Gustav62

Yeah, the airfields (and the environments in general) in the previous games were very lifeless. I hope they do think of something that's reasonable to make the world feel less deserted. Maybe the radars could be separate vehicles or static objects which would be placed in the world in the right spots upon map load. I also thought that it would be neat to have an editor option for "populate." In the editor, you can define how many people / cars / civilian airplanes / boats there should be and click "populate." Using settings for the time of day (rush hour or midnight, for example) and the situation in the city (holiday or martial law), there would be a random number of civilians and civilian vehicles. And cars would just run random routes on the roads, like in the game "Lock On Modern Air Combat." Probably we won't see that until someone capable makes a mod.

In Armed Assault and Operation Flashpoint, there was the Shilka turret with four cannons. How did they solve that problem of four guns on one turret, does someone remember?

What does "micro" AI mean? Like pathfinding inside buildings?

Hmm, sounds very movie-ish. What would you do after they put up their hands and start back-pedalling? And why would the AI listen to your character? Remember, they also have guns which they can point at you.

This might be considered off-topic, but in the game Lock On Modern Air Combat, power transmission lines actually collapse from a bomb blast. Power lines, railways, and other communications / infrastructure are a really neat idea. I don't remember any previous game in the OFP family having them. Every city felt like a third-world settlement. But EricM is right. The more the developers introduce, the more possibilities it yields for gameplay. Personally, I'm not picky.

Laqueesha, Grand Theft Auto takes place in a city, which means most of the time, cars stay horizontal to the ground. I played a game called "Soldiers" once, in which people climb in and out of tanks. Imagine: when a tank rolls over (pretty rare), the people are animated as jumping horizontally or upside down out of the vehicle. Even in Armed Assault, there are many places where you can park a vehicle in a thirty-degree incline, and the character will scriptedly climb out with a thirty-degree angle vertical deviation from the natural stance. There is always an exception to scripted animation. You know scripted death sequences, for example. People fall and wind up with half their body sticking through a wall, or hovering parallel to the ground on a set of stairs. I think the way technology is today, it's not possible to make lifelike animation in an open-ended environment like a game. Only in computer-generated video.

They added to the Russian video a comment about including the "Pchela" UAV. So at least we can infer that UAVs will come standard in the game. Whether the player will get to operate them is a different question. And I don't know about actual fire support.

From my modest amout of experience in modeling vehicles for Armed Assault, I have to say that it would be a considerable heap of work just to add fully-animated doors on all vehicles. As for the characters popping out of vehicles, I don't know of any game that makes that look life-like anyway. Operation Flashpoint 2 (ooh, I mentioned it, someone get me) seems to be implementing detailed animations like that, but I'm sure that there are many inclines / terrain features that the vehicle could rest on which would also make such animations seem really wrong. (Personally, I resent it when a game tries to bedazzle and mesmerize the audience with fancy graphics and effects, without having any "meat" to it, like we players don't care about anything but the eyecandy.) If the developers focus all their energy on improving the superficial looks of the game, they will have to delay actual gameplay improvement. I must say, I think Armed Assault was close to perfect. Some more stuff on the side (new map, new vehicles and weapons, new static objects and props), and a good story / campaigns, and it would be the perfect game.

Yes, I noticed it too. I think it does look pretty unrealistic currently. Secondly, the automatic fire sounds way too slow in the video (it's supposed to shoot at 4000-5000 rounds per minute, way past the point at which the human ear hears separate shots). They might just finish the sounds and visual effects last, after the meshes and textures are set in stone.

If I were caught in a war, the last thing I'd do if I heard something is run outside! I'd stay in my basement, for sure. As a rule, I don't support mass-scripted events in a game. Stuff like that becomes very predictible and loses its neatness quickly. As for the lights flickering, I have no idea why that would happen from an explosion shockwave. Explain. However, since there are electrical substations in the game and high-tension electrical wires, it would be really neat if damage to those actually put out the lights in a neighborhood or town.

Ah, OK. I've experienced some of those myself. I'd call it something else, though, not cheating (development shortcuts, maybe). The problem is that smoke is simply aesthetic. Grass is for "feel," also. But I thought the developers fixed the grass issue in a subsequent patch. Anyway, smoke should definitely serve a practical purpose against the AI.

I was thinking the same thing. Some kind of time-delay value for the grenade in the config. Do you know if grenades are classed the same way as bullets in the game? If there is an actual mesh for the bullets, like grenades? Just curious.

