Drozdov

I find only the driving to be shockingly bad. It really is bad, they think absolutely nothing of running you or everyone else over. The number of times I had to revert during the Badlands mission because salvage trucks kept running over Razor team is not funny. Their pathfinding also sucks, especially when you want them to go into a forest. They just won't do it, even though there's plenty of space between the trees and the vehicle is heavy enough to smash through them without damage anyway. The rest isn't that great, but it's at least better than ArmA 1. The main problem with the AI is their love of Engage at Will mode, which means AI commanders always send individual soldiers on unsupported kamikaze attacks.

Why would my method work with one controller and not another? Is the Xbox controller fully functional with ArmA 2?

There's another problem with binoculars; if you're using them standing, then go crouched, your character puts the binoculars away, brings out the main weapon, then puts that away and brings out the binoculars again. It's annoying, and if you don't have a weapon it's actually impossible to use binoculars crouched. I agree the binoculars should function as a weapon, although I do think pressing B should put them up to your eyes immediately.

Are you sure it doesn't work? It works with my Playstation 2 controller. What I meant is go into the control list, find the Aim Up/Down/Left/Right and Look Up/Down... settings, and manually bind them. To get it 'inverted', push the stick down when binding the look/aim up key, and vice versa. By the way, might be an idea to bind the Look Up/Down/Right/Left (Analogue) settings, the ones which are bound to TrackIR by default, to the other stick.

Just map the aiming keys the other way around.

I'm furious enough to crush my mouse and chew through my desk, but I'll try and keep this coherent... I was in the final stage of the Manhattan mission of the campaign - without giving anything away, it's one where you have a million objectives that take hours to complete, especially the first time around when you don't know where to go. I got killed and reverted back to the autosave point just before the final objective... or so I thought, because I managed to click the restart mission save instead. I'd already had to revert multiple times in quick succession, so I wasn't exactly paying attention to the warnings of losing saves and progress etc - that's what it says normally, anyway, and the only difference is it says you're restarting the mission. So, it sent me back to the start... no big deal, I thought, I can just close Arma with Alt+F4 and my old save won't have been touched yet. Hey, wait... it says it's SAVING??? :eek: ...... ... So, after punching the desk and shouting 'FUCK!' extremely loudly at 5 in the morning (while others in the house were sleeping), I relaunched Arma to confirm my fears - I'd irrevocably lost all my progress in that mission. A mission I'd been playing for 5 hours or so. :crazy: You could say it's my fault for hitting the wrong button, and then doing the wrong thing to fix it... but, fuck me, it's an easy mistake to make, and even if it wasn't, it doesn't excuse the rubbish save system. Why is there only one slot for autosave points, why does restarting the mission have to immediately destroy all previous revert points, and WHY OH WHY does it save the game when you press alt+F4? To avoid losing progress when pressing it by accident I guess, but then why not just a confirm screen? It can only be to prevent cheating... but wait, who would you be cheating? The game itself? It cares that it's being cheated? Come on... This isn't the only potential save-destroying trap. Just before this happened, the game triggered an autosave while I was in the middle of being fired at by a tank, and with an enemy AT soldier charging at me. If one of those shots was a lethal one only interrupted by the save process, it would have meant I lived about 0.01 seconds every time I loaded. Since every autosave overwrites the last, that would mean I'd have to start the whole mission again (I hadn't used a user save slot so I'd no backup). All of these boobytraps could be avoided if the save system was improved. For a start, autosaves shouldn't only use 1 slot throughout the campaign. They may not be tiny files, they're about 14mb, but surely almost everyone would prefer to sacrifice a relatively small amount of hard drive space to ensure you're never going to lose much progress if something bad happens to a save. Just make it so each autosave is unique; they can be deleted when the mission is completed. Secondly, restarting a mission shouldn't automatically eradicate all previous saves for that mission, there's no real need for this at least until the first 'checkpoint' is reached. Thirdly, alt+f4 shouldn't force an auto save, there should be a quit confirmation window instead. I thought patch 1.02 was supposed to support multiple save slots, but I've seen no evidence of this at all. I guess it only means for the unlimited user saves feature, which means it's only useful for regular difficulty and below (why isn't that enabled for higher difficulties as an optional setting?).

