Entelin

I've played Arma since Arma 1, and I've always felt like the game was basically a broken heap of great possibilities/promise. Despite that, there was some fun to be had in private servers, and I always felt like the development of Arma was something I wanted to support in hopes that someday something really polished would come out. That day seems to be well on it's way. This alpha has exceeded my expectations, take that as a huge compliment. The weapons feel and look great, the movement finally feels good, the animation is good, you don't glitch through railings. You did a great job reworking the UI, a lot of little annoyances and quirks are finally gone. It's really looking like the final game is really going to finally be "that" game we have all been waiting for. PS: Please let us press up against a ladder to climb it, menu's should not be used for anything movement related.

probably because they figured out that java is horrible for making anything, let alone games, and that they should be using something like LUA for this instead. You know, a language actually designed for engine integration. I'm all for revamping arma's scripting system, but doing it with java is kinda like jumping off a bridge while shooting yourself repeatedly. I challenge anyone to come up with an example of a game that uses java that actually runs well. (don't say minecraft, it does NOT run well)

BF3 is a bit too verbose, the sound doesn't get damped quite as much as it should, there is more echo than there is in reality. However, no question they did a good job on it overall. I do agree that Arma needs VASTLY better sound than it has now, everything sounds really flat, unconnected, and lifeless, weapons sound like pea shooters. BF3's sound isn't terribly realistic, however neither is arma's.

The play control in arma needs to be substantially cleaned up if you expect to attract new people to the series, heres a small list of things that need to happen. pressing up against a ladder should make you start to climb it, double clicking down should trigger the slide down action. You shouldn't have to go into a menu for these basic things. You don't want a separate button solely for "Stand Up". Hitting crouch once causes you to crouch, hitting it again makes you stand up. Hitting prone once makes you prone, hitting it again makes you stand up. Hitting crouch while prone makes you crouch, etc. There is absolutely no benefit for this separate button and getting rid of it frees up one button around your primary control area. There should be one button that selects/performs an action. If your pointed at an ammo crate you hit that and you should get "gear", point at the drivers side door of a car and you enter as driver, etc. Point at nothing and it should pop up a menu you can move through with the mouse wheel like it is now. The default option being cancel so if you click it by mistake you can quickly close it. The mousewheel should not bring up the menu, its too easily hit. You need to add the ability to jump or climb over fences and other obstacles. Now I realize this might be a little "controversial" because of the way some other games have implemented it. However not being able to get over a short little railing that extends halfway through town is very very lame, and for that matter unrealistic. Perhaps the solution as I alluded to would be to make a climbing action which would trigger whenever you pressed up against a steep or short object. So for example on a hill that was getting too steep and you pressed against it you would get down and start to climb it, if you pressed against a wall/fence that was your height or less you would climb over it. Or if you cant do this yet then just give us the ability to jump a little to at least get over these small obstacles. Naturally you wouldn't allow people to fire while this action is taking place. Fast run and Walk should be changed to a toggle (or give the option) People don't want 3 different keys to hold to go forward at different speeds, the toggle should release when you stop pressing forward. ex: W (now moving forward at the normal run speed), Alt (now fast running forward while W is still pressed, or Alt is pressed again). Moving slow would would in the same way. See America's Army for how this works, they have the most realistic squad vs squad infantry combat currently imo. The targeting system needs to be extended. The player should be able to configure what kind of targets, and in what areas will be considered hostile. The player should also be able to assign unit type priorities. EX: "In this circled area target AA first, then armour, then infantry", The player should also be able to select different types of target sorting, such as type, faction, and most importantly distance. As far as I can tell Armed Assault doesn't have any particular logic to how things appear on the list, and you cant designate neutral or friendlys as targets. The "more" list has no sorting whatsoever and doesn't list distances. I put 3 unoccupied trucks at difference distances and they appeared in the more list in a completely random order, and due to them not having any distances listed there was no way of actually determining which one I just told my AI to fire at. The information listed about the target should also be configurable. These options should not require the editor, they should be available to the player at any time on any mission. Correct me if I'm wrong but theres no way of telling your AI pilot what altitude to fly at? (outside of the editor), Kinda important if you intend to order your entire squad to parachute out of the chopper. Flying low is great for avoiding enemy fire, not so great when half your squad turns to pancakes. I also didn't see any option to tell a squad mate to have his weapon fully ready. I made a map where a truck was heading down a road, and my AI RPG soldier and I were up on a hill, I ordered him to target and then fire on the truck, he stood there doing nothing until the truck was visible, then I watched him as he took out the rpg, got it on his shoulder, stared into deep space for awhile, and then..... oh yeah then he put it away because by the time he got it out the truck was already gone and out of range. If he had his weapon on his shoulder ready to fire he could have hit it. I personally had no issues hitting the truck. Am I wrong that there is no way to order an AI to do a sequence of things? (in game) like "go here" then "go here" then "gear" There is no way to directly select a fire-team through a consistent set of key presses. This breaks attempts to use voice recognition to select teams, and regardless is another awkward functioning control. Currently you must shift-click a unit's F key to select the group hes in, course if he dies then your out of luck and you have to change keys again. Apparently this was not an issue in OFP. Lets be honest here for a sec. The interface is visually ugly, personally I don't care much about this, and I doubt many ofp vets here care either. However if your a new to the game, or playing the demo, an ugly interface combined with all of these other user interface issues will be thought of as verification that "this game sucks". You and I know why this game is cool, but I'll be honist with you, when I was new to the game, playing the demo, I didn't know all it could do, and I forgot about it for about 6 months, only coming back when I wanted to check it out on my new system (remembering some of the pretty screenshots/videos I had seen). I'm glad I did because this time I saw what the game was really all about. However my point is that for every one of me who finally "gets it", theres another 100 out there that could, but dropped it before they got to that point because it didn't feel right or because the GUI looked like it was from X/Motif in 1985. (sorry Motif you know I love you) "details"