It has been made clear that Armed Assault will feature a campaign from the American side. I'm pleading with the developers -- please also include a campaign for the Russians. Personally, the one and only thing about Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault that bothered me was how those games treat the Americans as world saviors, and the Soviets and other "evil communists regimes" (or the side who simply use Soviet-made weapons) as the bloodthirsty rapists and pillagers. What really excited me about Flashpoint when I first played it was the originality of the gameplay. Originality, I believe, is the key to why so many people have become enamored with these (otherwise great) games from Bohemia Interactive. Then why are the stories in the first three campaings so predictable and vanilla? It is the same trod-out stereotypical russophobic propaganda that has been pushed down the throats of people in the West since Napoleon's rule: "The crazy Russian hordes rape and murder their way into a defenseless little nation, NATO / America / the beacon of liberty and democracy and hope in the world selflessly steps in to save a beleaguered people from the primitive, animalistic asiatic barbarians." Been there, done that, even have the T-shirt. Hundreds of Cold War propaganda books, films, and games use this unimaginative cookie-cutter template. It kills me, thinking that Armed Assault 2 might fall into the same hole. (I remember Red Hammer. It did have the player in the position of a Soviet soldier. But, again, the story portrays the Soviets as evil, and your character is supposed to kill his own buddies. For perspective, imagine if someone released a game about Iraq where you are an American who has a cathartic revelation and begins to kill his fellow Americans.) Campaign / mission developers, if you are reading this, please take the first brave step out of the big old box of stereotypes. Write a campaign that is somewhat intellectual and doesn't just fill players' minds with pseudomoral xenophobic drivel. I know that making a parallel campaign doesn't require new models, vehicles, or scenery on top of what will already exist in the game. Marketing people for BIS -- I know that Russia and the Russian speaking world today is a quickly-growing market. Don't turn off a huge section of your customer base by allowing another dripping, hateful misrepresentation of their nation. If you churn out another mass-stereotype, that will equate to a slap on the face of Russian gamers. Set an example of fairness, and you will gain fully-devoted fans from that region of the world. As for me, I've decided to avoid this game altogether if it only brings one campaign where you're supposed to slaughter Russians by the hundreds. There is something wrong with that, in light of how the Americans, for two decades already, are the ones consistently invading nations in every corner of the world and sticking their noses into sovereign nations' internal affairs -- not the Russians. Gus

Another little thing (this, I'm pretty certain, has been mentioned): weapons in Armed Assault still release all tracers. This affects the gameplay, since the shooter's location is displayed instantly. Aside from being unrealistic, it is so cartoony, to the point that I can't play without turning off tracers in the options.

How does the AI cheat in Armed Assault now?

Celery, the referenced site attempts to put China, Nazi Germany and the USSR into one big happy "democidal" family. Unfortunately, it's not an academic, serious source by any means. Did you even look at their charts yourself? They list the war-dead in Afghanistan as evidence of "democide" -- the country's willful extermination of its own citizenry. Especially conniving is the use of those killed in the Second World War to pump up these statistics. I mean, come on! Germany invaded the USSR, but the "bloody Soviet regime" is charged with those deaths. I understand the weak logical connection -- if the Soviets had never been in power, Russian relations with Germany might have been different, but it's still speculative and academically dishonest to put the blame on the Soviets for the 13000000 civilians who were directly slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis. Also, that site takes numbers from different sources, and uses the most elevated ones (counting on the fact that you don't pay attention as they attempt to slip it by you) for its conclusion that the Soviet Union was evil. Famine and starvation feed into the statistics. Even "Deportation" of anybody is figured into the "Murdered" category. Did you notice these deceptions? We Americans should be thankful that the cities here were spared the horrible destruction of the Second World War -- not trying to carelessly use the mass-deaths of innocent people as fodder for the defamation of a country that has ceased to exist twenty years ago. If you searched for some America-hating site, you could also find the same kind of circus. The US government has also deported people by the thousands (e.g. oriental population during World War II), committed genocide against the Indian population, experienced economic hardships which displaced people (Dust Bowl and Great Depression), and fought wars in which American citizens have died by the hundreds of thousands (Civil War, for example). The bodies quickly start to stack up here, too. I figure, if I don't want to have people throwing that kind of stuff in my face, I should not be so quick to accuse others of the same thing. Anything that the USSR has done is analogous to things that any other nation has done (maybe in somewhat larger numbers, but still). So let it go already.

