KaRRiLLioN

The thing most people don't realize is that almost all publishers for North America are international publishers. Eidos, EA, Activision, Codemasters, Ubisoft, and so forth. Only a few of those are actually U.S. companies. Many are based in Europe. The problem with all of them, of course, is that they're huge and probably require concessions that BIS doens't want to bear. I think it has nothing to do with any publisher in the US thinking they have the "right" to do what they will with ArmA; rather, it's the fact there are almost no independent publishers in the U.S. that are worth anything for distribution. Unless they strike a deal with one of the smaller ones, especially one that will do some good marketing, we're most likely stuck with an online version at some point. Regardless of whose fault it is, the entire mess is a debacle. I'm sure BIS would be the first to admit that they'd love to have NA distribution already in the pipes. With a decent marketing scheme, it could really sell far better than even OFP, IMHO.

Why in the world was my post edited? I didn't link to anything obscene.

I tried to order from www.amazon.de using my English account, but once I tried to use my US shipping address, I hit a brick wall. I also tried looking on several CZ sites that were advertised on ofp.info, but I couldn't read a thing. I asked one of the regulars on my server about buying a German version and shipping it over since he lives there, but he pointed to www.buyarma.com and I was able to order a German version. Â I know I'm taking a small risk since it's not like buying from Amazon, but since you can use PayPal, and it protects you, I don't think there's much risk involved. This version oughta tide me over until a NA version is released at some point. Â Hopefully it won't use Starforce either.

I put in an order with some site I can speak German, well enough, but I'd prefer to have it all in English. I'll most likely also purchase whatever NA version is released. I want to set up a local dedicated ArmA server so I can get to work porting over the tons of missions and whatnot from my OFP server. That thing has been running for several years straight and has accumulated a lot of junk! Edit: Removed Link.

if i remember right each player is able to command up to 40 ai soldeirs. can be that i am wrong, but i think i heard it at the PC-Action Magazin DVD. I try to control up to 78 AI and this is no problem In ArmA? How do you control them? Â Do you switch between squads or is your command menu really large?

What's even more important to me at this point is how many AI can you have running about without killing the server? In current RTS-3 games, once each team amasses about 50-70 units per side, then it starts to get laggy. When I say 50-70 units, I mean counting each unit whether it be a tank, jet, solider, etc. Even if it has multiple units driving/gunning/commanding the vehicle then it still counts as only one. I'm hoping that larger numbers of units are possible without undue lag because in the BIS version of CTI or in RTS-3, battles would truly be awesome to have some massive tank squads and battles raging. In RTS-3 we balanced out air power by adding ARENA to the main battle tanks as an upgrade so your entire squadron couldn't get completely pwned by 1 jet/chopper. One other thing: isn't it now possible to control more than 12 squad members? If this is the case, then it'd be very nice for these scenarios.

I'm looking forward to trying out that new gametype. Â Who knows, it might be fun. Â But I still like RTS as well. Â I've had a good crowd of regs who still come to my server for RTS even though I haven't actively updated it for a while now. For realism, Cam51 and I designed a new mission type named RWS that more realistically depicts the way things would be. Each team starts with a supply truck, a tank, and a truck. Â There are towns that must be captured using the supply truck by driving it in front of the 'HQ' building there, but each town is guarded by resistance and the further you go, the larger the resistance force becomes until you finally reach the airport. When you capture certain territories, you're given access to infantry, tanks, etc. that you can deploy from there, but you have only a certain number of resources, i.e. there's no money and you don't actually build anything. Â Instead, it's coming from your inventory. If the enemy takes away a town with a vital function, then you lose that, but the towns must be taken in specific order, i.e. no skipping around. Â You win by taking over all enemy territory or by depleting the enemy's supply trucks or other vital resources. It used a full navy so you could transport squads of armor across islands since it was based on AEC islands. Â I hope that ArmA allows for even more realistic naval ships. The only problem with this game type was it takes hours to play, depending on the skill of each team. Â I'm curious to see if JIP will work with it because it might work better in a more persistent state. That would also open the possibility of making RTS-3 for AEC islands actually workable. Â If JIP works, then there's no problem starting up an epic game such as that, especially if a more realistic navy is possible.

