Inkompetent

You just answered yourself. The 'apart from'-part is exactly the reason to have addons that aren't required by the mission itself.

Well, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" you know. Once that no longer stands true there is no reason to help any longer (like Afghanistan for example). Not saying that it *is* the reason, but definitely a plausible one since it isn't the first time it happens. Considering the scale of the war and that it continues after Saddam's death it is obvious it wasn't the reason this time, but there are countless examples of the above in history both on person- and nation-scale.

The numbers mentioned by the OP are the numbers for ArmA1. Not for ArmA2/OA. The numbers I've been informed for ArmA2 and OA are: 256/320MB = LOW 512MB = NORMAL 896/1GB = HIGH 1-2GB = VHIGH or DEFAULT.

As far as I heard on the radio it was Israeli soldiers about to cut down a tree standing on the border, that they considered blocking their line of sight towards Lebanon. The Lebanese soldiers considered it trespassing and shot at the soldiers, being the start of the firefight. Seems more like a small incident to me, that won't cause any kind of escalation in itself. Lebanon got to show it doesn't tolerate Israel on/past its border, and Israel got to successfully shoot back. Will of course be something for the politicians to yell about and people to be angry about, but it'll take more than that to cause something big in such a skirmish-familiar region.

Four entire reasons to abandon the game? There doesn't need to be but one: Codemasters.

Oh? I'm so used to FSM getting higher priority. Well, that's a relief then :)

Welcome to the promised land of awesomeness! In addition to Terox's awesome guide I just have one single thing to add: Find a community. Or well, it should rather be: Find a community, and/or an actively administrated server. A lot of servers are just left running without anyone in control and they tend to have no real organization, no real goal, and are prone to give a bad experience in general. There are however many, many communities out there of varying sizes and styles and locations and languages, so one can always find somewhere to play where one knows there are other people on the server that want to play like you do, and where there are admins to keep the server in order. Whether you want to play COOP or PvP the above stands true. Then of course one doesn't always have to join a community. Many of them have public servers where anyone can come and play, but still tend to give an experience vastly superior to nonsupervised public servers.

Very good suggestion. And indeed it *can* be done by script to get some sort of functionality that resembles this, but without a lot of probably not all too good tinkering with locking AI in place and stuff like that it can't be done well, and the basic AI FSM would still override any scripting-attempts. Thus getting it built into the base FSM would be a prefered solution :)

Yeah. I mean, after raping, beating and spitting on the franchise, turning into a hollow, broken shell in the eyes of almost everyone, why would they stick with the name again? It's like intentionally asking to need a twice as expensive PR campaign as last time, just to clean the broken, dirty name and not make people nauseous at the mere sight of it. Would be more sensible in my eyes to drop a franchise with such a (now) terrible reputation and simply call the game 'Red River' or whatever.

And that the avarage age of gamers is rising. However I think that the deal probably is that 1) They want to bring people into their franchise as mindless wallets as early as possible, and 2) Older gamers are more picky with what they buy, while teen kids convince their dads to buy any crap there is with a cool package.

That's being too nice. It'll be more like... how Rainbow Six: Letdown-.. I mean Lockdown was compared to Raven Shield. Vegas was actually a good game, just not deserving of the Rainbow Six title because it's not even a tiny little bit like the original games. But Lockdown. Gods. :butbut:

Note that any and all advanced physics will have to be 100% clientside, since the game is already stretching the possibilities of bandwith. Stuff like syncronizing ragdolls across clients simply isn't possible, and bodies will end up in different places. The least differences on each client's interpretation of things might give dramatically different end results with 'real' physics, so it's simply not feasible, unless we should cap servers at 32 units (player + AI) or something. As long we get rid of the bouncy tanks, screw phyics, and indeed focus on stuff like improved lighting (for example car lights not going through walls) and stuff like that. Much more important for the feeling :)

Agree with Toasticuss. There's no point in getting a socket 775 motherboard. Go for an i3 or i5 CPU, because you thus get a socket 1156 motherboard and is quite futureproof (for example DDR3 RAM and possibility to upgrade to i5 or i7 CPU). You can install all new Intel CPUs on that aside from their very, very best ones which require a yet bigger socket. i3 CPUs are effectively Core 2 Quad CPUs anyway, based on the exact same technology, but with some improvements here and there (like integrated memory and PCI-E bus and support for DDR3 RAM). You just have to make sure you don't pick one of the slower i3 CPUs when you get it, but one of the faster ones instead, and you'll easily match the best Core 2 Quad ones.

Well, with his username it's hardly surprising he got banned. But yeah, remembering the circus from the first game their forum management included deleting all posts and banning all users posting anything negative, so... Yay for boycotting Codemasters!

Well, they can for example keep the graphics engine. It is pretty good by now. However the animation system and some other basic features and functions are not there, and for example switching active addons from in-game would need quite some changes to the core of the game. Maybe it can be done by hefty modofication of the current engine. Maybe not. That said it'll indeed be some major changes, but if they don't really have to touch graphics (much) at all, then that's a huge workload not having to be redone.

@ Flash Thunder I hope you don't expect the new engine to be done before 2020 with those specifications of features?

