dmarkwick

Strange topic. The answer is offensively simple: if you think it's overpriced, don't buy it.

I confess I sometimes rely on it :) Often my AI see enemy I cannot, and often I see enemy the AI cannot. It's never going to be perfect.

Steam Guard. Never heard of it, I will investigate :) Thx

Thanks for the heads-up :) I'm asked to sign into Steam from that website - can anyone confirm it's safe? I'm always a little suspicious when third parties ask you to sign into some other place from their sites :) (Especially when that third party warns you to be careful about signing in from third parties ;))

Always disable updates until you're sure you need to update. Doesn't help with this problem unfortunately, but I would assume a fix will become available.

Well, to interject, IMO the crosshair is a game enhancer not a detractor. For me, it's simply a visual indicator where my weapon is actually pointing because I don't have the kinisthetic feedback of actually holding the weapon. Also, I use TrackIR so my weapon direction is not necessarily center screen. Plus, there is some amount of random variance between crosshair and actual weapon direction right? In ArmA, the weapon is always shouldered, there is no firing from the hip. As such it's not unreasonable to have such a visual feedback as a crosshair. As has been mentioned before it also is useful to see if your weapon in blocked by geometry due to lack of kinisthetic feedback that we take for granted IRL. Playing "realistically" on a PC isn't just all about removing/denying onscreen info because you can't see that info printed on your eyesight IRL. It's about reasonable analogs for info you should have, but which you don't have becuase you're sitting in a chair looking at the world through a letterbox and using a mouse & a button to look & move about. I find it unrealistic to glance down at my legs or try to judge how far away the ground is when I wish to know what stance I'm in. For me, the stance indicator is a reasonable analog for my sense of what stance my body is in. In a similar way the crosshair, for me, lets me know what direction I'm pointing my (shouldered) gun in, again a perfectly reasonable kinisthetic analog for senses that I'm missing. However, this is all subjective I guess, which is why there are options. :) The zoom issue.... not really an issue because it's not really zoom. When "zoomed" in you're actually at the 1:1 visual ratio you should be at, but because of FoV considerations there is a default "zoom out" view so you can navigate the world in a useful fashion. With permanent 1:1 the feeling of playing the game with a cardboard box over your head & a hole cut in the front is even worse. 3rd person - old argument :) most people will agree that it serves as a sort-of-cheat in MP. However, server admins keep allowing it, and they're paying the bill for the hosting. Their choice entirely. I might suggest third person be disabled by default for MP only, in that way we could be sure any 3rd person setup is a deliberate choice.

IMO Facebook's involvement is exactly about investment. Facebook won't be Facebook forever (as in the most used social network) and I guess the company is looking to diversify & expand, as nearly all companies do.

This slight confusion is why I disable floating zone in game. With TrackIR, it's far better with it off IMO.

Pros: External processing for tracking, so no CPU usage. Very accurate. Wider angle lens & increased sample rates than previous versions. Well supported. Cons: Need to wear a hat. Cost (although you have to offset it with the amount of use it will get, which will be a lot). Up to you, it uses a USB port and wires you to your PC. Personally I found an accuracy drop while using it.

I'd recommend getting it. It takes maybe a few hours to get used to the thing, until then you're going to do a lot of head flapping and crazy aiming, but after that - you won't ever look back. (Well, you will, you've got TrackIR :) but you won't like to play without it I mean ;)) Aside from the excellent infantry tactical awareness you get, you also get to fly helicopters pretty well too.

IIRC, the bullet holes are similar to the stars, in that they are GPU primitives, and very cheap to use. I don't know whether we'd see any performance decrease due to using textures & displacements etc, but it should be borne in mind that the two effects are from different techs.

But it's not the thing you're demonstrating :) Look, if you have a problem with the Zeus DLC, if you see it as worthless and not adding to the value of ArmA3, then that's one thing. But to dismiss it out of hand and then put furniture as part of a higher priority list... well you can see what's going to happen here.

I thought that is what Zeus is? In any case, I would hardly call free DLC content "screwing the community". That's a rather disgraceful & hateful description of what is happening. IMO natch.

