FatNinjaKid

I took a peek into the pbo-file. Looks like you are seriously planning on including voice messages. That would be really cool. Can't wait! ...I'd offer my help but .... well, unfortunately I am from Europe and not an American (you dont hear that very often, do you?! )

Nice one! But personally I do not quite see the point in interconnecting the missions the way you did. This makes the difficulty level unpredictable. Why did you even bother with all that weaponpool-scripting? Adds no fun to the game IMO. And it don't increase immersion at all. I also don't understand what these stupid, little botched-up "side missions" in the official campaign are supposed to be good for. That feature kills off any immersion that is left.

i just got ArmA today and I am truly disappointed. I don't have to explain why, i guess.

You are absolutely right. For most people this is going to be the most expensive game they are ever going to purchase (because of the hardware-requirements they have otherwise no use for).

Does anybody here happen to know if you will be able to buy Arma at German retail stores (like Saturn, Media Markt etc...) or does the publisher have an exclusive deal with Amazon.de? //Just asking cause everyone is always going on about Amazon... not there is anything wrong with Amazon.

Yeah, I truly hope the amount of smoke you get to see will not depend on your hardware. In the game "Joint Operations" the effect a smoke grenade had on your visibility was based on the way you configured your game. If you had a fast cpu and video card you were practically blind, but if you had a slow computer the effect was more like watching somebody smoke a cigar, or something like that. As a result player with good computers were effected by smoke and those with crappy computers were not. That was just unfair and totally destroyed the tactical aspects of using smoke grenades (which made the game even more stupid and pointless than it already was)

I dont have any problem with in-game advertising, as long as the publisher clearly states to the customer what kind of deal he is getting. BTW: I dont think it makes any sense to denouce publishers or programmers as "greedy". Trying to make money is what they do. It is their job to try to create as much profit with their product as they possibly can. In that they don't differ from any other company. Do you think the guys at BIS get out of bed each morning, because they want you to have good time on your computer? I don't think so. They want money. And for all I care, they deserve it. Greed is what makes people tick. Let them be greedy as long as they do a good job. Greed is good.

Here are some pics from what is going to be my new humble abode for the next three months Wujin -- China. building sites everywhere somewhat typical sunrise this morning Wujin is a shitty little town close to a slightly bigger shitty little town in a shitty little province close to Shanghai. "Wanna go to Shanghai?" my boss said. "Wanna have some fun and meet interesting new people?" he said! "Sure" I said and now here I am. Shanghai my ass... On the bright side: People here are inconceivably friendly and reasonably good beer here only costs around 60 cent the litre (Yeah, I started counting in litres)

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE"> isHideBehindScripted vehicle Return whether the vehicle has set the hideBehindScripted true. <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">IsHidden person Return whether the person is hidden (reached the hiding position). YESSSYESSSYESSS°°!!!°°

You probably know this, but in OFP you could drastically improve the realism of formations by selecting "combat", "engage at will" and "slow". The AI then moved extremely cautious using some sort of bound-over-watch system. When stopping the AI positioned itself quite smartly hiding behind objects while covering large surrounding areas. Unfortunately most mission makers never realized that. So that is why you had all those stupid V-formations.

Errrrrrr... good voice acting?? (dude, wtf? )

WHY, OMG, WHY?!

Some days ago my company offered to transfer me to Shanghai. I always wanted to go to there and I thought this was a fantastic opportunity. The next thought I had was that I probably wont be able to play ArmedAssault when it first comes out, since I wont be having access to a decent computer over there. That was kind of ... weird

Yeah, but do you get to see pictures of dead Iraqis? Here in Germany at least you could see pictures of the Iraqi civilians which were lined up against a wall and then executed by those Marines. But I cannot remember ever having seen pictures of Iraqis murdered by other Iraqis in similar fashion, although I am sure that must have happened like a hundred times. Every night on the news we get to hear about how many Iraqis were killed. We get to see some vague pictures with smoke columns and general chaos, giving you the impression that Iraq is collapsing into total disorder. But we never get to hear or see anything about the victims. They have no names, no faces, no history and no feelings. Why is that? Normally our bleeding-heart sensationalist television would not miss out on such a chance to capitalize on other people's suffering. So obviously (to me) they are pushing a political agenda. If we really got to see bleeding bodies and parents crying over their murdered children, as we did during the war in Bosnia, well, then I am sure people would feel a whole lot different about the US occupying Iraq.

