Inkompetent

Quite a good point there. If the action has been keybound it should be removed from the menu. Or at least have a Game Option for 'Hide keybound actions'

Well, Russia haven't been in any war at a larger scale since... well... WW2. Chechenya and Afghanistan (USA didn't win in Afghanistan either, so I guess Russia and USA scored equal there) hasn't been anything like Korea, Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Georgia was so short. I guess Afghanistan for Soviet and Vietnam for USA are the closest comparisons we can get, and even that isn't close. They haven't got (or should we say: 'taken') any chance to field test their military themselves. If I'd think the Russians are lacking in any area it would probably be doctrines and communication. Not that they haven't modernized from the terrible cold war doctrines, but I wouldn't believe that the same level of soldier initiative or the communication assets to make such initiatives efficient are available at really low level, like especially for the US forces. Non the less. All equipment has different strengths and different weaknesses, both adapted to different military tradition, doctrines, political climate and economy (both monetary, material and manpower).

Well, you are 'holding yourself in a controlled exhale', i.e. thinking about the breathing and of timing the shot with exhaling, which means if you 'hold' it too long you eventually run out of oxygen in your blood and need to inhale again ^^

There is no default thing in ArmA2 to show that. It'll have to be added some way through a mission-script or addon to give such functionality.

The reason my keyboard isn't smack full of keybinds is because I don't use all keybinds that *can* be used. But say... Have you ever tried getting into a helicopter under stress in a mission that adds 6 actions to you when you are close to the helicopter in addition to the standard ones? I agree it's not good design to have something like that, but without coding an ADDITIONAL graphical interface for those controls there is nowhere else to put them than into that über-crappy action menu. If addActions can be put in some other default control interface (like a radial menu) things would be 1000x easier.

How the *beep* would a more efficient user interface break the combat feeling? o0 I know that I *can* bind everything and its mother to single presses and double-taps (yet for some reason I can't put 'hold breath' anywhere else than the LMB or RMB, which are the last two buttons I want it at), but I also know that it takes a long, long time to actually remember where everything is. Especially the stuff that's more rarely used.

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters -nosplash (No intro) isn't really speeding anything up. Just gives you a plain loading screen instead of all company logotypes. -noworld (No world) speeds up the loading of the main menu since it doesn't load the Utes island map. Saves a little time if you intend to play on Chernarus instead. CPU count can be good if you have troubles with getting the game to run on an i7 CPU or something, and WinXP mode if your Vista or Win7 isn't being nice to you.

And the point of doing that when the existing ones aren't populated is...?

Actually in most cases body parts separated from the body in war are cut/sawn off by a surgeon. But indeed there's lots of very, very ugly wounds, limbs partially separated from the body, etc.

Well, there could always be both a radial menu and the old action menu at the same time, but it would allow separation of commands. Take for example 'Weapon M136 Launcher'. Instead of having it clutter the action menu it could be 'left' in the radial menu to have your weapon options, and leave stuff as entering a vehicle in the standard action menu. Decluttering things is quite important in my eyes, since some missions can have VERY many items in the action menu at the same time during certain occasions. Moving several of them to a radial menu or radial submenu would do wonders.

That's how it works in VBS2 afaik, and since it's that code we're getting in OA...

1.0 should work with all addons with XEH-support.

Difficult? Not a bit. Horrendously time-consuming and a huge volume of data that needs to be patched causing distributoin issues? Yes.

It's in the ArmA2\AddOns\a10.pbo You just need cPBO or some similar tool to unpack the .pbo archive, and Kegetys' unRap or whatever derapifying-tool to unbinarize the config.bin file. Then I'd recommend Notepad++ or some other more proper coding tool to open the .cpp and .hpp files, because the standard notepad can't handle the endlines.

This will require quite some changes to the engine, because the game loads all addons into memory when you start it. I can however agree that an official launcher tool for easy mod management would be appreciated. Far, far, far less work than reworking the game, and still something that *should* come with the game when one buy it, considering how important addons are for this series :)

Can be done on the move too, but I'd definitely doubt it can be done in any rougher terrain where the tank isn't moving evenly. And also it is greatly depending on distance. There's no point in a fast reload unless you can get a second shot off really fast, so at long ranges it wouldn't be much advantage. Still it is at worst at the same speed as the auto loader while moving, unless the terrain is so mean you can't aim and shoot either ^^

If it is a building made of concrete you'd at best put a big hole in it. Made of bricks or stones and you probably can shoot quite a bigger hole. Only building you'd 'blow up' would be a smaller wooden house ^^

Extended EventHandler support would probably be prefered I guess, so that it doesn't collide with other eventhandler-manipulating addons. Nice idea though! We like vapour trails!

Ahhh. I got the impression one had to punch in the wished for distance as well (or at least know it to determine needed elevation). Never ever used artillery in neither ArmA or ArmA2, so haven't felt the need to try this myself, even though I like the concept :)

A decently well trained loader reloads the Abrams after the first shot (when prepared) in less than two seconds. This does however demand having an extra round already in the hands to shove in when the breech opens. So the two first shots can be very rapid. In the long run the mechanical auto loader will of course beat the endurance and lactal acid of the loader in the M1. How fast that goes I think is estimated to around one minute, depending on the condition the loader is in. I do wonder how many tank engagements nowadays consist of active, rapid firing for over a minute though. And indeed, first shot is always one shot ahead of the other tank, and will probably win. Having a man loading is meant to save seconds, but can in bad scenarios of course cause the opposite.

Pythagoras is nice for ranging the artillery, but does need a calculator at hand. distance = sqrt ( (x-distance)^2 + (y-distance)^2 ) So if the target is 2.4km east of you, and 1.9km south, the horizontal distance will be: sqrt ( 2.4^2 + 1.9^2 ) = sqrt ( 5.76 + 3.61 ) = sqrt ( 9.37 ) = 3.06km. Just make sure to keep the units of measurement consistent throughout the calculation, be it in kilometers, hundreds of meters or single meters. Maybe not overly useful when putting down a howitzer barrage over a wider area, but really nice for pintpoint first-shot strikes on fixed positions.

Yeamn September/October 2010? :D Just curious since BIS has said that there won't be any release of OA this year.

Also, do not forget that compaigns fill a very, very important role in showing off use of code. If it wasn't for the stuff shipped with the game we'd not have much of a clue about how to use briefings, the modules, or FSMs.

Not entirely true. It is argued that the Russian military industry is stagnating because it doesn't spend enough energy in development, and instead spends its funds and energy into production, making them fall behind in the technology race ^^

Downside is that the missiles can't effectively be used on the move, so they require the firing tank to remain stationary until the missile reaches its target, which takes quite a lot longer than for a SABOT to reach that distance, and SABOTs can be fired on the move. Different strengths :)