Col. Faulkner

I'm disturbed by the amount of errors in that once sentence. Fascinating.. Arch. Yes, he made twice as many as you did in yours. "Hello pot, this is kettle. Black, over!" Â

The picture in the original post looks realistic. Assuming that the SLA forces are Soviet/Russian trained what style would their face painted camouflage actually likely be? I don't recall seeing pictures of any Eastern bloc troops with face paint on. Is the modern warpaint resistant to water and sweat? Our stuff was dark-brown coloured only. It came in a green rubber bag thing like a balloon. You got a splat squeezed into your hand and just globbed it on - in theory covering the highlights on your fizzog. Ten minutes after you'd applied it, it had inevitably run in streaks making your section look like a warry version of Kiss. It gave us horrible spots too (or was that just because of our burgeoning hormones)?

The Harrier weapons systems are so astonishingly realistically simulated that it's a wonder the game isn't classified!

Given that 8 out of 10 responders like the idea, I wonder if BIS are now considering it? Assuming, for the sake of argument, that they are going to enhance the sights (telescopic as well as iron) to have adjustable elevation how would one like this to actually manifest itself in the game? How should the adjustment be controlled?

The "mirror material" just shows a very blurred image of a generic ArmA landscape. This image moves as the vehicle moves, but it's utterly useless as a rear-view mirror. I suppose that properly working mirrors would impose a large performance hit, though, as effectively it'd amount to rendering the scene on screen more than once (wouldn't it?)

16,000 kilometres view distance is literally the same as standing in New York and being able to see Sydney, Australia. Is it a typo for 16,000 metres?

16,000 kilometres view distance is literally the same as standing in New York and being able to see Sydney, Australia. Is it a typo for 16,000 metres?

Yes, "Watch" is often disappointing, but currently it's about the best there is available (without messing about with ad- hoc scripting stuff). Maybe we should try to thrash out some sort of properly detailed specification here for what should be added, with good illustrative material so the BIS people can clearly understand what we want and why, so a proper enhancement report could be submitted to BIS. Better fire control would go a long way to solving the currently infuriating problems of commanding AI men in the field. As a corollary to this, I'd also say that proper fire suppression is an essential feature that needs to be added somehow. Any simulation of infantry and tank combat is fundamentally and profoundly flawed without this.

I didn't say anything about "rapid area fire" (whatever that is). I was just mentioning the "Watch" command as a stop gap - I totally agree that it's less than reliable.

Well it's obviously something to do with the .tga file, isn't it?

There doesn't seem to be any formal mechanism for making enhancement requests. The BIS team do seem to take notice of items of especial interest on these forums, though (see for example how they changed the aircraft flight behaviour and some aspects of the RPG-7 simulation in response to discussion on the forum). There is a "watch" command already. You can select one or more units, hold down the "watch direction" key (I have the left ctrl set to this, I can't remember what it is by default) turn the cursor to the desired direction and click, and the units will turn to face that direction. This more or less covers the "...enemy in that area - watch and shoot!" or "...when enemy appears - rapid fire!" sort of FCO already, but not the "area fire" concept of course. It'd also be good to be able to explicitly order grenades to be launched by the AI at particular areas/targets. edit: It appears that you can file enhancement requests on the BIS ArmA bugtracker: http://bugs.armed-assault.net/main_page.php

Friendly tags at close range would be OK as a representation of the various subtle cues you use to recognise someone in the real world (things like gait, posture, physical size, habits) none of which are represented by the clone-warriors in ArmA. Even better if you could toggle the display as needed with a keypress.

Friendly tags at close range would be OK as a representation of the various subtle cues you use to recognise someone in the real world (things like gait, posture, physical size, habits) none of which are represented by the clone-warriors in ArmA. Even better if you could toggle the display as needed with a keypress.

The various sailboat simulator programs use various ways to indicate wind strength and direction, so it's not an impossible task. Whether adding wind itself to the ArmA engine is as straightforward is another question, of course. I'd vote "yes" for adjustable sights on all the weapons. Even just a couple of settings would be OK for most weapons. It could even be an option that you could switch on or off as desired in the "options" screen, if you don't like it. People are always talking about buying VBS2. I was given to understand that it was not going to be for sale to the general public.