That playthrough looked pretty enough, but that first encounter looked stupidly easy: douse the nearest fire then pick the pocket & sneak past as the guard stares at where the fire should be? I just seemed a bit meh to me. Maybe it was a fist encounter to introduce the gameplay... ?

If exploration od amazing places is your thing then Skyrim might fit, beautiful game environment. If you don't follow the main storyline you won't get plagued by dragons either, but can still follow sidequests etc. Plus a selection from a ton of mods can probably turn it even more to your liking. Other than that, probably Fallout 3 sounds ideal for you.

Wow, lots of people allowing their imagination to run away, then getting angry at their imagined scenario. Nothing better to do? :)

'Tis true we aer wired to believe. It's an evolutionary outcome - we are creatures who have evolved the ability to transfer abstract knowledge between individuals, negating the need for direct experience. However, we have also evolved the ability to learn. So, just as we're wired to believe outside information directed toward us, we are also capable of learning that sometimes this can be treated with skepticism. (However, we do have to learn that. Skepticism is not a natural part of our makeup. Thankfully, learning is :))

I haven't used ALiVE, so I cannot comment on that. But, I have used DAC, which (perhaps...) uses a similar idea. In DAC, distant groups are reduced to one representative unit, until it gets close to an enemy group (including player groups), at which point both are reconstituted back to full strength for regular simulation. The distance that the reduction/reconstitution happens can be set by the mission designer, and it can help in saving a few FPS while there is no contact between enemy. Of course, when there is, the same simulation levels happen that would have happened anyway. I guess what you might be considering then is some sort of fidelity dropoff for distance? So that distant contacts can be decided by more statistical methods? That would certainly improve performance but there are also some cons involved with that, mostly with the fine placement & actual battle positions of dead units if you were ever to reach that area.

It sounds like you're simply playing the wrong missions in that case. Player-centric missions that will save your FPS are very easy to make, just make them in a small area with fewer elements. No need to wish the engine crippled unnecessarily :)

As true now as it was then :) IMO this aspect of the engine should always remain. To be sure, there have been some good addons that can add in this activity (that of reduction of distant battles/logic) if desired.

I didn't know that. I thought the universe in Elite II: Frontier was huge, but this one (Space Engine) is orders of magnitude beyond even that. If they (he?) can make procedural gameplay to match the procedural setting, then it will be magnificent :) but, it sounds like a long way off to me :(

I thought I would kick off a generic space genre thread to encompass any interesting space genre games. I'm looking forward to playing some, I always liked Elite so I'm looking forward to Elite Dangerous, and of course Star Citizen looks interesting... Games I have in the past really enjoyed: Elite Mercenary Damocles Frontier Shuttle X-Wing vs TIE-Fighter/X-Wing Alliance More recently I actually bought into a small game called Space Engineers, think of it as kind of a Minecraft for spaceships, except that you can crash stuff into other stuff. Witness: nlaY2ELJ2qk It's quite enjoyable. Rather flakey in a lot of areas but we are still in the early build stages of development. ---------- Post added at 11:21 ---------- Previous post was at 11:17 ---------- On the subject of Star Citizen, looking at their site I'm a little confused about their purchasing system. Has anyone here bought into it? It looks, to me, like you have to purchase (with real money) ships you want to play on? Is this a method for players with deep pockets to leap ahead in the game, or is there literally no progression without payment?

Not so much a game, more like a toy: Space Engine mootV7Iqa34 Plus, it's free :)

I'm not sure that jumping as described in this thread would be all that useful, and perhaps not useful enough to warrant an engine change. Small obstacles like low stone walls etc can already be easily overcome simply by running over them, IMO simulating casual running-vaulting. Higher obstacles like fences, IMO are not really jumpable obstacles it would be like hurdles, an unsuitable action for an equipped soldier. The slower step-over movement already seems to be the most suitable way to do this. What I would say, is that taller obstacles than fences need to have some way to overcome. Like a chest-high wall for example, a scramble-over animation would be very welcome. As for having the ability to jump across trenches, that might be a valid reason for a jump, but that seems more like a step-across situation. Plus, I've not seen any examples of trenches in ArmA.

A setback for No Man's Sky developers.