dslyecxi

I fully grasp "the concept of full destructable environments", but I also fully grasp the complete impossibility of such a thing happening anytime soon, let alone in an MP game, due to the absurd amount of developmental resources that would be required to even come close to attaining that goal. If you think something like Crysis is even remotely close to said goal, perhaps your perspective is colored by that.

Video from a mission we played at the start of our Saturday session. The premise of this one is that a airborne platoon acts as a quick reaction force when a friendly (AI) unit comes into trouble while attacking a random city. A few minutes into the mission the QRF request is made and the player platoon must quickly form a plan and move to reinforce. In this particular runthrough we had about 50 people playing. It was a blast. I didn't get a ton of footage, but what I did get I edited together into a nice little video. QRF Video Youtube: Hires: http://dslyecxi.com/videos/mar15_qrf.wmv

Don't assume that something you read about VBS2 has anything to do with ArmA2 or will show up in it in any capacity. I doubt it. In any case, it's too time-consuming and difficult of a thing to implement to expect in the ArmA2 timeframe. There are better things that could be done with that time, effort, and money, things which would have a larger impact on the overall experience.

A patch being a beta and a game being a beta are two drastically different things. A patch is like a mini-product, it goes from alpha -> beta - > release candidate -> final in the same process as a game does. You seem to be confused about that part of things.

The problem with that is that you need a whole new set of textures for a large chunk of the game's content. I don't know if it's realistic to expect that in ArmA2 given the development timeframe. I would like to see it, but at the same time, I get the impression that the effort spent could be spent more productively on other aspects of the game.

The same effect can be achieved doing what they are doing now - any given wall may have several different pieces that can be blown out, which allows for the tactics you cited. The difference between what they're doing, and "full dynamic destruction", is very small in terms of gameplay, and MASSIVE in terms of developmental resources, system resources, and online complications. The path BIS is taking on this particular topic is the best one to take, easily.

Thank you kindly for misrepresenting my comments so completely.

The community you are a part of != "The Community". An aspect of it, yes, but referring to it as "the community" is misleading unless you clarify it like you just did (which you did not do previously). We use TS and have used it since OFP. We've been operating at platoon strength for awhile and have set up appropriate comms (as detailed in our TTP, which many others have based off of). VON has a very significant place even with good TS structure. It doesn't take in-game usage to figure out how the VON applies. Knowledge of how the Direct Speaking function works is sufficient to figure out how at least one major aspect of VON can be harnessed for communication/coordination purposes. If you need clarification on this, let me know. We've been running VON at platoon strength for awhile now and are quite familiar with how it operates and what it brings. "Limited BIS support"? What are you wanting? You sent stuff in showing that you can play with more than the quoted (aka: supported) number of players. What were you expecting in return that you didn't get? What would you rather see that isn't there, and is a reasonable development option for ArmA1? I'd be interested to hear your opinion of something that would approach the payoff of VON development insofar as the entire community is concerned.

I can only assume that you and the people you refer to simply do not understand what VON allows for compared to TS. Out of the entirety of ShackTac, I can't think of anyone in our group who hasn't found VON to add a fantastic additional level of communication to our gaming. I think any other groups that even attempt to be a fraction as organized will benefit similarly from what VON brings to the table. For public servers in particular it allows for a great ease-of-use, allowing for simple, logical communication without having to worry about connecting to a Teamspeak server. The "direct speaking" mode is something that simply cannot be matched by Teamspeak, no matter how badly you wish it could be. The nice thing, though, is that I don't have to really sell it to you - it's been developed, and you can either use it or not. No loss to me if you choose it ignore it, but every gain to me when ShackTac employs it. We've had some amazing sessions already using it, not to mention taking advantage of it to have experiences that are not possible with TS-only - the perfect example being our paratrooper missions. I must say, the thought of the entire IC-ArmA group purportedly not being able to see the benefit of VON is surprising. I guess there's a level of fluid comms-related teamwork that the group is not interested in pursuing. Pity. I wonder if other tournament groups like ToW are more in tune with what VON allows? You do speak for almost all of IC-ArmA, correct? One must assume so when someone says that a "big part" of a 250-person group has a single opinion on one matter. Unless "big part", in fact, turns out to not be so big as you're vaguely implying...

I like how certain people keep citing that it is "not a community issue". A poll was done by such a poster, thinking that there was no community interest in VON. The results of the poll were OVERWHELMINGLY supportive of VON being fixed, when obviously he had hoped to prove that there was not any community interest. He was wrong. So are you. Try relying on facts and not drawn-out-of-thin-air assumptions in the future, please.

Development doesn't work that way, neither does the patching process. Trying to split off to do two different patch branches (SP and MP) would probably end up delaying both and not be worth the amount of time and effort it would take to do such branches to begin with.