I just meant that the artificial restriction that an ATk weapon can only be fired from a kneeling position should be removed, and one should be able to fire them from all of the positions that a normal firearm can be used from in the game. I don't know or care what "idiots" in other games do. In my opinion being forced up (or down) onto one knee to fire a weapon is unrealistic and downright annoying too.

Yes! That's what I want too!

That "official reason" is nothing but a myth. The real reason boils down to the fact that since the USA had moved to 5.56mm, NATO was pressured into following suit. It was a repeat of the reason why 7.62mm was a NATO standard in an earlier era. It's true that you can carry more 5.56mm ammo than 7.62mm but that wasn't a major consideration in deciding to adopt 5.56mm. At the time the SA80 was adopted we were told that it was more useful in house to house stuff in NI than an SLR and official promotional bumf went out of its way to emphasize this. Many British soldiers at the time were dismayed to find that the SA80 weighed the same as an SLR (and was less well balanced - never mind the other teething problems with it). Many of us thought at the time that a better idea would have been to adopt 'Para versions of the FAL, which were the same length with stock folded as an SA80 (an important consideration when in a vehicle), hit harder, and weighed the same as an SA80. The Falklands War experience had nothing to do with decisions to replace the SLR. The MOD never "went out and got several guns designed"; design work for the XL65 system was already well underway in the late 1960s, and the first IWs were being troop trialled in the late 1970s. And recall that the decision to adopt a modified FN FAL in the mid-1950s in the first place was again due to the influence of the USA. None of the British weapons were suitable for firing 7.62mm. Several of the prototypes were trialled but failed. Britain never wanted the SLR but the FN FAL was considered the best available substitute at the time. It is often opined that the USA would have adopted the FAL too if the acceptance tests had not been biased in favour of the M14. But for NATO pressure, Britain would otherwise have been using bullpup self-loading rifles based on the  EM-2 design in British .280" calibre. They were officially approved for service already in 1951!

But the Kalashnikov rifles in the game are clearly AK-74s (5.45mmx39), not AK-47s (7.62mmx39).

Excellent idea. Not sure if the die-hards would buy it though... If the "hand signal" is an icon, how does that differ in any important respect from a subtitle or a spoken or whispered message on your "teamsay" (or whatever it's called)?

Yes, that's the idea.

It may be possible to do it by swapping just the configs but I never investigated that, so I'm not going to make any pronouncement on it's feasibility. For my purposes I wanted the adjusting cams on my sight unit to "move" as visual feedback of the sight setting, so I went down the "auto- swap rifle model plus config" route.

You should do those sometime. New Zealand '84 patt' DPM would probably fit the Sahrani environment quite well. That orangey-yellow it uses as a backing colour, would probably match the scrubby desert areas nicely. [anorak] Here's just a small point regarding nomenclature; It's not called "Woodland DPM" (not even in the New Zealand forces). "Woodland" is the name for the pattern used on the American M81 BDU suit. The British pattern is called just "DPM" (or "DP"). The pattern you've done is officially called "Desert DPM", and is a specialization of DPM made by deleting some areas and recolouring others. "DPM" is strictly a generic term but, for historical reasons, is used specifically to denote the 4-colour temperate/tropical pattern. [/anorak]

That isn't the intention (although it is a simpler alternative). With some wizardly scripting it is possible to change between the "differently zeroed" rifle models in the game. You could for example have a set of commands like "range 200m", "range 300m" etc (assuming an M3 telescope) in the action menu and select whatever is desired. With some thought, a better solution for the user-interface could probably also be devised. edit: That probably isn't very clear. When you select a "range", the rifle model would be "silently" swapped in your hands - you wouldn't notice any change but a different weapon (with a different zero) would have replaced the one you were holding.

Please can you explain this bit, I don't understand what you mean? The US tanks in Arma are M1A1, aren't they?

I don't know if you are interested in doing more UN troops, but the ArmA OPFOR models would also be well suited to representing Eastern European UN members. For example, here's an illustration of a Ukrainian member of UNPROFOR in Bosnia in 1993. He's practically a standard ArmA SLA soldier with some UN badges and his steel helmet painted blue (nb. painted, not a cloth cover).