EricM

It seems you can download the demo already (I'm doing it)...

I believe that Arrowhead is the best way to go : a big expansion with a lot of content, new campaigns and environments + news engine tweaks every 6 months or so. The community split argument is not really valid as every Arma player already has a different set of addons than his neighbour : ACE ? FDF ? BW ? P85? OHPLA ?). The advantage of official content is consistency in quality and values (armor etc...) with Vanilla Game.

Is it my imagination or did they add some new "splatter" effects (blood and mud) when you're shot at or roll on the ground ? Noticed while playing EW part 2...

Welcome on board. Battlezone 1 & 2 were indeed two of my favourite games ever. The perfect blend of FPS/RTS fun... (and I'm usually not too kind of RTS either) with very slick controls and base building. I was always thinking that someone would make a BZ3 mod for Arma with the new Warfare Base building... Carrier Command could be the game to bridge the gap, and since Pandemic closed their doors, it may be our only hope to ever see a BZ3-like game. BIS technology really is perfect for a BZ successor : large environments, air/sea/land combat, FPS/RTS gameplay and all the bells and whistles... I really hope they take some inspiration from the BZ squad control (merging units!!!)

Not yet. Arrowhead is due in 2010... hopefully in Q1, but you never know...

1) I depends on how "maxed" you consider things being "maxed". On its top most user settings (everything set to very high, 10km view distance, superwide screen and 200% 3D resolution etc...) I believe Arma 2 can make any rig crawl and beg for mercy and will continue to do so for the next couple of years. You can even push the game further by hand tweaking the config files... So in a sense, "Max" is when your computer cannot handle it anymore in this game... The game runs fine on most rigs, but occasionally doesn't like a specific set of components and some ultra-high rigs, while it flies on lower-machines... There are bottlenecks we are not always aware of... If you plan to build a monster PC for Arma 2, get rid of a card and get a SSD disk instead. Arma 2 uses a streaming technology that can benefit A LOT from it. In any case, get the DEMO to see it for yourself. Bear in mind it's not the most up to date (1.02, while the game is now 1.05 with improved AI and performance for instance) but it will give you an idea. I don't know about SLI, but a single 280 should give you a nice and steady FPS to play with with very high settings. But it will not be as frantic (120 FPS) as others games because we are dealing with over 220 square kilometers of terrain and over a million objects and hundreds of AI... The campaign is quite a powerhog at times but the editor and single missions give you supersmooth gameplay most of the time. 2) Bugs : the support of BIS is unparalleled... they listen, take note and deliver new patches on a regular basis, even though perfection is still a long way for such a complex game (always a thing to tweak). 3) AI : it is simply the BEST non-scripted AI on the market. Not perfect, sometimes retards, but STILL THE BEST by a long range when you consider the amount of things it does without pre-placed cover system, respawn point and scripted actions.

Any news ?

I truely believe that optimal contact reports in game should be world-centric /compass-based (North/South...) and in meters for anything further than 50 or 100m and player-centic and direction-based (left/right) when under 50-100m. (eg : Left is the players' left !)...

I believe that each time BIS gains a little bit of performance, they use it to add new features, so that you eventually get similar performance but more or better things to play with. Let's face it : Arma 2 is much better optimized than Arma 1, but they added so much more stuff to the game (big forests and thick grass, civilians modules, ambient combat, Secops, micro AI, parallax mapping, hemispherical lighting, shadermodel 3...) that you eventually get only average or no performance gain at all, but gain in density. I believe they'll do about the same with arrowhead and use the extra ressources gained to add new funky features.

Ok, I have a rather good looking MI28 that I made a while ago for Arma 1 (it flies and shoots ingame, it has rvmats and all but it's too raw for release) Edit : I should point out that original model was made by Digital Centurion, reworked, optimized, remapped and "LODed" by me. I don't have time to finish it and not enough reference for the interior, so I'm willing to share it for a community project. As such I'm looking for serious people interested in - cleaning the config stuff - add interior (if they know how it looks like...) - add custom sounds or whatever they see fit... The idea is to release the model under the same conditions as the BIS models, some sort of "Open source" limited to Arma. All contributors will be credited in the readme but you will have to provide the MLODS if asked. The plan is to gather talents to make one good looking professional model for everyone, so that it's usable later in MP. Feel free to join in.

I'm surprised they added the Apache... In a good way, but still. New Army units are a strong selling point of Arrowhead. They must be pretty confident in Arrowhead's potential and new features to give the Apache for free.

I've seen that too yesterday, it was awsome : I had set two groups of enemies to fight in chernogorsk while watching with the camera.sqs and one of the AI climbed on top of one the big tower silos to have an overview and shoot the last remaining enemy !

