Lange

*grin* yeahh i know that way. but i havent tried it after the arrow did not change although it was over the window-edge. then i read somewhere that the arrow wont change and so i did ignore it and tried resizing it and it worked. hmm a bit unusual to play in a window, but it runs smooth on "nearly" 1680x1050 while a complete xp professional machine is emulated in the background running my fax and scan station. ArmA everything on maximum. now lets wait for the hopefully soon coming 4gb/ati-patch and im a lot more lucky man. Simon

Yes, this is already confirmed, it happens with ATI cards in full-screen mode only. Until we provide a fix, the workaround is to run windowed, or to limit the memory on boot. Yeah found it out meanwhile that it runs in window mode - but how can i adjust the size of the window? in the video options there is no settings for it and the commandline switch -x -y dont seem to work. anything i have missed? regards Simon PS: Any schedule for the ati fix? btw: congrats that you finally decided to fix that annoying 64bit4gb problem. i was positively suprised when i read that that particular problem has been fixed. at least you working on it. i got to admit that i gave up last year. do you know that i have ArmA since day0 as collectors edition and preordered it those days and never played it till today?! never had a chance to, because of the 4gb problem? finally i can at least lurk into it. and hopefully i can play it fullscreen in near future.

Well the blackscreen bug is still there along with millions of... "Error: Failed to create surface texture" ...lines in the report file. ONLY workaround is running ArmA as windowed and not fullscreen. But that is useless because u cannot even change size of the window. However, is it that hard to fix the 4gb issue once and for all time? Changelog said it has been fixed. That was the only reason i gave ArmA another chance since november2007 .... but it still has the bug. any chance that it will be fixed? SysPecs: Vista Ultimate x64 Phenom 9850 BE 8GB RAM ATI Radeon 4870 Simon

Although Patch 1.14 is fresh installed as the whole game is, i still have the old ArmA 4GB+ bug. i got the black screen issue! the log is filled over and over with this line: "Error: Failed to create surface texture" until i kick the arma.exe process!!! My Systemspecs: Phenom 9850 BE 8GB RAM Vista Ultimate x64 ATI Radeon 4870 Im a bit wondered that the changelog of ArmA says the "vista x64 4gb" bug has been solved but still have an issue with ArmA - btw: exactly the very same as last year, when we did found out that ArmA has primary an issue with 4GB and not with vista itself. Simon

Jeez, learn reading. Windows can address even more than 4GB. only limitation are the 32bit os which can max address 4gb using PAE. seems u dont have a clue what you are writing about. im going to ignore your posts now since they dont even worth reading them since you are not reading posts and stating weird ideas which focus is only to blame anyone but BIS. unprofessional indeed. Simon

it is not. just read. seems that you are another uncovered fanbot. the results you are refering are a complete other scenario (getting 4gb usable under 32bit os). its a bis issue. just read and understand what there has been written. ps: if it WOULD be a windows issue, explain why ArmA is the ONLY program that is "affected"?! you cant since the evidence and reproducable bugs are pointing to BSI blaming them, since (A) only ArmA has such an issue (B) the only factor producing that particular bug is 4GB ram and more AND running ArmA © no other game is known havin such an issue. no matter what windows version. These are unbreakable facts you cannot ignore. no matter how hard you try.

Wrong its also in XP. You would know this if you would have read my posts carefully. ArmA is currently the ONLY game havin that issue.