ArmA's save system is perfect then? Nothing wrong with having only one autosave slot, which can wreck your game even if you don't do something wrong? What if it autosaves just before you're about to die? It frequently autosaves during combat, and if it does it at the wrong moment, you're fucked. Guess that would be my fault too? For your information, there's nothing wrong with being slow. I like to go about things realistically and thoroughly, checking every village I go through for something interesting. There's a lot of stuff to do in that mission, and not much useful intel to tell you where several objectives are.

Try reading what I actually said, people. I don't want more user save slots (I didn't use a user save point in that mission, it's not necessary because of the number of auto save points), although it'd be nice if the option was there on all difficulty levels; I want autosaves to NOT OVERWRITE THE PREVIOUS ONE, and instead be separate saves so you could go back to an earlier point if something fucks up, and you wouldn't have to redo a whole huge mission. I also don't want restarting to eradicate the other saves, there's no need for it. Who reads a warning message every time? I'd already reverted normally a few times in a row since a damn BMP kept killing me. It's virtually the same as the normal 'you'll lose progress blah blah' message if you hit the restart mission instead of the autosave in the list, so it's easy to do that by mistake. In no other game I've ever played (except OFP and ArmA 1, of course) would restarting a mission delete all the save points.

As I said, I've seen no sign of this. All I get is an autosave slot and a user save slot. Do you get 7 slots on Regular difficulty? I'm playing on Veteran.

In real life, the success of major US military operations doesn't hinge on 4 poorly armed men in an average APC either. In real life, you're not the only one who can't see through undergrowth/tree branches. Real life takes more than a bit of coding to make major improvements to. Real life doesn't have a restart mission feature. What exactly is your point? Good luck trying to get through ArmA 2 without saves of any kind.

Hey vilas, did you get that PM I sent you a few weeks ago with the modified config for the bandits addon? It added wound textures for all of them.

Ok, I've done a bit of FPS testing. First of all, my PC specs: E6400 Core 2 Duo 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM 7900 GTO 512mb graphics 160gb HD with 12gb free For the test, I used the tropical Sahrani mod I've been working on which replaces the default BIS trees with these ones. I mainly tested it at two sites - in the forest around the log camp in northeastern Sahrani, and standing on Punto Morton (northwestern Sahrani, overlooking the Mato Grosso on one side and a bunch of smaller forests on the other). The first site, at the log camp, is essentially a single-model tree forest, originally made up of Les_Singlestrom trees, which in my mod have been replaced by Big Jungle Tree 7 - essentially it's a fairly dense forest made up of this model. On my normal ArmA settings (1024x768, visibility 6000, Terrain/Anisoptric/Anti-Aliasing normal, Shadows high, objects/textures very high, shading and post-pro high), this forest is unplayable. Walking through the trees gives an FPS average of about 7, looking at the forest from a higher point makes the FPS drop even lower. I changed the settings to the 'Normal' preset (everything normal, postpro/aa/aniso low, vis 1200). Now, walking through the forest gave an acceptable frame rate that ranged from 15-20 and never really stuttered - this is about the same as walking through a BIS forest at my original high quality settings. However, viewing the forest from a high point, or going outside the forest so that a lot of trees were displayed on the screen, caused the FPS to drop to around 12. With BIS trees, my original higher quality settings give a framerate of around 15-18 when walking in the forest. Viewing the forest from a height gave a higher framerate of around 17-18, and viewing a large amount of trees from a medium distance, say, a forest clearing, resulted in a higher FPS of around 20. The 'normal' preset settings show the same pattern, FPS being around 20 walking through the forest and about 28 when viewing the forest. The second test site, around Punto Morton, has a bit more diversity of tree models. The Mato Grosso forest is quite dense and comprised of Big Jungle Tree 1 and 4 models (replacing the Les/Str Buk models), while the other various forests to the east of Punto Morton are mostly made up from Big Jungle Tree 7 and Jungle Tree 3 (replacing the large Smrk models), Palm 9 (replacing the small Smrk) and a few Palm 11 (replacing the Briza model). These forests are mostly small and less dense. Anyway, with my original higher quality settings, looking east from Punto Morton (showing a large amount of small forests) gave a very low FPS of around 5, while looking west down to the Mato Grosso gave a slightly higher average of around 6. Walking around gave some interesting results - I found that inside Mato Grosso was almost playable, with an average FPS of 15, but it would drop significantly whenever my view wasn't mostly blocked by trees close to me and I was able to see a lot of trees from medium-long range distance. In the forests to the east, the FPS difference was even greater depending on what was in my 'background' view, so to speak. If I was looking to the east, FPS would drop unplayably low because it was loading all the trees from the various forests in the background whenever my view of them wasn't totally blocked. Looking back west, the background was only of the mountainside, so walking through sparser clumps of forest I was getting a pretty good FPS average of over 20. Bumping the settings down to normal preset showed more or less what you'd expect and confirmed the same pattern - background trees are more important in causing lag than foreground trees. Playing the same area with the BIS trees didn't entirely show a reverse pattern, but the difference was still big. In short, their trees cause more FPS lag when they're close to you than when they're further away. It's more evident in the medium range view - looking at the Mato Grosso in its entirety from above didn't cause any problems (FPS about 28), but looking at a shitload of pine forests to the east resulted in an FPS of around 18-20. My conclusions after all this are that the HDT trees (at least the big ones which were the main ones I tested) could do with some optimisation before they're mid-level PC friendly. I've an idea how this can be done - if you look at the BIS trees in Oxygen, they're all mostly 2D objects in their lowest detail LOD. From a distance, you're basically looking at a texture painted onto a flat plane, but you'd never really know it in game. Because the new HDT objects are binarized, I can't have a look at them to see how the LODs are done now, but it looks to me as if each LOD is still a trimmed down version of the last - still fully 3D. Of course, it'd require a bit of work to do this. I'm eager to have a go at helping, although I'm still finding my feet with Oxygen and 3D modelling.