I don't know if anyone has already brought this up, but isn't it strange that you never get to see pictures of people killed by the insurgence? Every single day we get the body count of how many civilians got shot, decapitated or blown to bits, but there are never any pictures. What would people think about what the US is doing in Iraq, if they were confronted with the atrocities committed daily by insurgence? I guess some would get the idea that somebody ought to do something and put an end to it.

The original OFP campaign re-located to Lechistan: rapidshare (3MB; 3min)

I once suggested in the game2 section to introduce a feature to the debug engine that would allow you to record behavior macros. In the debug engine you push a record button and then everything you do gets recorded for, say, 10 seconds. When you are done AmrA will save a log file with the information about all the buttons you pressed. Something like: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE"> Time Direction Button 0.00 233 W 2.22 234 - 2.30 232 Q 4.55 180 W+D .... ... you get the idea. Then in the mission editor you can define conditions or triggers that will make a certain AI unit suspend normal behavior (like disableAi Move) and execute the behavior macro defined in the log file. During all that time the AI should still be able to target and fire (with the weapon selected by the mission designer). Now, of course that is not real 'artificial intelligence' and I'm in no way suggesting that you should script the whole mission like that. But there may be certain situations --like when entering a building or spotting a sniper-- when such a recording feature might really ad something to the game. Basically that means that the AI could become as smart as the mission maker. The main advantage would have been that making intelligent missions would become much, much easier -- even for the BIS (Of course, you could also include the log file in a .PBO addon file.)

I am afraid ARMA is not really going to be that great. It is going to be a nice game and all, but judging from the vid all the things which annoyed me about OFP are still going to be there. Sorry, but seeing that bot running past the player in that vid was just pathetic. I wonder why I should even buy that game if I can have basically for free (FFUR). I am not going to pay €50 for some new textures and sounds. Don't get me wrong, I hope Arma is going to be great and I wish BIS all the best, but how realistic is that?

Looks like I got Creativity Deficit Syndrome: ffur euro, freya, lechistan

That pretty much sums it up for me.

farmland stuff Sinai, Arab Terrorists, ECP

I have been using the UBUNTU distro for about one month now and I must say it is really no big deal! You download the CD, burn it, install Linux parallel to Windows. Then you just follow the step-by-step instructions on how to install drivers and codecs and such. It takes about 2-3 hours and ...voila... you got Linux. I really don't consider myself much of a tech-freak so if I could do it, almost anyone should be able to do it. So ArmA for Linux? If it is not too much of an effort - yes please! (If you want to try it out, you can download beginner-friendly UBUNTU here)

(1) I guess it is quite easy to simulate AI units taking cover behind objects by introducing 'safety zones' {green} around objects. When an AI unit is under fire it will simply move to the next safety zone. When the unit taking cover is in the 'zone' some scripts will kick in. Depending on other values assigned (courage, skill, speed mode, hit probability etc...) the unit taking cover will then display a certain behaviour - like peaking through windows or peaking around corners ...etc (2) The real problem I see is making the AI take cover behind terrain features (not objects). Depending on the relative position of the unit taking cover and the unit firing, certain areas might provide cover and others may not. Certain areas might in one moment be no-go-zones while in the next moment they might provide excellent cover. So how can the engine test if a certain area can be seen (fired upon) by a certain unit? I guess the easiest way would be a sampling: When unit {A} spots an hostile unit {B} the engine draws a random sample spot from the area surrounding unit {A}. [white circles]. Next engine simply checks whether or not that spot can be seen from where the shooter {B} is standing. (Technically that means: Can you extend a vector to that spot without hitting a surface?) If the spot can be seen than the engine will simply draw another sample spot and test again if it can be seen...and so on. When the engine has finally detected some spots close to unit {A} that cannot be seen by unit {B}, unit {A} moves to one of these spots (randomly). If the spot is in a 'zone' the unit will start executing some script. I don't think that the strain on the CPU would be too high because this function would have to be executed only every once in a while when a new unit is spotted.

Got any ideas on how the server can technically detect if orders are being followed by another human player or not?

Mig Animals Farmland mod unreleased island