Those within the Soviet sphere of influence, but not constituents of the former Soviet Union. Like (I'm taking a shot in the dark) your country, Poland. Did I guess right? If you are saying that the USSR put pressure on them, which amounts to indirect manipulation or control, that is true. But then the same has to be said about the United States and NATO. The two sides are peas in a pod -- there isn't an "evil" one and a "good" one. They just happened to have opposing views. The Soviets considered this doctrine failed after the Second World War (if the biggest war in mankind's history couldn't start a spark for a global socialist revolution, nothing could). Besides, the war was never supposed to be brought westward by the USSR but from within, by the proletariat of the Western nations themselves. Civil war, in essense, was the idea. Any historian will tell you that as soon as Stalin was out of the picture, Soviet foreign policy mindset underwent a colossal and permanent change. You're right -- both sides are bad. Political ambitions are always based on greed and paranoia (help me to find an example of an exception). Therefore, it can be said that all political and, consequently, military action is bad. For many people, it depends on perspective. Like, "I'm a citizen of <blank>, so any event that benefits my country is good. Anyone who opposes my country is evil. Anyone who supports my country is good. Anyone who helps me in opposing the evil side is good." Et cetera. But anybody from anywhere can do that. It is a moral argument rooted in relativism. Since you venture to speak for them, please share with me -- what horrible things did the USSR do to BIS studios? I think the reason that the USA and USSR are portrayed as the good (former) and the bad (latter) is almost purely financial. Explanation: The English-speaking sector of the games market is by far bigger than the Czech, Russian, German, Spanish, etc. As it happens, most of the people who speak English also live in countries harboring decades of anti-Soviet sentiment. If you were marketing a game, would you want to offend the biggest customer population, or to play into our stereotypes? You're probably right here (not that there weren't defections in the other direction also -- there were). The quality of life in the socialist bloc was worse than that in the Western nations. I doubt that so many people were hopping over the Berlin wall to make a political statement. They were trying to go to a better, wealthier state. It's the same here in the States with regard to immigrants from Mexico. Lots of people come here, legally and even illegally, because it's easier to live here. Not because the evil Mexican dictatorship creates an unbearable life for the citizens. But again, no proof of an "evil USSR." Care to build another strawman? Very clever! Â Â In either case, they must have changed it since the first screenshots. For example:

Sounds are a real issue, and the sounds in ArmA are pretty poorly done, and there is no distance sound effects at all, it all just faints away unrealistically. Why would you think a realistic sound environment is something unneccessary? Don't you think it creates more atmosphere when you're hearing that distant artillery and gunfire just like in real life, not just that "Bhoooom..." and decreasing volume over distance? Or what about getting shot by a machine gun, hearing each of the bullets of the burst snapping loud right above your head while hitting the dirt? You might be right. Or it could simply be a preference thing. Personally, I have high standards for sound or graphics. I know that there are some more important issues in the game that directly affect gameplay not just the atmosphere. Has your character ever gotten stuck in a doorway or on a stairwell in a critical moment? Has your character ever killed himself on his own grenade because it's hard to predict where it'll go? Has he ever been shot because he can't reload and run at the same time? That's the stuff that makes me want to cuss, not the sound. But it's different strokes for different folks, I guess. Many people do put a high emphasis on sound quality, who am I to judge?

Maybe the fluid stance controls, like you said, become confusing. A player spends more time in-game fiddling with the right posture than paying attention to what is going on around him. But games like Armed Assault, I think, were made to simulate bigger events. Everything is bigger -- the number of people on each side, the distances, the duration of combat is all longer than in Medal Of Honor or Raven Shield. Those other games (the serious ones, not the eye-candy exhibitions) are mostly made to show a small-scale, like room-to-room combat. In those, a fluid stance is much more useful than in Armed Assault. Although I would like to see it implemented in Armed Assault II.

You're probably right about Red Hammer (I never finished that campaign). The idea that the Soviet Union could "lose track" of an entire division (Guba's division) was always silly to me. The people who wrote the story really tried hard to come up with a situation where the USSR could invade an island in the Mediterranean. So the plot came out pretty unbelievable, I agree.