Ah, I see. I hadn't really looked at big tree 3 and 5 closely, they are entirely the same as 1 and 4. Big tree 6 is a fair bit different to big tree 7, though - I'd noticed that before so I'd assumed the others were different.

I checked again, and Big Tree 3, 5 and 6 do still have 'Tarzan' vines. Here's a screenshot. I'm not entirely sure about a change in FPS from old to new, haven't tested with FRAPS on yet. In general, though, they still cause a lot more lag than the default plants. I'll add some more detail on this later.

Thanks a lot for making this, it's a nice improvement on the old version. I like virtually everything I've noticed so far. The trees look much more natural now their foliage doesn't deform to the angle of the slope they're on, and, of course, being able to knock everything over makes the objects much more usable. Making appropriate objects sway in the wind was a nice touch. If you're willing to make a new version, I can suggest a few things that might be worth further improvement. Jungle trees 1-4 all have some odd triangular protrusions from their trunks - they had these in the original version, so it's not something you've done, but it'd be easy enough to remove them, and worthwhile in my opinion since they're the nicest tree models. Jungle tree 2's lowest detail LOD could also do with an overhaul, since its trunk appears invisible from a distance. It'd also be good if you made 'no vine' versions of Big Tree 3, 5 and 6 (not sure if the numbers are right), since their Tarzan-style vines that sweep up to hang in the air kind of limit their usability. Finally, there are a few issues arising from the fact that the trees can now be knocked over. The ones that have any kind of vine things hanging down vertically defy the laws of gravity once they've been smashed to the ground - their 'hanging' vines are still rigidly parallel to the tree trunk. More generally, I don't think any of the trees have been given textures for their feet, so to speak. Once knocked on its side, you can see through the bottom part of the trunk and look at its hollow insides. Anyway, good work.

That all sounds great, I experimented a bit with loading the models into Oxygen and editing the LODs. I did a quick job on the LODs and found it was easy to get the trees to look like trees from a distance, but the performance took a hit. I had a look at BIS ArmA trees and realised they do LODs totally differently and much more efficiently, so no wonder the performance was so much worse when replacing them with the HDT trees, even before I'd tweaked their LODs. That made me think it was probably possible to make the HDT pack a lot more resource friendly without sacrificing the graphics, but since I don't really have the knowledge or skills to properly rework the LODs I was willing to just give up on that for now. Sounds like you're doing a good job, though.

