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dmarkwick

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Posts posted by dmarkwick

  1. Posted

    Well the formula would be interesting and might have other uses, but ultimately wouldn't solve my problem, which happens when the action is occurring :( the fog seems to affect initial recognition from zero OK, but once there is some gunfire the recognition leaps to superhuman levels.

  3. Posted

    I thought there was already some fog discussion, but I didn't find one that was very recent, so I start a new one :)

     

    While playing some modded ArmA3 with ASR, DAC, ACE & some other more visual/content centric mods, I noticed that when I decided to add thick fog into the mission, AI seemed to be picking me off with alarming accuracy considering that I couldn't even see them.

     

    So I took away all mods, only vanilla A3. One player unit 100m away from an enemy unit, facing each other, with fog set to 100%, no decay and minimal base (so that the fog is essentially uniform). I monitor the enemy distance and knowsAbout as I walk slowly toward it.

     

    At around 55m distance, the enemy unit starts to notice me. I can juuuust about see him too. His knowsabout slowly increases as I approach, at about 30 meters it is usually around ~0.03 or so. I cannot tell him from a friendly at this distance, and apparently he can't either. At 25m his knowAbout has jumped to 0.22, still no recognition. The instant I step below 25m, he fires on me, every time.

    I don't regard this as too bad actually.

     

    But, if I halt at ~60m or so, just outside his range of vision (and mine) and fire my weapon, he becomes aware and after maybe 2 or 3 seconds, will see me and immediately hit me. This is I think what is happening at the first mission I mentioned, if AI are aware of enemy in their vicinity, they seem to possess greater spotting ability than the fog should allow.

    In fact, if I fire my weapon at 100m away, his knowAbout immediately jumps to 1.35, but he doesn't fire. I presume he knows enough to know there is an enemy and the direction, but cannot identify one visually.

     

    So I guess I'm saying that, in my opinion, the visual enemy recognition in thick fog seems to be higher than is reasonable. Now, I can counter this somewhat by fiddling with the setUnitTrait command and affecting the camouflage, and maybe even make some monitoring addon for it, but it's difficult to work out what the fog value is at any altitude for a given set of fog parameters, when the fog is volumetric and has altitude parameters affecting it. If anyone has such a formula to work out the current fog value, at the unit's current altitude, with a given set of fog parameters, I'd be hugely grateful :)

     

    However, even affecting the camouflage only delays detection from a zero start. As soon as firing starts - the enemy are back to spotting with better-than-realistic ability.

    • Like 6

  4. Posted

    1 hour ago, menjoo said:

    Hello,

    Is it no longer possible to use Armas standard methode of commanding your AI-buddies, i.E. not having to press ctrl, anymore?

    I cant find a setting for this, nor any key bindings referencing to this. I'm sure this has been asked before but the search didn't come up with anything useful, sorry!

     

    I actually achieved it several months ago, but I scrapped all my mods & started all again from scratch, and I can't remember :(

     

    I have a feeling it probably involved removing a pbo rather than changing any optional setting. This is how I removed the ACE3 fatigue so I could get back ArmA's fatigue (which I prefer).

  5. Posted

    8 hours ago, dragonfire43560 said:

    What is the best difficulty settings (for Precision and Skill) to use in conjunction with this AI? Should I leave it at the default 50% for each?

    Generally speaking, I like to have a high skill but a low accuracy. I don't want to be immediately punished for not noticing some threat straight away & get headshotted, that's not much fun :) but I do enjoy the threat of many enemy closing in on me because I made some strategic boo-boo :)

     

    Generally, skill as high as it can go, and accuracy somewhere around 0.2 for me.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted

    On 3/10/2017 at 9:13 PM, domokun said:

    Yeah JTD's Fire & Smoke mod for Arma 2 had these flocks of birds that would get startled by approaching units and/or gunfire.

    It was awesome to see a flock of birds suddenly rise from a forest and then feel the cold dread trickle down your spine.

    So DM any chance for JTD Birds? With murders of cawing crows?

    I did actually make a standalone version :/ but it's not releasable (I didn't put too much time into it), better in some ways and a little flaky in others. and I want to improve the sprites. So maybe sometime...

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    On 3/10/2017 at 9:56 AM, domokun said:

    This is great mod because it offers a subtle but profound impact on the game's immersion.

    Here are a couple of details which could make it even more realistic:

    • Colonization temperature: nothing breaks immersion more than seeing flies in winter and/or high altitude. The reason is that most flies (depending on the species) can only survive in temperatures from 15-35 °C.
    • Colonization time: the time (minutes) for flies to arrive on the corpse, e.g. "Sacrophagidae (flesh flies) may arrive within minutes following death" and "usually arriving within 10 minutes of death"

    So, any chance you could update this mod to include these 2 parameters?

    Until Smell-O-Vision arrives, this continues to be brutal cue for grim realities of death.

    Hi domukun, and also thanks for the continued interest :) and thanks for the ideas.