Actually that sounds a lot like a mission called Island Fight that came out before even RTS-1 and it was by Animal. Each team has a base and they get a couple of helis, some jeeps and tanks. Between each base are territories that you have to capture by holding them for 30-60 seconds. Once you control all points and hold them for a certain # of minutes you win. Vehicles respawn at the main base in a hangar which repairs them. If the hangar is destroyed, then it has to repair during which time no vehicles can spawn. It's a pretty cool mission type, but it's definitely not an RTS-style, technically speaking. Guess I'll be porting over RTS. I hope there's plenty of cool new scripting commands because I have a lot of stuff I wanted to try.

I'd like to know as well. If it's a mishmash of Battlefield and RTS, then I'd prefer just to port RTS-3 to ArmA. I may end up doing that anyway since there's a level of complexity that can be added that this included version probably won't have in it. I'd be willing to bet it's a dumbed-down version for the masses. Not that it would be bad. It might serve as a good 'school' for newbs who can later graduate to play a true RTS-style mission. Plus, rescripting some parts of RTS-3 would give me a chance to add more depth if the scripting has a lot more to offer--which I hope it does. Now if I could just get my hands on a Czech version...anyone know where I can buy it online?

It might violate an agreement with 505, the publisher for the English version. Â That doesn't mean, however, that they can't offer the Czech version as a downloadable purchase. Â I'd get it then convert it to English. Â Later, when the official North American version came out, I'd buy it. Â I'll bet they could easily double sell it like that to plenty of us who want it NOW!

For caveman: How can you kill that which has no life? -Southpark, WoW episode. I'll probably try to get the German version when it's released. I can speak and read it proficiently enough to understand, methinks. There's no way I can wait until freaking 2007 to play this.

Is it the publisher that does all the language localization? I'm guessing BIS does the English/Russian/Czech languages, but with that long list of countries that 505 is doing, if they have to create a stringtable for each language, that'll take a while. For the Vatican, they'll have to convert all the audio into Gregorian chants. That should make for a surreal campaign. ;P

I can read Cyrillic so I was a little surprised when I saw it. Makes sense though. Russia is one of the biggest markets for pirated stuff though I have no idea of their copyright laws. I guess they figure they can get away with it. The cover, literally transliterated is: Operazzia Fleshpoent 2 and then, oddly enough, they have Armed Assault spelled in the latin alphabet....wtf.

AFAIK, SLI and X-fire are entirely hardware independent. I don't think the software needs to support it. I have an nVidia 7950 GX2 which is a dual-core card, similar to running SLI on one card and it works in OFP just fine. So as long as your motherboard supports SLI/XFire then you don't need to worry about ArmA supporting it.

If BIS needs a US publisher, I know a guy with a DVD burner and a color copy machine. If he starts burning DVD's now, he could have a few thousand ready by November. I hope BIS can break through the monolithic block of massive publishers here in the US and find one with favourable terms. Most of the ones here are more interested in buying out developers so they only have to pay them salaries instead of what their game is really worth. Then when the game is out, they fire them. Greedy bunch of a$$h*les.

OFP was released in 2001. Â Arma is supposedly based on the VBS-2 platform and will be released in 2006 (hopefully). Â It might be better to ask why we don't expect such features in a 2006 game since several other games prior to it were able to implement it. Would I expect it to be completely realistic? Â No, but then again there's already so much in OFP that isn't realistic that it wouldn't be a first. What's not realistic about wanting to be able to land a chopper on a moving ship? Â Or walking on the surface of a moving ship? At a minimum, it'd be nice to be able to shoot out the window or rear of a moving truck if you're being pursued. Â That's definitely realistic. As for other games having the features of OFP, yes there are others. Â None of them did it on quite the scale, i.e. larger islands, but they still did it. So I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for something like this. Â Also, considering it was part of a VBS1 module, it's not like it's something brand new for them. And I'm very familiar with programming/scripting and I know how long and tedious it is to debug. Â But BIS has already been adding new content to Arma, as they said in their interviews, so if we're going to have to wait forever on this publishing stuff to get worked out, they might as well add more requested items. Â If, however, they're about to release within the next month, then forget it and release it. Â I won't cry.