So I select several units to be "team blue" and some others for "team red", but how do I select one or the other? I'm setting up pilfius and its working pretty well, however I just cant figure out what key sequence I can use to select a specific team...

I wasn't around back when 1.08 came out. 1.08 isn't really playable on my system, 1.09 works well enough though. Obviously they havn't announced a release date or anything for 1.09, but I'd kinda like to know generally what to expect from everyones past experience with the process. It's good to see that BI doesn't just drop their games on the floor after release at least.

Well, I give them some slack with arma1 primarily because they had split with their publisher and needed a way to generate some income to continue developing arma2. Now... if after all this time arma2 comes out and it still has rather significant issues then I might form a different opinion. I expect however that arma1 has proved to be a good testing ground for them and that arma2 will for the most part be the game we have been waiting for.

I have a nv 8800 gt, I got the same issue on 1.08 under most resolutions. On lower rez's I would see the issue in your screenshot, and it would crash shortly after. Changing rez's to anything and then back would remove the problem and I could continue playing until it cropped up again (which may only be 5-10 mins later). This issue never occurred while not moving, it always happened while traveling over distances. At higher rez's like 1600x1200 I would not see the artifacting, it would just crash immediately. I tried setting everything to lowest quality, lowest rez, used command line switches, everything, no improvement (at all). Updating to 1.09b resolved this issue entirely, though it still did crash on me once after 4 hours or so. All in all, not bad. If you don't have these crashing/artifacting issues in other games then its unlikely to be your PSU, or overheating.

it has nothing to do with one apps supporting the other, pilphius simply presses keys if you say a phrase or word, so anything in any game that can be done via the keyboard or mouse buttons or joystick buttons, can be done using voice via pilphius. The issue turns out as mentioned above, that there is no consistancy in the keys used to select a team, which is bs, and just plain stupid play control. And this mistake is hardly alone when it comes to arma, hopefully they clean up all these issues with arma2.

thanks a lot

The unit spawns the hints are all displayed, however the unit will not move to convoyendpos, and does not become equipped with the M9. This is my first script, the final idea is simply to have this unit enter a truck, and drive somewhere, respawn when it dies and repeat. I'm trying this basic thing first though. <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">sleep(3); hint "Add unit"; _convoyGroup = createGroup Civilian; _convoydriver = "Civilian7" createUnit [getpos convoystartpos,_convoyGroup,"_convoyDriver = this", 1.0, "PRIVATE"]; processInitCommands; sleep(2); hint "move"; _convoyDriver doMove getpos convoyendpos; removeAllWeapons _convoydriver; _convoyDriver addWeapon "M9"; _convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; _convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; hint "end";

This is something I assume is fixed as there wasn't much excuse for it not to be in arma (or any other game for that matter). SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE JOYSTICKS! It's easy to support, and hugely important, somehow despite having support for something like track ir, arma doesn't support more than one joystick device. Pedals for aircraft, brakes/gas for vehicles, external throttle, alternative primary control pad. Enough said, it's important and impacts more people than track ir support does. Somehow this feature still manages to be neglected by many games, in a game as large in scope as arma you cant live without it. It's not like its some hugely challenging thing to implement either.