     

    The time for the flies' arrival was made short to make gameplay a little more.... well gamey I suppose. I wanted a way to find dead bodies in long grass so I could take their ammo etc, and I wasn't really interested at the time in having a "realistic" fly arrival time :) I figured this was a good candidate for making it a little gamey. (pun intended ;))

    I also made myself a simple heat-haze addon last year, it includes time-of-year and lattitude code so it doesn't happen inappropriately. I guess the same code could be used to control fly appearance too. I just never considered it outside of rain :)

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

    Hi lordprimate, thanks for the continued interest :)

     

    Of course you are more than welcome to change or fix this as much as you like. I actually have made some of those changes already to my own version (sound volume for example) but I never released it, I thought no-one really used it. I wasn't aware the key didn't work anymore :(

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    19 hours ago, Tonci87 said:

    So, what is so special about these games? I never played them....

    I won't double-up on the above description :) but another unique feature of H&D2 is the pseudo "multiplayer-with-a-single-player" gameplay. There are 4 units to your team, and you can switch between them. More than this though, you can set up instructions to all of them using a timeline, so one unit will go to position X and will cover in direction Y, another will set up a machinegun overwatch in position Z, another will throw a grenade to position XX to provide the distraction/bait etc. All of the actions can be slid along the timeline, and actions can be based on the completion of other actions, so soldier A won't move until soldier B has reached his position etc.

    • Like 3

  16. Posted

    1 hour ago, 5C4R556 said:

    I voted for Hillary but I think Trump is doing a good job. He is doing what he promised and there have only been two problems; the Muslim ban and former secretary Flynn. The Muslim ban is understandable and I think once he tweaks it it will be back in effect throughout the country. He's already done more in his first few weeks than most presidents do an entire term.

     

    I remember when Obama took office. Everybody was calling him a Communist and talking about his birth certificate. Who cares? The whole Communist thing was a bunch of white dudes pissed off at a black president. At least that's how I saw it.

     

    Give Trump a chance. Yeah, he says stupid things but he means well.

    I think what Trump is doing is making good on his election promises as fast as possible, get the nonsense out of the way first, then, with typical media short-term-memory effect, he can get onto the other stuff I'm sure he wants to do. "Muslim ban" will get stopped, and the wall will be started but with reduced expectations, but they will be high-profile news for a while then onto other things. When he rallies for his next term, he can point at it all and say he makes GOOD on his promises :)

     

    Unless his general buffoonery gets him removed first, natch.

  17. Posted

    I know what you mean by the minimap thing, I couldn't enjoy The Witcher 3 until I disabled the minimap & pointers (Same for Skyrim). Until I did that, the game was basically:

    Follow the arrow

    When you get there, do The Thing

    When you've done The Thing, follow the arrow again

     

    As you describe this as open, I will take a looky at it.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    17 hours ago, wiki said:

    Well, that is diffcult as I mostly do for others.

    As a matter of fact, when I make a mission, I don't enjoy playing it that much as I exactly know what to do, what will happen, where the enemies are, etc...

    My first motivation is telling a story.

    As said, I got plenty of ideas of scenarios, it's just making them that I find difficult ATM....

    I make my own "special" missions ;) and I go the other way. I try to make a mission as randomised as possible while still producing very interesting results. So all groups' members have a randomised chance of not existing, you'd be surprised how much this single simple changes things. Sometimes you spawn with no AT capability. Sometimes with no machinegunner. It forces you to approach the same situation in different ways. Also, you're never quite sure about the capabilities or numbers of enemy groups.

     

    Then of course you can add DAC or some similar random patrol generator to mix things up, so that your mission is each time different because of random enemy density.

     

    I'd be embarrassed to admit how much time I spend doing one single mission over & over & over again, getting enjoyment out of how it plays differently each time.

    • Like 2

  21. Posted

    3 hours ago, spooky lynx said:

    Am I the only one who thinks that the serviceman (both military and police) must pay attenation at his/her professional skills and their increase at first and his/her religion at last when there are no problems with main duties? IMHO those who have enough time to spend such amount of time on religion doings do it in prejudice of their main work.

    Arguable :) if you have a faith of some kind, then it could easily be the case that it is really the most important thing in your life. Think about it - your faith is your investment into the eternal, while your life is.... your current job :)

    I remember seeing turbans in the RAF many years ago, they looked kind of cool actually :) I didn't mind them, and they made no difference to anything much.

  24. Posted

    I do agree that smaller maps are better for certain scenarios. But a planet is a like a map, made up of thousands of smaller maps isn't it? I bet you can even find Altis and Stratis in Outerra :D  (Maybe without the buildings)

    Good missions should limit the scale of the play area, like the vanilla A3 campaign.

    It's not the map scale that's the thing - we'd all like bigger maps if they came with the same quality of denseness and detail as hand-made maps, but that's not going to be the case :/ a map of a planet-wide scale will be a procedurally populated map and they just won't have the same game experience IMO. Yet.

  25. Posted

    Well the tech looks initially promising, but as has already been mentioned - billboard 2D trees. What are you going to do as a soldier, hide behind a billboard tree? It's all well & good to have a worldwide map, but if it's procedurally populated it won't have the lived-in look that ArmA maps have, or the authentic details that indicate man-made towns.

     

    This product seems to be aimed at military training, not gameplay. If you think gameplay springs out of scale then you'll be disappointed :)

    • Like 3
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