Hillslam

For me this happens regardless of vehicle use. Regardless of "No Target" being told or movement, the 12oclock position will be correct as I'm moving but as soon as I come to a stop to engage enemies in my front, my squad will rotate the 12oclock back to some previous vector, regardless of enemy. then half my squad goes charging over the defilade to get into position and die....

Depends, are slats present?

I meant as a replacement to the M4 it won't happen. 4,000 units is about <1% of what they'd have to replace. SCAR too for that matter on that scale. But actually, what I beleive happened with the scar that confused people in the original posting is that SOCOM just moved the responsibility for purchasing the SCAR from itself to its served entities. Which is how the requisition should be/is handled for line kit. In fact I believe it means they are still evaluating the Mk17 but the Mk16 has passed its evals. Having passed all requirements and now is out of the hands of socom and into the hands of the regular requisition orgs.

I'm sure he means the 6.8, or the 6.5, both are new rounds. Not returning to the old 308, because the 6.5-6.8 are a good compromise between stopping power and how much ammo you can carry.

Well... now I know to shoot at the buildings too... nevertheless, looking forward to playing. Like you, been creating missions nonstop since OFP. However, I released a few very large missions in OFP to the public, that I think were well received, but since ArmA2, QG and OA have not again released a public one, just released for my friends and I to play. I may have to polish a few up and give em wings.

This reminds me of the arguments in Steel Beasts over the M1. Both sides were wrong there. Both sides got parts wrong here. For the same reasons.

You can also forget the US ever adopting the 416. That will not happen.

DMArkwick, Can you include a thick smoke that can be placed in the editor and just continues to burn? One that doesnt need a vehicle or other incendiary object to "fuel" it? It woul greatly help me lower my scripting in some of my missions where I need a smoldering town for effect. Thanks for your great work.

I'm a modder and looong time OFP, Arma mission developer and I just downloaded the Steam version because I couldnt wait for Gamestop to get their thumbs out of their a**es. I want to address these claims that Steam will be as good as a hard install. Its not. mods are harder to load, you put any mod in the init and steam goes thru some funky scan bullsh*t that takes forever. similarly, there's no clean way to set startup variables since you're using the steam applauncher and not the arma2.exe. If you do add startup params to that Steam gets totally confused and has to figure out what the f**k is going on before it can kick off the exe. And if you change those params you got to sit thru this whole steam dog and pony show again. And if you do try to go around that and launch the arma2 executable? .... good luck, steam sh*ts all over your HD. You can plain old forget overwriting a base pbo. Updates that occur when you're not prepared for it to do so, tanking your session and not allowing you to run it. Go offline, RIGHT AWAY to avoid this. It goes on and on and on. I've played with it now all day. I can say using Arma2 with Steam is a COMPLETE Pain In The A**. And I'm not new to this, or to software development in general, been writing software for over 20 years. The moment a hard copy becomes available locally for sale I will be buying it, and I recommend anyone who mods or uses mods or sets startup params to do the same. Cliff's Notes: From a Steam Arma2 user: AVOID STEAM ARMA2!

Ok, I cannot seem to get TEAMSWITCH enabled in the missions I create in multiplayer. Works fine in the editor. I've got plenty of playable units. I've tried a trigger keyed off when player dies, and it pops the TEAMSWITCH dialog when the player dies in the editor like it should. But when I export it and play it multiplayer... nothing. I've tried setting TEAMSWITCHENABLED=true in a trigger, in an init, in the ext file, still no teamswitch in multiplayer. The teamswitch keys are all mapped, and *they* work fine in the editor as well. But try as I might I cannot pop the teamswitch dialog automatically in multi upon player death or call it by keypress (but I don't need the latter). Aarg. All it does when the player dies in multi is switch them automatically to the next playable soldier in their starting group, and thats it. When they run out of alive playable ai in their group, they're done. HOW do I get this working in multiplayer? I really don't want to dynamically spawn the player, I want to keep the soldier counts set for my coop missions, but I need for the players to be able to switch to other groups on death. I'm pulling my hair out trying to make this work. The frigging thing. I was so excited about teamswitch feature in ArmA, but now I'm growing to hate it. Any help appreciated.

All the squads that are to be playable are already set as playable. Thats not the problem. I'm talking about moving from one playable group to another playable group automatically on player death of the last member of the first group. It cannot be done via teamswitch in multiplayer. I've got to hardcode the whole bloody thing up in scripts, checking for who's available and who's not and thats just a pain in the ass when teamswitch *should* have been made callable in multi as well.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Unfortunately I'm aware of all that. What I'm looking for is an automatic way of pushing the player into the next group when their last playable character in their current group dies. This matches up with my mission scenarios ideas that I was never able to bring neatly to OFP. For example: - a force defends a bridge from an overwhelming force and dies to the last man, then friendly reinforcements retake the bridge. I want my players to be able to play both facets of this mission. etc. Looks like I'll have to keep using kludgy selectplayer scripts, which sucks.

So just like respawn=5 in OFP that never got implemented, there's no way in ArmA to allow players to switch groups on death in multi? $%^& - its back to rigged-up SelectPlayer for me.