So prefixing a variable with _ makes it local? does having a variable defined within a {} block make any difference in scope? I Changed my code to this and it works fine, just got rid of the _'s and changed the item add order like you said. The driver should be a global because I might want to refer to it in another script. Any problems here? <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">sleep(3); hint "Add unit"; convoyGroup = createGroup Civilian; "Civilian7" createUnit [getpos convoystartpos,convoyGroup,"convoyDriver = this", 1.0, "PRIVATE"]; processInitCommands; sleep(2); hint "move"; convoyDriver doMove getpos convoyendpos; removeAllWeapons convoydriver; convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; convoyDriver addWeapon "M9"; hint "end";

Would I be alone if I said "who cares about singleplayer?". Personally, my interest in singleplayer goes about as far as putting a bunch of units down and watching them fight. Arma's largest failing was that it didn't have any polished multiplayer missions, as can be seen by the fact that nobody plays the default ones, its all evolution, or sahrani life, or others. Almost inevitably singleplayer gets lame in about a day, regardless of the game, AI is nowhere near good enough in *any* game to be more than a tool to a real persons strategy. As such, there is no test for ones strategy more suitable than other humans. Take a hint from other fps's and don't bother devoting much time to what will inevitably be a failed attempt to make an entertaining single player campaign. Beating AI doesn't take skill, it's just a mater of time before you learn how to exploit its intelligence flaws. And when you do, its universal and without variance. Now I'm not saying AI is unimportant, its very important in a game like this in multiplayer so that you can implement large battles directed by numerous humans against each other. It has the potential of becoming the ultimate realism+rts+fps war game.

The unit spawns the hints are all displayed, however the unit will not move to convoyendpos, and does not become equipped with the M9. This is my first script, the final idea is simply to have this unit enter a truck, and drive somewhere, respawn when it dies and repeat. I'm trying this basic thing first though. <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">sleep(3); hint "Add unit"; _convoyGroup = createGroup Civilian; _convoydriver = "Civilian7" createUnit [getpos convoystartpos,_convoyGroup,"_convoyDriver = this", 1.0, "PRIVATE"]; processInitCommands; sleep(2); hint "move"; _convoyDriver doMove getpos convoyendpos; removeAllWeapons _convoydriver; _convoyDriver addWeapon "M9"; _convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; _convoyDriver addMagazine "15Rnd_9x19_M9"; hint "end";

Arma's choppers fly pretty well, but the planes fly horribly. Actually the problem is that the planes I think borrow a lot of logic from the chopper code, they don't turn right, if you dive and then pull up they sink way too much, just like if you did the same with a chopper. The wings just don't feel at all connected with the air. I would also like to see wind impact flying, and adding in volumetric clouds would be a huge bonus both on land and in the air for overall appearance. I love the fact that in arma you have working instruments in vehicles, thats a huge leg up over other games like bf2 for example, your flight dynamics just suck it really needs to be fixed. Lastly, parachutes do *not* fly like arma portrays... lol I mean seriously... what the heck are they doing? tilting this way and that youd think you were in the middle of a tornado or something. In reality the parachutes in arma are supposed to be very maneuverable, smooth flying airfoils they don't tilt all over the place. The circular canopy parachutes used in mass low altitude drops, and vehicle drops are not as controllable but are still very smooth. Flying a parachute is a rather anti-climatic experience, they are slow and smooth. So lets get rid of the crazy wobbling and crap. Wind effecting parachute drops would be cool too. Having a button you can push to deploy the chute would be great too so we can do halo drops.

I have a pretty new system running on a 8800 gt, before the patch the game was unplayable due to random crashes which always occurred when moving, I would start to see a bunch of random triangles on the screen, if I switched my rez they would go away, but if I let it be the game would crash. With something like: cannot create 2048x2048 texture or something. This is gone in 1.09 and it is vastly more stable. However it still does crash every now and then, usually it will just freeze and consume 100% cpu, or just exit. However as I said, these crashes are quite rare, next time it happens ill write down the error message. Regardless I'm looking forward to 1.09's official release so public servers will all switch to it since 1.08 is unplayable for me. I get this issue also on 1.09, there is some sound but its VERY quiet and I hear some static like blips also. I am using a SB Live.