Well, that sounds promising. What other things have your changes come at the expense of? Do you also know if it's possible to change the way the trees look when they're on a hill? Right now, their foliage deforms to conform to the angle of the hill, which looks funny.

Isn't that more or less the same thing, though? Either way you're directly swapping one model for another. Aim's Jungle Sahrani used the method of editing the plants.pbo, and it still has floating trees.

Hex editing. It's possible to use a hex editor on the .wrp file to (rather crudely) replace one object with another. Read this thread to get a basic idea of how it works. There are, however, problems with this method; the object you're replacing has to be at least the same size and preferably smaller than the one you want to replace it with. It's particularly important when it comes to height - replace a tall item with a shorter item, and your new item will be floating in the air, since it has the same Z co-ordinates. This is becoming a particular problem for me with trees - I was wanting to make a more tropical Sahrani with a consistent climate. Unfortunately, the temperate climate trees I wanted to remove are all much taller than any of the default tropical climate trees, so if I replaced, say, a spruce with a palm, the palm would be about 1m above the ground. I came across the HD tropical objects pack, which has a few trees big enough for the job. Now, however, I'm realising that only about 2 of the HD models are even big enough to replace most of the trees I want to, so the forests would be rather repetitive, and as I said, these big jungle tree models look funny from a distance. I think it's unlikely I'll be able to make a perfect tropical version of Sahrani. If you're wondering how this was brought this up, I had originally mentioned my tropical Sahrani project in my previous post, but I edited it out since I realised it was a bit cheeky to write about it before I'd asked Linker for permission to use the models. I will, of course, ask for permission if I plan to release it publicly, but for now I'm just seeing if it's possible.

I know it's been a while since anyone posted here, but I noticed a problem with how the Big Jungle Trees look from a long distance away. If you're more than about 400m from them, they look like telegraph poles, you can't see their branches at all. Here are links to some a screenshots to show what I mean: Trees looking like telegraph poles Trees slightly closer looking like trees It's a real shame, because otherwise they look pretty great. It seems to only be a problem for the big jungle trees. I'd like to know if you'd be willing to change the look of these trees when seen from far away so you can see some foliage

AI planes no longer seem capable of landing anywhere but Paraiso. It's like OFP all over again in that respect...

Actually the motorbikes are waaay more forgiving than they used to be in OFP, with the exception that they're more likely to flip up when you're going uphill - but that's not so bad since you're going slow and it'll never kill you. It's much easier to stay on your bike at speed than it used to be, unrealistically so given that you can actually skid sideways at speed without toppling over. You need to be going fast down a bumpy hill to kill yourself on an ArmA motorbike. In OFP you could kill yourself by going fast and zigzagging too much, it was really more realistic that way.

Having the AI be affected more shouldn't be CPU heavy. But you're probably right that modelling the grass to respond dynamically to human bodies would increase the drain on computer resources. Hidden and Dangerous 2 was obviously doing this on smaller environments. Still, I think it would be possible to limit the flattening effect to within a specified distance of each player, a distance that you could set to whatever mode your computer could handle. Anyway BIS won't bother to make that change, and it might require changing aspects of the game that an add-on maker wouldn't be able to, so if they have something like this it'd be in Arma 2 or whatever the next game will be called.

I think the flattening effect as it is should be 1st person only, if that's possible with the engine. Actually Hidden & Dangerous 2 made it possible to deliberately flatten grass with your body, so you had to actively flatten it to create a field (heh heh...) of vision. That's way more realistic than the automatic halo effect of ArmA flattening. It also had the grass making you hard to see, but the AI could still always see you if you fired your gun. It'd be good if they had that system instead, and modified it to make it hard for the AI to see or hit you when you're in long grass.

I don't think they knew what they were basing Sahrani on. It seems like it's supposed to be Spanish speaking, yet it has Arabic architecture in the South and an Arabic name. Porto even has a minaret. The posters in the North are a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese - all are Spanish except the 'No Passarao Sulistas', which is Portuguese for 'No passage for Southerners'. This mish-mash of cultural influences combined with the completely different landscape of the North and South (you can't have half of a tiny island tropical/desert with palm trees and the other half temperate with pine trees ) make Sahrani a totally unviable island, and a nightmare to make a realistic story-driven campaign around. That said, I like the island and some of the towns in it. It's just so implausible as a whole.