As someone who is fascinated by Cold War history and by the USSR, I want to answer your points. There aren't many people left in the world who would stick up for Stalin, so he is always attributed with ever-increasing numbers of deaths. X-number of people died in the USSR from 1924 to 1953, whether of natural reasons, by accident, war, illness, etc. well, "Stalin must be at fault." But you're right. Stalin was not fit to be in charge of a tollbooth, let alone a superpower. Anyway, Stalin's actions in the thirties should have no effect on the reputation of Russians today. Agree? I don't know how many hundred (as you said) German citizens were raped by the Soviets in the Second World War, but I know that upwards of 13 million Soviet civilians were killed by the Germans. When the Germans carried huge casualties on their advance through Belarus due to partisan action, they began exterminating entire villages in retribution (almost exclusively, women, children and old people, since the men were mobilized). About one quarter of the Belarussian settlements were erased from the map. The Cold War cannot be attributed to Soviet ambitions alone (as if America was oblivious to the changes which were taking place in the world order). It was a collision of ideologies. To say that the Soviet Union "wanted more land" is a ludicrous simplification of historical fact. The Eastern-European nations inherited pro-Soviet governments after the war, but they were never annexed or controlled by the USSR. Afghanistan was not invaded by the USSR. This is a common myth among people who don't really care to read the historical facts. There was a revolution in Afghanistan in 1978 (most likely funded by the USSR), followed quickly by a civil war (most likely funded by the American CIA). The Soviet Union supported the new government, and the Western nations supported the rebellion. Afghanistan's president Taraki requested the Soviet Union for help in stabilizing his country, but the Soviets refused. The situation in Afghanistan (by extension, on the Soviet border) gradually became worse, and in 1979, a Soviet battalion-size force seized the palace where Afghan prime minister Amin was located. The "war" in Afghanistan was one in which the Afghan army participated on the side of the Soviet contingent. Classically, during an invasion, a nation's armed forces resist the invader, not aid them. So there was no invasion of Afghanistan. And even though it's been twenty years already since the Soviets left, the civil war continues (proving the point that the Soviet military intervention wasn't the big issue). I don't agree with what the Soviets did, but I also disagree with what Ronald Reagan's reaction was -- to arm the opposition in Afghanistan and to "talibanize" the country. It kills me to know that, today, American kids are dying in Afghanistan as a direct effect of the short-sightedness of that president. And since when do people actually care about the Russian royal family? Only when their fate is used to villify the Bolsheviks. Maybe you're right, the Russians might be portrayed as neutral in the game. But in one of the videos that was released, it looked like the Russians were being manhandled by the game's main characters. It looks like the whole situation is a play on Russian affairs in Georgia's Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Adjara, Moldova's Transnistria, and the Crimean peninsula. In videos, the "Chernarus" flag is very similar to that of the Ukraine. Really interesting.

Ballistic09, I agree totally. No global power does anything without some kind of gain involved. No war happens on purely moral grounds. If America and the Russian Federation are involved in a shooting war, they both have some rationale for that, not just "good" and "evil." Show the story from both perspectives fairly, for Pete's sake!

As an American, I'm willing to admit that the American government isn't nearly as kind and altruistic as it presents itself. No, the Soviet Union wasn't a "nice" state, but the representation of the Soviet Union as some kind of force for pure evil in the world is also misleading. Every government needs a scapegoat to distract the citizens from problems at home. The image of the menacing USSR was used by the USA in that capacity beautifully.

I agree with the benefits of implementing a fluid stance. There are so many times when you kneel, and your boresight is lower than the hood of the car which you're using for cover. If you stand up, you expose yourself too much. Plus, there is no way in Armed Assault to rest your weapon on a surface (even standing up doesn't have to hurt the accuracy of the shot if your weapon is braced against a stationary object, like a house corner or a vehicle). It would be nice to have these things if the controls for them were made intuitive. Maybe it's too much work to program something like that. And since the game is of a larger, "tactical" nature, maybe the developers don't want that much micro-control of each player on the map.

In my opinion, the sounds in Armed Assault as they are right now are very well done. By saying "realistic sound effects," some people might be referring to the wild-and-crazy Hollywood type of confusion that we see in cheap action movies. I'd really hate to see that in a serious simulator like Armed Assault. Many people like Operation Flashpoint and Armed assault expressly for their lack of attempts to look outrageous and cool (which would appeal to the average juvenile gamer). If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Besides, the developers already have a laundry-list of real issues to resolve.