Kode

I recommend you don't buy the most expensive things, the higher you go in prices, the less extra power you get from it. Arma won't be heavy for your computer as it's an optimised engine from OFP, which needed around 500mhz and a 32Mb grafics card to run(I used to play it on it). Make sure you buy a directx 9.0 card, buying something older will do the trick, but soon directx 9 will become a minimum. Choosing between ATI and NVIDIA is more a mather of peronal taste. The latest ATI card is currently the most powerfull, but they switch the lead very often. On the CPU side, you could take pentium 4's or athlon XP's, even dualcores, just make sure not to buy semprons, games won't run very good on them, they are cheap office processors. Buying a dual core won't have a very big effect on games! Many people think it's that way, but it isn't. Little explanation: Symmetric MultiProcessing: SMP capability is something that must be written into the code. The program must know that it can utilize two processors to complete processes simultaneously. This is known as multithreading. ==> I don't think Arma will have that incorporated. A dual core processor won't be twice as fast as a single core processor nor will it be as fast as a dual processor system. It will fall somewhere in the middle but there are specific advantages, but that would be to complicated. I suggest having 1Gb of ram: it decraeses loading times of about everything, and is always usefull for the future, where OS'es get heaver and bigger... Hard drives: again personal taste most of the time. Maxtor has a bad name for reliability especially in servers and stuff like that, but for other users, they work just fine. There are seagates, western digitals, all are fine, and you can choose your capacity. Just make sure, you either buy SATA(whichfor you need support from the motherboard or a controller, might even buy SATA II they can work as a SATA) or IDE. Sound and LAN etc... is very often already on the motherboard, you could optionally have wireless on it aswell, again buy what you need. In short, Arma will run on a pentium 2Ghz without a problem, the more powerfull your graphic card, the better it will look offcourse, but it will run on a directx 8 card.

Well, the best OS is actually a personnal question , and also how the users uses and works with it. I used win2k for a long time, and also winXP(not talking about al other OS's like different linux editions, mac os's and older windows). I neither had any major problems with it unless I did things wrong, which some users just don't know they do. Most often the problem is: I might try that new OS. By doing so, installing it, but then problems start, things are different then the previous, you have to search for things, things don't work properly at first, giving errors and such. Then some people just go back to the old OS they know, and leave the other OS, as they are tired trying. My experience is that you can tweak winXP so hard you only use 80Mb of the Pagefile with 256Mb ram, with windows 2k it was around the same. But Xp just is more recent, still has support, and supports more recent hardware, and newer application designed for windows, are mostly designed for windowsXP. It depends on the person wether they seek the problems untill they resolved them ,or just go back to the old. Anyway, windows vista won't be out for next year, and the hardware specs are again much higher, so then again how many people will switch etc...

Placebo stated in the interview on the polisch site that it still remains the same. He wouldn't tell us that if it wouldn't be true. I'm sure much more info will be released when the game is finished and published. In the mean time, William's blog revealed something about the story, it's like an introduction. That means that something is going on. What would be the use of  starting to tel the story when the game wouldn't be out in the next months. Normally you wouldn't know anything about the story untill the release of a game. So go BIS, and stop whining about releasedates, it's out when it's out and being pessimistic won't change a thing, staying positive is the best way to go.

yes, that also seems to be the job of william, which is currently on the island. But they are not with many, so mostly local troops.

Indeed many nice quotes, seems that they are doing great for the moment. I just hope they won't have to many problems with a publisher. It's nice from Placebo/Bis to communicate this way. They keep the community interested and actually still manage to keep 95% silent, without complaints, keep going that way, and let Arma be the game of the year . We could try to kidnap Placebo and release him in return for more information  ... but I don't think he would like that  Perhaps we'll have some eastereggs

true, it was there in OFP, but palmtrees make me wonder, of course, it could be on another island... The island(s) may exist somewhere, knowing BIS to recreate things, like islands, buildings, etc.. in OFP, however I didn't find it either...yet . But I do ask myself, will BIS create it like Nogova, or did they do the same as with kolgujev looking like tenerife? (they made Nogova with a number of real places, and put those all in one map, which resulted in Nogova)

well ricochet was already in OFP; if you are standing next to a vehicle, and keep shooting at it, you'll die, same as when you look down to the ground and fire of your gun, you'll die after a while. The shots are less effective I believe but not much.

It is possible they have another big island north of Sarah, not showed on the screen of it in the blog. You can see the roads on the island, and according to that, you can count the number of villages/cities. I think there are about 12 cities/villages on the south part and 13 on the north side. On nogova you have 25 cities/villages I think. So this is not much difference for an island that should be 4 times bigger then nogova... edit: Something that could be interesting from will's blog : so different islands if you ask me.

Don't forget it probably was a demo from, yet again, december , the same time those videos came out. So it's very likely things have improved already. It had to be a great experience though, I wish I would have been that person

I certainly will play co-op, still my favourite, some CTI could be nice aswell. I wonder what other multiplayer modes BIS will have put in. I'm always open for new things

ehm, they even increased it with hiring placebo. I think they are doing very good. The game has no publisher yet, and it's the publisher that do the PR, not BiS. Bis never told much. Bis is surely listening to the fans, so their PR is good.