Have they ? If so it didn't strike me as being very obvious as trees still pop up way before disappearing into the fog... (this would probably be a killer for my machine, but it would look awsome) Will have to pay a closer look... As for the AI changes, I'm kinda lost in what's in an what's out in this latest beta... The one thing that still looks weird is when the AI drops prone to face a wall in overwatch... (if near a wall couldn't they be told to watch the other way ?) Generally speaking they should crouch/knee down more and go prone less often when near cover.

Me Neither... Plenty of morons when the game was out, but not anymore. And I'm not too kind of global ban lists... Imagine someone somehow steal your identity and gets you banned while your innocent... How do you plead your case ?

Nevermind.

I don't know exactly which part (probably art and mission design) but it's been said officially that the expansion was started around january 2009 at Black Element (who also did Queens Gambit and work on Carrier Command with BIS) while BIS team concentrated on finishing Arma2. The rest of the BIS crew joined forces during the summer. Assuming Arrowhead will ship first quarter 2010 (let's say in march ?) It will have had more than a year of development, that's not bad for an expansion. You understand why they want to make it stand alone to recoup more or the cost. On the other hand, I'm eager to see what they have been doing for so long, since a lot of the army stuff can probably be upgraded from Arma or VBS 2 (+1 new lod and texture). I wonder if Takistan will have clutter and random content outside of the border, in the infinite land : grass and rock, but also some spare trees and maybe even a couple of houses and compounds... that would be nice...

Why not give the MLRS and GRAD the proper ammunition by default to use with the arty module ? It's impossible to use them without the arty module anyway, so what's the reason behind it ? Currently, you have to go to the wiki to find the addmagazine "ARTY_12 etc etc...", remove the current ammunition and replace it with the new one, making it it utterly inaccesible to the standard noob. Static artillery works straight out of the box with arty module compatible shells... Just a thought...

It does work but not by default. You have to change the ammo magazine type for the targeting to work (unlike the M119 or D30 which work out of the box). That's the purpose of the topic...

No, I bought the new version to get multi-langage support and a backup CD + give some cash to BIS... But I was hoping to see it fixed.

I'm Bumping the thread because I bought a second copy of the game (505 DVD vs Metaboli Download) and I still have the same problem. How come 50% of the players have the problem, 50% doesn't... Can anyone enlighten me ?

Can someone tell me what happens at the end of this mission (if there is a cutscene of whatever ?) ? With all the CTD over and over again and every time there is an autosave (and there is one every 5 min or when a town is captured) I spent way more time on this mission than on the whole campaign, capturing the same towns 25 times in a row... Almost all the country is under my control, but I'm getting mad at it. I must have spent 40 hours or more on the same mission because of the bugs and now all the fun is lost. Is there at least something rewarding at the end ? God I loved the campaign up to know... but it's killing me. Same here... it was smooth as a baby's butt until DOW, and now I'm stuck with this mission for now a couple of months. I try to come back to it from time to time but with no luck. (And I have the game since german release 1.0 !!!)

For the record, High command has nothing to do with Warfare and movements ARE mocap, except that YOU control the head and upper torso. For OA I would like : - A more unified command system : reorganize the quick menu so that you can have access to complex commands menu with formations, stances etc... (no double system with space bar and backspace) - Reorganize/add/change some commands (something like "Land" or "Get higher" or "Get lower" for flying vehicles, fire on my lead, copy my stance) - better responsiveness of High command + more options to get in/rearm... - New gear interface in the editor (no addweapon scripting for such simple tasks) - New halo module - New ambient traffic module - Fully funcional 3D editor - Better camera script management : ability to create camera cutscenes with waypoints/keyframes in the 3D editor wihtout jumping in and out of the game to notepad and RPT...

Honestly, campaign aside, Arma 2 was very good from the start. If BIS had taken the easy road and stuck with a more linear and simple campaign it would never have had this reputation of bugginess, because I never had a single performance or bug in the single missions, and the editor does its job too. And as many people said, without the input and the pressure from the community, there's no guarantee that the game would have been in the state it is now. Arrowhead will serve to boost people's attention on Arma 2 again, with all the fixes included and performance optimization. With a lot less trees around + the natural increase in hardware performance and tweaks to the engine, it will probably get much better performance this time around. I'm sure there will be a "Gold" version bundled with Arma 2 so that late comers will catch-up to chernarus too. So I'm confident we will have some more adepts. I know I would have been very sad to wait another 6 months with all the fun I had in the editor since german 1.00 !!!

I cranked up the draw distance to 10km to see the effect, and at first I didn't see much of a improvement past 5km... then I switched the objects to "very high" and BANG : the ground was covered with trees and stuff up to the VD limit... Off course it was a slideshow, but a nice looking one. Though I agree with ALEX72 : I'd prefer to keep around 3km VD but have objects rendered further in the fog, up to the point where you don't see them popping (4km?), rather than have 5 km VD and see everything pop up 1km before (4km as well) when the fog starts...

Link The report can be accessed here. An interesting read, even though Arma isn't in the list...