Well the issue is not a vista issue. its a BIS issue. sickboy cannot read as it seems since the questions he stated i already mentioned in my post before! but as far as i can see he is just another fanbot without arguements. Why else he would state arguements which are already proven not true. he and other fanbots should consider the often quoted package's minimal requirements. minimal by definition means MINIMAL and not exactly or maximum. means. if there stand 2000/xp as minimum, vista is still supported since it is the NEXT version (higher version and not lower! of 2000 and xp. so if someone would try to run the piece of software on NT ME or 98 those fanbots were right. (cannot believe that i have to teach them that logical lesson again). its the same logic as we can expect that recent gfx cards do run and not only the mentioned (on the package) ATI Radeon 9500 (and the equal nvidia competitor). Same goes for memory. there is NO sign that there is a memory limit. they - again - tell you only of MINIMAL requirements. the bug is not bound to a specific nvidia or ati driver issue. it is a pure BIS bug. fanbot may consider reading the meaning of "preproducable bug". REPRODUCABLE on different machines. only factor that causes that bug is the amount of available memory. and the fact, that other games DONT HAVE that issue. so the question is is BIS want to fix this or if they want to lose their already damaged reputation completely. with operation flashpoint they blamed Codemasters for many decisions. this time they cannot blame anyone but themself. Especially since many old behaviour shows up again at BIS. so the only way to refurbish their reputation is listening to the market rules and the customers voices and not only to the weird logic of subjective ground reasons. so again, explain why other games dont have that issue. explain why ArmA has an issue with 4GB+ RAM explain why the dont fix it although this bug is known for nearly a year (just look for the blackscreen bug yourself, dude) most ppl wouldnt be that upset if BIS would say something like "hey, we know about the bug and we are working on it but cannot tell you when the fix will be there, but we ensure that this bug will be solved." but telling ppl they can put their game in the trashcan since BIS has their money is a rude and stupid attitude. especially if BIS is not right in their arguements. Simon

then they should communicate this. but ignoring the complaints of customers and not doing anything is the wrong way how to treat customers.

Frankly, this does not make any sense to me. We are not performing any video memory remapping - fact it, even if we would be crazy enough like to try to do things like this, we would not know how to do it. All we do is we use Win32 + DirectX APIs which handle all of this on their own. Well, then explain why - if the system has more or equal 4GB RAM - ArmA has trouble creating texture surfaces and spamming the logfile with that errormessage?! Other games using win32 + and directx too and dont have an issue with 4gb systems. To be accurate: Armed Assault is worlwide (as far as known) the ONLY Windows-based Game havin such an issue. No matter if ppl use nvidia, ATI or S3 gfx, its always the same REPRODUCABLE bug. if you got 4gb or more, ArmA does produce the black screen bug (even in the menu you dont have ANY textures). If you disable them (as described in this thread or using the bios switch OR removing them), ArmA does not have that blackscreen bug anymore. this is being validated reproducable under XP 64bit and Vista 64bit. (32bit OS wouldnt have that bug since they are not able to address 4gb and more ram) This bug is known for nearly a year and no bugfix or hotfix in sight. when will it be fixed?! the package didnt told us maximum versions and maximum ram amount. Simon

Well, the responsible item has been identified meanwhile at german official support website. it seems that BIS's ArmA has an issue with system havin 4GB or more running. Since PC architecture needs remapping for accessing high memory address ranges, most boards do the remap automaticly or have a switch for it in the bios (e.g. memory hole, ...). if you want to use 4gb or more you need to enable that switch. the PCs/OSs memory remapping collides with BIS's unusual way how they remap videomemory to the mainmemory of the system. they just developed ArmA too close to the hardware. now they got the answer of the PC - the got a memory bug in the engine (good work!. so until BIS is solving this somewhere in the year of 2030 in a parallel universum where coders decide to code stable code and not fast ugly code, we the paying customers have to decide if we want to have an unstable system (due the fact that we are banned from using recent vid-drivers (e.g. the guy with that cat7.4 wont have fun with other games e.g. bioshock)) or we have to limit ourselfes to UNDER 4gb memory (max 3gb). well, OR we have to ban BIS products until they learn their lessons. just try it out urself. disable 4gb+ memory (e.g. disabling memory hole function) and suddenly the texture creation bug (aka blackscreen bug) is gone and you can enjoy all the other ArmA bugs (sloppy performance on highend systems, dx10 bug, wrong arms physics, stupid ai, ...) Besides: those who have 4gb and have it running are lucky bastards since they have the rare condition where the remapping does NOT overlap. its a lottery game. you could have luck that it will work with 4gb+ on ur system too, but the chances are real low. i have spoken with lots of ArmA 4gb ppl and read a lots of forums on this globe and if i had to tell a number i would say that at least 99% of all 4GB users have that issue. ah well, and those who say its an vista issue. same bug shows on xp64. and those who say that xp64 or vista are not supported... (1) the call it MINIMAL requirements NOT exactly requirements (2) a 9800 is higher as a 9500 and a HD2900 is higher than a X1800, but you are not forced to use a 9500 (3) vista superiors xp. if ppl would use win95 or 3.11 they were right, but since vista is the comon and actual used os and their package does not say "NOT RUNNING WITH VISTA" (just see point1) they have to support it. (4) on the package is NO indication sayin that you must not use 4GB+. it only says MINIMAL requirements!!! not maximum possible environment! and now take ur rocks. those may throw who are not guilty. Simon