I'd really like to see this feature for sure. I do wonder why it can't be implemented in Arma, seeing as how older games have it built in. I agree in JO and BF some of it can be ridiculous, like people standing on the hoods of jeeps that are moving at top speed, but I'm willing to sacrifice a little realism on that front if it means I could stand up in a chinook that's moving, go to the back and fire at jeeps below. BAS's implementation was ok, but clipping was still a problem as I'd often end up falling through the chopper. Something tells me that with fixed clipping issues, that won't be as much of a problem. But naval units, IMHO are VERY important to broadening the already massive scope of OFP/Arma. In RTS I implemented a naval factory and we patched together some good units, battleships and whatnot. With multiple turrets in Arma, I can't wait. Still, I'd REALLY like to see operational carriers instead of having to hack around with Geo-LOD's and land-LOD's etc. When the Nimitz first came out, it took forever for me to patch holes in that thing with scripts. I gave up on the Kutznetov--thank goodness Gnat didn't. That curve in the hull was a PITA to get right. I tested using moveable carriers for RTS. Basically they didn't move by sailing but could be redeployed. Each team would be able to build aircraft from their own carrier. The only problems I ran into were most islands didn't have enough water to make it worthwhile and redeploying the carrier in MP could sometimes glitch. So I ended up taking it out after running a few tests. Since the blasted carriers have to be placed in segments, lag could cause some freaky effects. Having done tons of scripting, mission building, addon modelling, island making--well just about everything you can do to create stuff for OFP, my wish list is pretty long. I think Arma has taken care of most of it, multi-turrets being a big one. I wish this was implemented, but if it's not I won't cry...too much. I just can't wait to see the first Arma naval battle with multi-turreted battleships!

I think even OFP has widescreen support because when I got my 30" Dell widescreen, I had options for 1920x1440 and 2560x1600 etc. in OFP and I've been playing it at 1920x1440 since my Nvidia 7800GTX apparently doesn't like the native resolution for games since it's only 256MB. Time to upgrade again, I s'pose. From what I've seen, OFP will allow you to choose any resolution that your desktop will allow, which is nice.

I just hope they don't get our pussies all wet and hang us out to dry. I've seen plenty of addons with dual guns; obviously one of them was just for decoration. I'm hoping this is a nudge, nudge, wink, wink picture from BIS that is declaring such a thing will be in ArmA.

Now that would be cool. Â That way only good players would be left for online playing! Also how about a backpack/harness and thigh plates that vibrate and stimulate your muscles to simulate fatigue from running? Â eg, Â Have you ever noticed how you can sprint from one end of nogova to the other non-stop? The big problem I see to that is the market for Game 2 would be significantly smaller since I'm certain the player base for it would be wiped out within the first week after Arma was released. Â I think a shock collar would work better. If you get injured, it shocks you less, but if you catch a bullet in the head, it'll send a few extra thousand volts into you. Â First, most of us will live through that, second, it'll improve those players who stick it out or make us all so cautions that we'll low crawl from one end of the island to the other just to prevent getting hurt. Maybe even locational shock zones would work. Â Just think of the punishment you could deal to a TK'er when everyone on the team shoots him repeatedly in the crotch. Personally, after reading the latest article, I can't wait to see what kind of goodies I can implement in RTS3 with some of these new scripting commands, and I'm certain switching units will be one of them so you can change clothes, etc.

@CsonkaPityu, my illustration with the AI tank is not one where I am actually in the tank; rather my tank is completely controlled by AI and across the island somewhere. I would find it infinitely convenient to take control and blast the errant enemy AI. If, however, Arma AI is improved then there may be no need for it. I find it happens a lot in RTS games when an enemy soldier is lying prone on a slight downslope and my tank is above it and is too stupid to go down the hill a little to engage the enemy even with engage at will on. As for 'B' rated movies retaining sole ownership of stealing someones clothes or changing clothes at all during a mission, I don't think that's the case. As someone else pointed out it would also be useful to change into different camo if the mission called for it. Being a scripter, I've made tons of different kinds of missions, from realistic to races, to zany and even zombie missions all to keep a little flavour in a game that is finally growing stale over the years so any additional tools I have at my disposal are most welcome.

