Dohtar

If online distribution will be available more than a week before the retail box, I'll be happy to skip the plastics. I've broken my OFP CD a few months after I've bought it, and f*** u* distributor in my country didn't want to replace it for me, so I rather have "download again" option :P

I really see no problem here... as you explained it, holding breath will improve your accuracy, so it is up to you, when you'll want to use it. Obviously you'll need it more on greater range, and not at all in close quarters combat.

Add striptease bar in every village on Sahrani

Juan Antonio Samovar .... Juan Antonio Samaranch ...

Nah, 3D Realms are... ever since they started to give us Duke Nukem 2017 pics

No idea, but I would say BIS didnt spend much time on that. Why? I have good old MS Sidewinder FF joystick, and I have never used it in OFP. Flying with a mouse and keyboard is so easy once you get used to it, that it makes little point putting joystick on and off your table while entering/disembarking the vehicle. It might be fun to use the joystick, but in a MP environment (and I only play MP for past few years), efficiency is more important than fun. Anyway, BIS have stated somewhere that ArmA flight controls will be even easier to manage, so unfortunetly I don't think they will care about pedals and throtles much. If you ask me, I'd like to have choppers limited to joystick only, this way you create a realistic feeling in the MP game, where only those with sufficient skill (or hardware for that matter) can fly different things :P

FPS games tend to have better graphic than MilSims... thats old news. But since when they also have superior physics? (Crysis, notice the jeep explosion at 3:00)

MArketing is ussualy covered by the publisher, so that is not something BIS should care about. But its true, a good Demo can nowadays do more, than any kind of adds. I never heard for OFP prior to it's demo - after I've seen that Hind flying over my platoon when advancing towards the town, I preordered it right away.

Yay, me like it! PS: Font choice in the movie is terrible :P

Prolly because modded servers are not ranked. For some strange reason people love to grind, its a mechanism well known in MMORPGs and since the succes of WoW it seems developers of other multiplayer games are adopting it aswell Ask a BF player how did the game go last evening, and you will hear "oh I gained XY points / rank / whatever" more often than "we had a great game with a good team".

Would be cool in SP, but how would it work in MP, when everyone would like to choose the smallest characters

True, but flying helis should be at least as hard, that half the players would be unable to fly it effectively (perhaps on a realism level of good old Jane's Apache Longbow). In most public OFP games that involve Helis, people fight all the time to fly them, would be much better if most of them would simply give up

If OFP would run as a perfect server-client model, this would be true, in practice however to many decisions are clientside, and lagged people can see you (and shoot of course) where you ain't standing for real. On small CS like maps (i.e. corridor and alike), mutual kills (you kill the enemy at the same time he kills you) are very common - in a perfect server based game, those would be very rare, considering the speed of the bullet

@Shins Excellent! Cant wait to see the video. Leaning that way is something that really helps in street fights (which I believe we will see more in ArmA, cause towns seems to be a bit bigger than in OFP). What about vertical movement? I always kinda hated shooting through 1st floor or higher windows in OFP, cause my FOV was either small (people running towards me / under the lower window line), or too much of my body was exposed throught it.

Looks nice, however for $180 ArmA should support vector expansion - leaning and vertical movement of upper body (damn usefull for shooting through windows, etc). Looking around itself doesn't justify it's cost for people who don't regulary play fligh or racing sims.

Game should log all the player IDs while mission is running, and if player does disconnect and return, he should be imediatly put in a character/side he was before.

If JIP would be in OFP, this issue could be already handled with ease, so it will be the same in ArmA. Something like. on join: if black_op_number > 10: new_player = seagul;

They should use XML support for reading and writing data. It is widely used, well known standard, all modern programming languages already have classes to handle it with ease, and if you limit file manipulation to XML files only its a good solution security wise. Server side only of course, server admins can choose what scripts/missions they will host, while clients just download it and don't think about it too much. XML files can be than easily served by a web server, than used on clan/server web sites. Would be nice to have integrated XML output (server info, number of players, mission), and script function to generate mission specific xml (for instance in CTI you could generate a list of towns with side that controls it - you could use that XML to make a live battlefield map on your website). With XML, RSS output would be possible aswell, meaning live news from clan battles and other funky shit like that - possibilities are endless really

It happend to me - I bought the game and CD key was already in use. What I had to do was take a piccie of my game box with CD key, send it to Valve, and got a new one. I guess they disabled the old one for online play. Anyhow, server admins should always have an option to uniquly identify their users, so pernament bans actualy are pernament (i.e. not based on IP, but CD key md hash, or some similar unique identification of a user that doesnt give you a chance to uncode it back to Cd-key). Would be cool to have an XML output with banned users, so you can use those on your web site with reasons why they were banned and all kind of stuff.

While centralised mod/mission check would be a good filter only to publish good stuff, I dont think that would have a positive impact on community's creativity. I'd rather see each addon would be recognised by it's hash string. Than every mission should use some kind of include() function for all the addons it needs, and players should have those downloaded when joining server. Since every addon and even every version of an addon would have its unique hash string, you could have for instance Jack's M4 addons v0.9, v0.8, v1.1 and Rob's M4 addons v0.2, v0.4 all in your game folder, and would simply use the one that specific mission wants you to. URLredirect for mision downloads would be cool aswell. And, importantly, on server list you should always be able to see if you have all the needed addons for a mission that is played at the moment, or which you are missing.

Yeah, supporting 2 different sound devices is a must. I am using my SB Live w/ 5.1 sound system for game sound and on-board audio card w/ headphones for Ventrilo. Other than that, real life like natural and radio communications should be put in as a server or map option. It would be a nice addition for COOP missions and clans that enjoy real war expirience, while most competitive squads will simply switch for Ventrilo/TS, if built-in system will be to limited.