What about it? It's an unreleased patch... who are you expecting to tell you about it? (short of BIS, who are probably all worried with finishing said patch at the moment)

IC-ArmA and TOW (and probably others) have very large weekly sessions. My own group just had a session last night that peaked at 55 players and maintained a 45+ player count for at least five straight hours. Game-Monitor.com right now shows there being over 1000 people playing ArmA multiplayer. http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=arma&pg=1 The facts seem to point towards something other than what you're claiming. Perhaps not for you, but plenty of other people are having a great time in it. As to a "future", there's ArmA2 coming out in any case and ultimately that will have an influence on ArmA1's "future" (and rightly so).

You're welcome to believe whatever you want about how the patching process works. I know that you do not have any sort of inside, useful info about said process, and I know that your (and other people's) comments are based on fanciful unfounded fantasy-land "ideal world" assumptions as to how things should work. I know "how I'm being productive for the community", and it is completely unrelated to my posts in this topic. I don't need your affirmation to justify anything I do. I never said that time doesn't matter, either - obviously, it does. However, there is a reasonable speed that can be achieved, and then there is your wishful "Gee, if they had the entire team working on the patch, it would go faster!" nonsense which has no relation to anything based in reality. You have no idea of what the situation is, and it is comments like these that prove it. I don't know what you think you're going to accomplish by making such posts, but I can tell you that it will do precisely nothing and not cause one iota of positive change to occur. You're in some fantasy alternate reality where bitching incessantly about something is somehow a force for good. Well, in reality, it doesn't work like that - perhaps one day you'll figure that out. Or perhaps not.

This is ridiculous - you're implying that nothing else has changed in those 18 months. That's not even remotely accurate. Go put the changelogs together and look at how much support they've given to the product. There are many, many, many developers around who would not have done even half of that. Once again we have someone who doesn't understand the development process throwing a half-baked opinion out that is simply not true or accurate. Funny, I recall a poll on this very forum by someone like you, someone who thought nobody wanted VON. The results were overwhelmingly positive about VON being fixed. Welcome to the minority, I guess?

What do you want? Seriously? You bitch about them taking a long time - well, guess what, they're a relatively small independent developer, working with a very complex piece of software. They're going as fast as they can and doing everything they possibly can to give you a solid final patch. Sitting around and moaning about how long it takes is completely non-productive. You have a completely delusional view of how the patching process works. Your "Come on BIS, put more people on the patch" comment illustrates that perfectly.

There's a phrase that applies here, something about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery... Hope you have fun with the concept. edit: That reminds me... while I have a topic about this in the MP section, I never posted the ShackTac Airborne Invasion of North Sahrani AAR here, with included videos and such. You can find the hires streaming videos included in the AAR itself, here: http://dslyecxi.com/articles/arma_airborne.html

It's been a long time coming, but I finally wrote a new after-action review of an ArmA experience for my site. This one deals with a night paradrop into North Sahrani by a group of ~50 ShackTac members, sans NVGs and radios, against an overwhelming force of SLA. Many interesting gameplay mechanics were in play - the most interesting to me was the use of only "Direct Speaking" VON and signal flares for coordination. No "radio" communication methods - ie Teamspeak - were used. I think the end result was brilliant, and the story of what happened should be an interesting read for many. You can find the article, complete with screens and video, here: http://dslyecxi.com/articles/arma_airborne.html

There was an administrative discussion happening in the start of one of the videos, so I blacked it out to prevent distraction.

It's not a public server, you don't have to worry about it.

"Realistic" dynamic destruction of structures is ridiculously more complex than what you see in any games currently around, unless you think that "realistic" dynamic destruction means that a single grenade will take huge chunks out of buildings as in some games. Lets not throw the r-word around so casually - even doing something as simple as having a single brick wall that reacts appropriately to the full range of munitions, from handgun to grenade to tank shell to bomb, is far, far from trivial. Doing that to an entire building, let alone an entire city, is asking a hell of a lot. If you think a small independent developer even has a snowball's chance in hell of doing that kind of full-blown simulation-level dynamic destruction, or that it would work over multiplayer in the current day and age, you are simply mistaken and have expectations that cannot be met by reality.

QG will not be a requirement for ACE. You easily get many times the value of QG in ACE for free, there's no reason to make it a requirement on top of that.

It was intended as a proof-of-concept for the ACE mod. We're still deciding how exactly to best implement similar functionality in ACE.

I'll take a Chernarus-styled European environment over a desert/Iraq/Afghanistan environment anytime. If ArmA2 was slated to be a desert/Iraq/Afghan type environment, I would not be nearly so excited about it. I've played enough of the VBS2 terrain sets like that to know that the gameplay and potential you get from a terrain like Sahrani or Chernarus is going to be a lot more interesting in general.

There will be PR prior to release that will detail the initial features and functionality of the ACE beta release. For now, please have patience. There are a lot of great things in store and it's better for us as a team to wait until we're closer to beta to tell you what exactly you should expect to see in the first release.