Hi, Fresh installed OS. An absolutely virgin of ArmA. Installed ArmA Installed the lates 1.05 Patch. Started ArmA and all i get is a lowresolution fullscreened BLACK Screen with a mouse in the middle of it. No Intro No Game Nothing! Just a arma process taking ~100mb memory and full processortime of both cores. Drivers are the latest for all enviromental devices of the machine including devices as gfx sound and so on. I have tried running ArmA as Administrator -> No Change I have tried running ArmA in Compatiblity Mode -> No Change I tried using -nosplash -> no Change I tried using -maxmem 512 -> no Change I even reinstalled the whole game including different patch procedures (1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.05 or 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.05 or 1.0 -> 1.05) --> NO CHANGE! Unneccessary to tell that other games as Steam-Based, BF2 incl all AddOns, Gothic3, Quake IV, Americas Army, STALKER, ... DO RUN properly as expected. Only Issue is ArmA! System Specs: AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ 4GB RAM ATI Radeon X1800XT 512MB Creative AUDIGY II Platinum MS Vista Ultimate 64bit Any Advice but reinstalling os or downgrade to xp is welcome. best regards Simon /EDIT: Almost forgot: there are no errors anywhere. Just a arma process that does nothing but putting a black fullscreen in lowres.

a few but not all. i did found several threads havin similar issues and no solution so far. my hardware had no issue. and please explain me the "load" when starting the game! (load caused by what? a prerendered lowres animation of the publisher? displaying a gamemenu?! you cant be serious! as written i have other load causing games running and not one has similar or just nearly similar symptoms as ArmA. thank god that i would never buy such crap hardware of dell or alienware. hmm and why should a mobo bios affect arma?! especially under vista?! under xp it did run (although i never had tried 1.05 since it wasnt there when i bought arma, only 1.01 were available that time) will you tell us that arma does access the hardware layer of any device including the mobo chipset? (if so, shoot the developers! i already tried several drivers but no change there (as expected) well since there is no sound or any other gfx when STARTING the game (i do not even get the animation of the publisher/studio) - all i get is a black screen. only the beta patch passes the start (but without any publisher/studio intro) and displaying an untextured menu which is working but since it is untextured you cannot use it since u dont know what is what. i can easely exclude gpu and mobo since the same hardware under xp works with arma. under vista there are no special drivers neccessary for the mobo. so forget the mobo path - its a dead end. the gpu - well, possible but since other ppl have the same gpu including same drivers and running arma i guess there must be some other source of the problem (copyprotection?). i read meanwhile that arma has *laughing* problems with multihead setups, so i did try to disable second and third display but that did not change anything too. maybe some of the ppl running the game with similar hardware may post what ati driver exactly they are using, if they switch somethnig off for the game, if they tried to configure the game by hand and not via the menu, special startup parameters. in the english forums i found a guy havin exactly the same hardware as i have but the amount of memory (he had only 2gb) and it did work. he had the SAME configuration as i have including (btw) the mobo bios version and he didnt use any mobo drivers as well since it is not neccessary because MS does support our board natively. ONLY difference was he was using 1.06 since he is in the US. im from germany and im stucked with 1.05 or 1.05beta. NACK, lots of games are running smoother. btw: i dont even know supreme commander so i guess its not worth lookin at. thats why i tried them. but the mainproblem ist the start itself and THERE is no 3d world not even anything comparible. i get the checked boxes - then the screen becomes black (lowres fullscreen) and the mouse is in the middle. then nothing happens. the process does not respond anymore but does not crash. it does not try to load the game or its content - no diskactivity at all. only change was 1.05beta but that had the menu issue. you see it seems its THIS TIME a lil bit more complicated as blaming the hardware. its the game, dude. Simon