Even though it is a huge task I vote for complete rewrite. If they are going to write a new game engine, rather than just updating the current one here and there, then rather make it proper and drop any and all compatability. In the end porting stuff (at least scripts) isn't generally a that huge deal almost regardless of language, so lots of functionality could fairly quickly be brought from ArmA2 to ArmA3. For models I totally understand that a completely new engine probably will mean completely new rigging of the models and a lot of work, not to mention new fancy shaders and other technical stuff. If their funds allows it a completely new, more advanced engine would be awesome. Stuff like ability to alter config-values on a per-instance-of-class-basis (for example modifying the lifeTime of fired shells/grenades), better integration of 3rd party applications, vastly modernized editor that can load, manage, and write scripts from within the game, in-game access to the RPT file, picture-in-picture rendering (MFD-screens) and clickable switches in vehicles, shooting with hand guns from vehicles, proper vehicle damage systems, and so on would all probably be a lot easier to include if rewriting the base rather than forcing them into the game with makeshift solutions because the very base of the engine can't manage the stuff properly. I don't mind if BI writes a new engine now or later. But they have to at some point. And when they do, screw backwards compatability. Make it work. Make it good.

Because then they (Activision-Blizzard) have full control of their users! If I understand things right the game is region-locked so a player of the US version can't even play against EU players unless he also owns a EU version of the game, in South Korea you subscribe to Battle.net (or at least to Starcraft 2 access on Battle.net, which is required to play), and there's a lot of other stuff (and bound to be more coming) where they really try their best to make you pay to play, even when already owning the game. On top of that, by removing LAN and forcing people through Battle.net they can add in-game advertisement and earn even more money since you'll be forced to be exposed to it every time you want to play multiplayer. Totally agree that it's pure crap how they are doing things, but then again... with Kotick being the CEO of it all, how CAN it be designed to be in the interest of the players instead of 100% being for the shareholders and more $$$? I'm not overly interested in the game. The campaign would be nice, and playing some multipalyer for lols with buddies, but beacuse Activision is involved it is a no-brainer to not give them my money. Could be the best game in the world and they wouldn't get it. Crappy business ethics isn't worthy of earning money.

To me there just exists a tiny, tiny handful of tactical shooters that I constantly return to when I want a 'smart' game to play, even if I do enjoy for example Battlefield: Bad Company 2 a lot. Rainbow Six series up until Athena Sword, Ghost Recon, Sum of All Fears, SWAT 3, SWAT 4, Operation Flashpoint, ArmA (okay, I don't play this anymore. ArmA2 is ArmA but better in all ways), and ArmA2. That's it. In a sea of many hundreds of shooters I can count a dozen of games. Real pity, but it seems nigh impossible nowadays to get funding to create a tactical game. Seems like a lot of investors and distrubutors aren't happy with just earning money, but they all want to make the super-duper top-seller, so unless you already have the money to fund development with you are screwed (look at for example Ground Branch and Sky Gods), and yet we get realism-mods for every single moddable arcade shooter out there, and the mods are played by many, many thousands.

Your fighting style looks efficient if standing in close so that you deny the opponent the opportunity of straight punches to the face where your defense is slow, and where you can grapple. Against a lighter, quicker and first and foremost more enduring fighter with a fairly long guard (i.e. denying you opportunity to approach past his front hand) it seems to be a tiring way to fight since you have to chase in close and deny him the chance to create distance. Powerful with good body defense and seems suitable for your body build. And after all, fighting is all about using one's body to the best. For you it means your weight, muscle mass and power. Just watch that head and balance of yours. Being a fairly tall but lightly built person I can only speak from that perspective of how I'd choose to fight you, but it'd definitely be to attack your balance and wear you out, since I stand no chance at all up close and most of my attacks to your soft parts would be inefficient since I can't pack enough punch to make you feel it through all that flesh. Hard spots and making you fall seems to be the only damage I personally could do.

Whohooo! My favourite Half-Life mod aside from the old versions of Day of Defeat is back! :D

Only until USA stopped trading oil to Japan! :D And why did they attack Pearl Harbour? Because USA stopped trading oil, started with the aid packages to UK (which Japan was at war with), and froze all Japanese assets in USA maybe? USA practically started the war in the pacific on their own. Just without an official war declaration ;)

Yay! Another reason to maintain my Codemasters-boycot! They continue to rape the franchise and sell it out like a cheap, drug-addicted, kidnapped prostitute, and I'll keep refusing them my money ^^

If you want to get away fairly cheap and still pack decent power with the graphics card I suggest the 1GB version (not only has more memory than the lesser 5770, but also has a faster memory bus) of the ATI 5770. Not being in the 5800-series it isn't among ATI's 'power'-cards, but it gives a lot of performance for its costs, and it supports all modern stuff like DX11 and Shader 5.0. Should cost about €150 and should last you for quite a while. The nVidia GTX460 and ATI 5850 is another price class up from this one. Otherwise I'd suggest the a bit older ATI 4870 which is a real powerhorse and should be quite cheap nowadays. At medium settings you should be getting 'fair' framerates with the i3 CPU and the above graphics cards. ArmA2 is a bad representative when it comes to boasting framerates because the FPS is generally lower in this game than other shooters because of the scale of the game, but at the same time you don't need 60FPS to play this game well. An avarage of 35FPS will probably do you just well most of the time. With an older (but severely overclocked) dual-core CPU, a ATI 4850 512MB graphics card, 2GB DDR2 RAM and WinXP I tend to avarage about 35fps at 1280x1024 at medium/high settings.

As long the game doesn't stutter so badly you feel you are getting a hard time to play it's fine in ArmA. Framerates is the last thing you need to worry about. Especially as an infantryman. For flying and stuff it's obviously more important to be guaranteed not to suffer from lag spikes, even if brief. If you can manage 20+ fps even when things get busy/are within large cities, then you are definitely okay.