental deficiency. When battle is joined there is no semblance of tactical manoeuvre at all (yeah, I know they "sort of" move in bounds as they move, but that seems to break down very quickly). Instead of an AI section commander (squad leader to you Yanks) assessing the situation and using his section as a team, individuals are repeatedly tasked to "engage" particular targets upon which they leap up or run out way ahead of the rest and invariably get shot (I often wonder why they aren't programmed to shout "Banzai!" as they do this). No notion of organised manoeuvre or fire and movement is exhibited at all. Even trying to command an AI section yourself is fraught with frustration as basic things are either impossible or require keyboard skills that would give a piano virtuoso "carpal tunnel syndrome", and your section of brutal, rapacious and licentious AI soldiery still behave like stoned airsofters. The inability to jump or clamber over obstacles is infuriating too - having to wander along a flimsy fence (made apparently of matchsticks) under fire looking for an opening, or having to enter derelict buildings politely through the doorway is beyond ludicrous. And personally, I maintain that any game that does not allow you to dig in (and to have AI intelligently occupy and use entrenchments) does not deserve the title of  "military sim". Yes, I know that in the current gulf war they do not dig in very much, but Arma does not (and cannot) represent that kind of warfare. I have a dream that one day I'll boot up ArmA and see my infantry section's gun team providing covering fire, keeping the enemies heads down, while I crawl up with my assault team to grenade the enemy trenches and then leap over the smoking holes. Some bods may even jump in and introduce the enemy to a bit of Sheffield's finest. Some enemy may throw up their hands in surrender. All without a single line of "scripting". The concepts involved in infantry warfare at the sharp end are not that complex and I don't believe that getting AI to follow these simple concepts is impossible. I know that Arma allows you to fiddle with finite state machines but I insist that a game that claims to be a "battlefield simulation" should embody such basic concepts out of the box, but I guess I'll just have to "dream on". Rght now the best you can get is a mad shootout, like a cowboy showdown outside the saloon, or a hillbilly feud. For these reasons I've shelved all of my gradiose ArmA addon plans reducing them to one where I hope the fundamental deficiencies of the game will not be so apparent. There, I said it...

We already have "Bob the Builder" for that.

Love the refereee in the dark-grey business suit

Love the refereee in the dark-grey business suit

Did you ever find out what was meant?

@MaddogX: Could a simplified version of that idea be used to model bipods on machine guns? I mean the way you can traverse a machine gun while prone in the game is totally unlike how it behaves in reality. In the game you seem to pivot the gun around a virtual axis through your navel, whereas the gun should pivot on a virtual axis through the bipod. I wonder if by making the deployed gun a static object you could even implement a loader too.

Err...yes it does. The drum typically used by german infantrymen (in the non-mounted version) contained 50 rounds. Yes, and the MG42 could also apparently be adapted to use the 75 Â round saddle drum of the MG34. When the gun was used in the light role, the ammo drums were commonly used. Even when loose belts were used in the light role a 50 or 75 round (metal, non-disintegrating) belt was loaded as a "teaser" (you can often see this practise in wartime photos of German soldiers lugging MG42s about). This matches best how they are likely to be used in the game, anyway, since all weapons are "personal weapons" in ArmA - unless you plan to script in the behaviour of gun numbers and ammo bearers - which would be really great (or unless you are building guns in the SF role - mounted on tripods with boxes of ammo to hand). (OT @JdB. I like your new sig. Maerten "Bestevaer" Tromp is one of my all-time heroes! Â Â )

A modder can easily adjust how cases are ejected to fix the "limply jump an inch" problem, at least. In the weapon models there is a point that represents where the case ejection starts and another that determines its direction. Fiddling with these can at least let a model weapon dump its brass in a similar trajectory to the real life one.

@ENTI: Like everyone else I'm still waiting for the BIS ArmA modelling tool so I can get soldier models and stuff in game. I'm doing some commando soldiers and "commando raid" missions too, not just a bunch of weapons. So basically that all means that it'll be quite some time yet. I'll also need to wait until some decent early war Germans are made by one or other of the other WW2 mod teams (I'd rather not have to do all of them too if I can avoid it). And, most importantly of all, I don't want to release shit so I'm doing it carefully. I am thinking now about concentrating on making the airborne version of the De Lisle and releasing it sometime soon as an "enticer". That's out of the scope of this project (and IRL only 2 prototypes were ever made), but might be interesting to some people. @.jonny: I refer you to the answer I gave to Abs. None of the models are "technically" finished yet and I have to learn this autodidactically as I go along. I'm not a brilliant 3D artist like some of the others on here. I also need to totally rebuild some of the models for better authenticity and "in- game efficiency". The Bren gun, for example. The Bren is a really complex shape, especially the MkI and especially for a duffer at modelling and I reckon I made an arse of it the first time. Some of the needed weapons are not even started yet. I still need to do a Lewis gun for my Higgins "Eureka" boat and a Webley signal pistol. One (just one of many) of the attractions of doing commandos, though, is that I don't really need to bother about doing support weapons and vehicles (except a couple of boats) because they never had any at the start of the war. @second: Yes the Finns used that bad-boy a lot! I just had some fun shooting up some ArmA BRDMs with my WIP Boys last night. @toffiekipper: I really hope I can get the F-S knife working in game (or can find someone who can). Even if it's just one basic attack (I guess THIS Â (commandos training in 1942) is totally out of the question in the game engine). I'd really rather not just have it as a "fashion accessory" on the soldier models, even if the opportunity to use it in missions will be rare. In the meantime, commando fans, Â I discovered a free 3D modelling tool called "Anim8or" that can make fancy renders of models. It's great! Even on default settings it makes even my crappy models look nice! More to the point it also shows up problem areas much better than OFP & Oxygen does. This is the current state of the No.1 rifle as rendered in "Anim8or" (yes, I know it still needs some "fixing")

Well "pal", if you think that that stupid crouching-walk anim is even remotely realistic (or even physically possible) then you need an anatomy lesson. And it's not "cynicism", it's called "wit" - look it up. Sorry for the derail

Just playing about with my Tommy guns in-game. The early-WW2 20 round mags quickly make one [re]learn fire discipline! The bolt-action ("boltlocked"?) Lee-Enfield No. 1 on "rapid fire" is great too. "Bamclickybamclickybamclickybamclicky..."

When you make your gun model you make the magazine as a separate chunk and with a bit of config wizardry the engine  knows to disappear it while the reload anim plays and a clicky-clacky sound is heard. If you look around, some addon makers have made discarded magazines appear as a model of a magazine (and not a khaki coloured satchel). By "discarded" I mean explicitly dropped, not thrown down during a reload (who does that anyway?).

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"room cleaning"? That'd be SWIFFER, not SWAT Â Â

C'mon, we all know that's Photoshopped!