ARMA still hates Vista on some hardware setups, Â either your MOBO, GPU etc still has Vista Drivers that hate ARMA. Supreme Commander should be fine ;} Try different ATI drivers for Vista and Nforce drivers for your Mobo. But if that doesn't work install a dual XP boot, Â or plonk in an old HD and shove XPSP2 on that for ARMA, Â Rainbow 6 etc etc and the 40-50% of unpatched XP games that still hate Vista (64 still seems to have more issues than vanilla 32 bit home). In 6 months probably won't be an issue, Â but kinda nice to play stuff now well mobo wontbe the issue since it is the most stable one on thr market. i prefered stability against performace. already tried different drivers but no change. honestly i didnt expect anyother. mobo drivers. well. first dont have since my board is native supported by vista out of the box, 2nd this is a real nvidia free place (u remember? stability). on the other hand: since i dont even get the menu wit 1.05 (1.05beta gets the menu but its broken) i dont see what mobo drivers or even gpu drivers have to do wit it, since u dont need shaders - not even 3d - do display a menu. well xp is no option. aight, but the stuff isnot named arma... bf2 is running... even ofp but not arma... shameful simon

i can verifiy that using multihead display setup under vista causes ArmA to fail loading textures!!! guess BIS has to do their homework REALLY QUICK!!! they cannot expect ppl downgrade their hardware enviroinment because they are not able to code.

Update: If i apply 1.05BETA it does start. But the Resolution is pretty low and all textures of the menu are missing. i cannot set anything (gfx sound options whatsoever) since i dont see them and cannot figure out what is where since everything is just black and not textured. Anyone?! Please!

the topic does say it. for a game released Q4 2006 it has a lack of present and comon technology. may we get some eta when we can expect delivery of those missing must-have features?! Simon

Well, although i think MSFlightX is not a good example, you are right that not every game or simulation has multithreading and 64bit support. But the point is that we dont talk about MS and its Flight Simulator. We are talking about ArmA. Just for the files: Half-Life (yes even HL1) and HL2, Battlefield2, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six Vegas, Americas Army, Gothic 3, ALL Unreal Engine based Games since Unreal1 are multithreaded, Ofcourse ID Software's Quake IV Engine, ... we could expand this list a lot more. multithreadin is complex and complicated but that is the comon business of professional developers. im pretty sure that adding multithreading afterwards is rarely possible due the immense amount of time (and money). just take it as some kind of critics for the responsible head-of of this project. usually when development has begnu multithreading should have stood on the list. even when ofp was recent, there already was known that intel and amd would produce multicore processors for the consumer market. also classic smp systems (multiprocessor boards) were already pretty popular. so i dont think ppl would understand reactions as "oops, how we should know?!". well 64bit does not only achieve addressing. offering 64bit optimized code also offers native code. running 32bit code on a 64bit machine means that the processor has to "emulate" the opcodes of the program which is not as fast as running it on a native 32bit processor. also moving large amounts of memory is a lot more faster on a recent 64bit machine. wasting that advantage just because there is no 64bit optimization is a little frustrating. there are good examples for performance increasing just by adding 64bit support. best known example is hl2 of valve. when they decided to add 64bit native support and did release it, their technology demo did run up to 40% faster just because of the optimized code - on a single core 64bit processor. so its not logical to say that such an improvement is impossible to ArmA. however, Paul Statham himself said that up to the last second of release features will be added and enhanced. the engine of the game and processor support (64bit) or even mt support is a comon feature and not a rare thing. this is not meant as some kind of offense. we enjoy the game-concept and simulation capabilities. BUT getting an oldfashioned engine in Q4 2006 with no support for 64bit or multicore machines while most of the present games DO support one of those (sometime both) features is a little bit disappointing, especially if you think about those dramaticly raised expectations created by your public relations department. (just reread press releases or interviews) just my point of view Simon

Sorry, no! its slow its buggy and it does not provide a linux dedicated server. no it did not meet my biggest expectations so far. not better. afaik. let me reflect again if im through... well, before testing this we need a server - not a listenmode server. laggy, buggy: XP Pro SP2 AMD Athlon64 X2 4800 2GB RAM ATI Radeon X1950XT 512MB ATI Radeon X1800XT 512MB AudigyII Platinum No, shes on the way to BIS HQ to cut some heads off.... i did, u better start running.... Simon