Has anyone noticed the ambient, voice, anonymous, etc sounds that we used to activate via triggers in OFP no longer seem to work in Arma? I have a basic trigger set to condition true, and timed for 4 sec min/max/avg with an ambient sound set. Nothing happens at 4 secs. I've run thru all the sounds in the dropdowns and still nothing activates. My sound levels are set correctly in audio options. Am I missing something thats changed?

I've been polishing a mission where I have various wrecks scattered (the static objects like the bmp and m113 and jeep wrecks) and I like to have them still smoldering or on fire. For the smoldering ones I use a campfire embedded down into the ground with a negative Z or such, but for the larger ones I wanted more substantial smoke. I also wanted to give the appearance that houses were burning. For that I used a Ural Fuel truck, and set its damage to 1 in its initialization line. I can then either embed the truck inside houses or underneath vehicle static wrecks for a really nice effect. That works great except for a problem: whenever a grenade goes off near said burning thing, the Ural "pops" back up to the surface and is now sitting there beside the house or the m113 wreck, still happily burning away. Obviously it kills the illusion. Campfires don't have this same issue, they seem to stay planted. Couple questions: - Is there any way to plant a Ural truck such that events like nearby grenade detonations don't move it? - Is there any other way to place the fire burning effect of a destroyed vehicle onto the map without having to use a vehicle object at all? - How long do the fires burn? It seems the fuel trucks burn the longest (and the sedan seems to burn the shortest). Is there an easy way to keep said fire effect going without constantly setting the object it's attached to's damage to 0 then back to 1? (It explodes again each time I have to do this) - Is there a way to destroy vehicles in their initialization without that initial explosion? Right now I "destroy" all my vehicles way across the map and use a setpos to put them into position after they've popped. The tradeoff is that while the player doesn't hear massive explosions going off as soon as they enter the mission, I can't place any of these wrecks in direct line fo sight at mission start or they'll see them "wink" into existence right in front of their eyes when the trigger moves them into position. Thanks in advance for any help.

Yeah, I've placed smoke on vehicles before with smokeshells and such. Its not the same effect as the true destroyed vehicle burning effect. Too bad thats not callable as an object. At least not that I've found. I'd love to hear that someone's found it though.

To the CS crowd - set your mous float to 0. To the folks that are used to OFP and are still getting mouse lag check your trilinear setting on your video card - its been known to cause mouse lag.

The kids can play CTF in UT, and CS, and HL, and Tribes, and Bf1942, and BF2, and BFVietnam, and BF2142, and Joint Ops, and Quake, and Doom, and so on, ad nauseum. And none of them had a longer shelf life than OFP. Measuring the "life" of BIS's games from public server activity is misguided, showing more a lack of understanding of the business model in play for BIS and trying to shoehorn it into the more familiar "gamey" titles' business models than an understanding of what really happened between OFP and AA. You chose the wrong performance metric, friend. VBS kept BIS alive and fed. Coop, mods, and such kept OFP in the community mindset, making the business case for the Arma product cut and dried. Simple as that. Volume of CTF activity on the net is no measure of "success" in this case. OFP was successful and great without pandering to a CTF focus and so will go AA. And BIS "gets" that. In spades.

Don't get your panties in a bunch worrying about some buyers getting exclusive content and others being left out. Even *IF* this was not made available via download by BIS or the publishers for the rest of the ArmA community, 1 day after its released it will be depacked and uploaded by someone in the community itself. Hell, I'll do it if nobody else does. But... having said all that - looking at the alledged content listed here, I'm not crying. Who wants any of that crap? So many much more and better weapons, vehicles, and other objects to be had... BTR80 T80 M2/M3 A10 AH64 M14 M14EBR SOCOM ... I look at the "exclusive" list and *yawn* - I've got other fish to fry frankly.

Thanks itch. And TMC... TMC from Arnies?

Anyone remember how to assign a name to the speaker thats not its group place designation, ala 1-1-1-B without using a stringtable? Is it: [west, "Billybob"] sidechat "Hi you all"; Presuming I want the text to show up as: Billybob: Hi you all

You have to add a radio message class to your description.ext file - check the wiki on code to cut and paste for this. Then you need to add a corresponding .ogg sound file in a directory folder below the mission folder, usually called \sound (not sure if this is mandatory but since its in the wiki's ext snippet for the radio message class definition, I just found a little snippet of static and put it in there to reuse for all my radio calls). Once you do that it should work normally with a trigger or waypoint where: mySoldier sideRadio "YourRadioMessage1" Now if only I can remember how to make it show up with the name of the unit instead of 1-2-1-B in the text subtitle...

I don't think Snake and I are referring to the same thing. I'm referring to missions I *haven't* yet exported to Single or Multiplayer.

Hello all. Only just got the game last night (I live in the US). What exactly is getting saved in those folders? Just user additional items such as scripts and so on? Because when I open them up they are empty. I've got missions saved in the editor already that are quite large, so where is that mission data being saved? (I'm used to in ofp saving off copies of my mission assets for later use and not using the merge function in the editor)

One of my peeves in OFP was the rubbery feel to the armored vehicles: a shell impact would send them bouncing across the ground, or even into the air. I remember the developers saying it was due to a limitation in the physics engine, and it was understandable they couldn't address it in the engine at the time, but it really was silly to see a 100ton tank bounce like a balloon when hit with a sabot round. Is this behavior still around in AA?