I have no problems it would be digitally distributed, but not with steam, and I think many people agree with that. There is a big difference. I just want to download it, and install it, to then play it, without any other program being installed or modify it. A release in a torrent is just fine for me. I just don't see Arma released on steam anyway(and the story that it costs less is not that true)

Well first off, if you use a protection like starforce, you first need to know if it can go allong with the code of ArMa. Something very important you may not forget. A protection is added by the publisher most of the times, so just before release. Also more and more people see that protection doesn't stop piracy. And then the question rises, does the cost of the protection system is worth it? Same goes with music, it's not because people are downloading music, that they won't buy the CD. They simply would never buy it even if they couldn't download it. This can be because of moneyproblems etc... Protection often gives more troubles then they "protect" the game(like starforce, etc...).

I was wondering about that site, because now that CodeMasters have 'stolen' the Flashpoint name, that site is no longer valid, so wonder what's going to happen with it... But it's probably BIS that registered the domain, so codemasters won't be able to use that. Especially as they have operation flashpoint, and not flashpoint as trademark(I think).

Ehm not hard, every time you start steam they bother you with it untill you do it, so make it more like almost all users take part of it...

It is possible to attach a satchel charge to vehicles in the current OFP. Something that isn't used much, but it is used from time to time. Yes the tanks fly from time to time, but sometimes it was funny  , or dead people flying 20 m higher then the ground. A game never can be perfect. And well, Arma was always going to be an updated version of OFP, not a brand new thing.  It still has some old signs. Recently I found something quite interesting:http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011219/spanel_pfv.htm Number of Full-Time Developers: 10 Number of Contractors: 3 Estimated Budget: $600,000 Length of Development: Over 4 years Release Date: June 22 (worldwide except North America), August 29 (North America), 2001 Development Hardware (Average): Various PC systems from 266MHz Pentium IIs to 1GHz Pentium 4s and 1.2GHz Athlons with 20GB hard drives and Voodoo 2 or GeForce 2 graphics cards Development Software: Windows 98/2000, Linux servers, Visual C++ 6, SourceSafe, Adobe Photoshop 5.0, 3DS Max, Microsoft Office, TextAloud (for voice prototyping) Proprietary Software: Oxygen (3D low-polygon modeling and texturing tool), Visitor (landscape editor), and some other proprietary data conversion and packing tools Notable Technologies: DirectX, Vorbis Ogg, Vicon 8 motion capture system Project Size: 10,000+ files, 250,000 lines of C++ (some assembly), 5,000 textures, 800 3D models, 100,000 words (localized into six other languages), more than 60 single-player and multiplayer missions I really wonder what it is now.

you don't even know what they are talking about, it's to vague, and you already decide to not buy the game, then what's the point posting here, they won't change it.

perhaps you could use a seagate tool: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html (if you still can boot) otherwise you could use a bootable floppy: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/download/seatoold_en.exe also available for a bootable CD: bootable image of seagate tools

I don't think you'll be able to change groups during the play, but only at the start of mission. So you can play it being a medic, or a LAW-soldier or pilot or something else, not swap during the mission(that would be bad in my opinion and I don't see how they do the story then) But anyway, it's multiplayer that is the most important thing for me, especially co-op, and I don't think that is in it, except that you can choose your role at the start of it.(so I guess the same in SP)

all hail steam, I want to play a bit of DoD:s, and I constantly get messages: This game is currently unavailable, please try again later...wtf...

You don't really know what the unit switching exactly is. If they mean you play a mission as a pilot, then another mission as a black-op then again as a normal soldier. This was already in the original campaign of OFP, and it was quite nice as it teached you to fly, drive, fire other guns/vehicles/planes/choppers.

Well the more explosives you put, the bigger the explosion... the more satchels you put, the bigger the explosions get, no?

Yes, sara is indeed the name of the new island. But I think that Sara will be too big to include in a demo. Of course, they could use a part of it.

Hello, I haven't seen any information about the AI in ArMa. Something that sometimes bothered me in OFP was the AI doing crazy things like not driving straight, stayed on the same place, having a hard time boarding a vehicle with making a huge walk and so on. I heared that the AI in OFP:E was improved alot, and you even needed them for information about the enemy, but will there be things like interaction, talking(like in ECP), hand signals perhaps? This is quite impossible to see on the screenshots,and well,it is quite important in multiplayer and single player in my opinion. So I was wondering if somebody knew anything about it.

It's done when it's done(very known sentence), and it's better to hide all the information for the people, so that they don't know everything that they want to make, but cannot make or other things like that. It helps to not frustrate people when the game comes out. And why, oh why would you advertise for an unreleased game... People would be interested for a week maybe 2, then to notice the game only comes out half 2006, so they buy another game and forget about it. And , imagine they announce the game being released in 2 weeks!wooaaa,, everybody glad and such,to then see it postponed to another date. These things are not nice for the people, and they get bored... This doesn't happen if you don't release much information, and keep it for when it's ready for in the stores.