For those who aren't scripters or mission makers, I can understand that it might seem to 'arcadify' the game; in reality it makes it much better. I do very much hope that the AI is vastly improved over OFP. I can't tell you how many times I've heard one of my AI in a tank call out "12 o'clock, enemy soldier" when trying to take a territory in RTS only to have the tank never actually kill the blasted enemy soldier for one reason or another. However, should it still have issues (or even if it doesn't) character switching would be great, I'd just quickly take control of that idiot AI, kill the enemy AI and be done with it. As has been mentioned previously, it will also be excellent to be able to switch models in game if you want to simulate changing clothes, camo, etc. For example in a Nogova Virus mission, when a player dies and becomes a zombie you could now change the model to a zombie one, or (more realistically) if you're playing a POW mission, you escape the prison, kill a guard and steal his clothes you can switch your model to one with his clothes on. Or, you could even make a mission where you can change from a man into a donkey using Mig's Farmland pack. Hell, why stop there, make it so you can change into chickens and cows too! Umm, ok, sorry. I got carried away. For the single player campaign I don't think I would want to switch characters in the middle of a mission, and since it looks optional, I can't see it as ruining the immersion for me. Of course as most other scripters and mission designers can tell you, many of us lose some of that immersion anyway since while we're playing a mission we keep thinking about the nuts and bolts of how the mission was made rather than the actual mission itself, at least I find myself doing that sometimes.

Switching will actually be excellent but for reasons other than those stated. For example if you are a soldier and want to switch into civilian clothes, for example, you can't really unless the model is created with extra textures for setobjecttexture in OFP. With Arma it sounds like if you needed to switch the player character to a civilian then you can switch to a different model. Also in missions you could change outfits/camo etc. So let's say you're playing in the desert but you have on woodland camo. Well now you can switch to a desert camo model. Also, like in an RTS game you want to become a spy, so you switch into the uniform of the opposing team and try to sneak in. I think it sounds cool if it's going to work as I think it will. Being able to change to different units/models during the game can open up a lot of new avenues for mission makers. Oh, and has anyone seen that new cell phone version of OFP on OFP.info that BIS is working on? Man that looks sweet! Definitely worth another delay on Arma so they can finish that up! The 4x4km islands and 6-way MP over bluetooth is gonna rock!

I have 3 models that I've been trying to understand. Â One is a tank model, the other a WW2 halftrack, and the other a WW2 plane. The tank and halftrack look fine when tested on my PC and fine when I use them on the dedicated server, but if an AI local to the dedicated server use either, or if it is just sitting there unused, i.e. spawned local to the server, then their treads are partially underground and they bounce. I've tried adjusting land contact lod's, naming them, looking at roadway lod's and GEO to make sure nothing is underneath the land contact LOD's but I'm having no luck at all figuring it out. Â I've also adjusted mass as well and even redone the Geo LOD. Â Anyone have any idea? On the plane, it too looks fine when I or another player use it on the dedicated server i.e. locally on a machine, but if it is sitting on the ground and local to the dedicated server then it bounces and doesn't stop until a player gets in it. I've done all the same things for it, named the 3 land contact LOD's properly, remade the Geo LOD, given it 8,000 mass, deleted all roadway lod's, and even redone the land lod but nothing works. So they all work fine and normally if used in SP or if a player uses them on the dedicated server, but if they are local to the dedicated server then they exhibit this odd behaviour. Can someone please tell me what demon has possessed these blasted units?

Hmm, I'll check into that. There are several WW2 missions on my server but none of them use the buggy model for the Jagdpanzer V. You'd also need the entire pack from my earlier post to try it out. Band of Brothers is one that has the halftracks roaming around and you can see how they bounce around. There's about 20 coops or so and 10 CTF's that have those vcls in it I believe, just look for ww2 in the file name when looking at missions. Several are on Normandy. Thanks!