a few is not correct. nearly all 3d rich rendering games use multicore. even games that are 1+ years old already had multicore support (doom3, quake4,...) Jesus, we are glad that BIS did not us 8086 code on our highend machine since they never advertised to use our specific machines. excuse our ignorance that we did EXPECT that a game which is advertised to be released in the beginning of 2006 and then delayed beside other reasons to include new technologies (statement of BIS after E3) is using state of the art techniques for processing data (e.g. first core for ai and second for gfx/sound management). you described the current situation since arma does NOT support symetric multiprocessing! consider a book about multithreaded development and its benefits.... you wanna tell us that the eastern block is still there and eastern technologie is 1 year delayed?! SCNR first dualcore optimizer is just a consumer directive to exclude a rarely problem which can cause slightly performance issues (nothing you would recognize especially not in a game which does NOT support multicore). everything the "optimizer" does you can do by hand by editing your boot.ini dude. second, you can optmizer as much as you want. if the programm actually does not supoprt mc (better is not written multithreaded) you wont have any worthy performance boost. nice try, dude. however, arma has a lack of state of the art technology. it looks like a game released 2 years ago. it works like a game released 2 years ago (except it has the "bug"-state of a fresh released game). even unreal (yes PART 1) already had multicore or better smp support which is the same. doom3 quake4 nfs-carbon, halflife2 (and all its derivates)... and lots more do have multicore support. also noone understands why there is no 64bit (native! support. its not that hard to implement this if you understand your job and know how to (cross-)compile. so, understand threre is no logical excuse for BIS. they made a mistake along with many more (e.g. no competent quality assurance or how do you call a qa team which oversees significant bugs which accur on first sight?!, BUT (!!! mistakes are not a problem IF they admit their mistakes AND do release fixes ASAP. also more transparency telling the community what is the progress for patches and what will be included with it would flaten the waves a lil more. we wait and meanwhile dont bother us with excuses a professional can only laugh about. there is no excuse for missing 64bit or even worse missin multicore support - especially for a game which would benefit that much of it. regards Simon

Assume... lol (1) when ofp came out there was NO linux server (2) the linux server came too late for ofp when most ppl turned already their back to ofp due the lack of linux server binaries (3) even today there is NO actual linux binary for OFP® so you assume that there will be a server binary for linux from the beginning?! optimist! Simon

linux server with NO graphical interaction. it MUST run shell only. linux server must be updated as fast as any other server binary that is released several linux binaries for different architectures (intel, amd, 64bit, smp, ...) should be tested with fedora debian and slackware (and gentoo). should place a pidfile should check icmp ping at connection time so ppl can be droped if they have too high lattency. anticheat as punkbuster server binaries as long with ALL neccessary files should be distributed free. no hoster should be forced to buy a client just to upload gfx/snd/models/maps to the server. im sure there are more features that are important.

well its a matter of fact and experience that people acting not as clever as ai in multiplayer games - especially in tactical ones. 99% acting like taliban with bombbelts: running towards killing sum, and be killed. i prefer the 1% which know how to act like a real mil. how to secure, defend and hold positions, respecting the commanding structure and knowing that an order IS an order and not a recommendation. first rule for all players should be: the teammate's life is more important than mine. second rule ist that i have to save my life since i cannot secure my mate's six when im dead. third, dont let mates behind enemy lines and never alone. teamwork! but just check any gameserver out there. first stupid argument you hear is: its public, teamwork does not work. well if everybody thinks like that then it IS. but teamwork can begin with 2 ppl acting as a team. you will be suprised how fast other mates joining your "team". teams win, egofraggers die. however that bad attitude makes no difference what game. quake2 3 4 doom3 hl hl2 cs css dod dods joint operations and yes even ofp or americas army are affected by those... my2cents Simon ps: at lest my post scriptum shall be ontopic. a sp/mp demo would be perfect along with a working linux server which gives future hosters an idea of ressources they may need.

i dont care for linux client versions. if they are there - good. if not, who cares. BUT what is extremely important for all client is the amount of present servers! without server you wont play online. ofp did show us what happens if the community has no proper linux server version. the ofp scene shrinked to a little underdeveloped bunch of last-standing-freaks bu the public has turned its back to ofp. its pretty - REALLY PRETTY!!! - stupid to count on windows server binaries. first, most professional hosters DO NOT USE windows servers (needs more ressources as linux server to get the same result, license costs are infinitely higher then linux "licenses", administration is not as powerful as under linux (in coe you can administrate a linux game cluster via 9600bps and a pda, try this with your "remote desktop"). but most important: there are lots more linux gameservers out there as windows servers. good example: take all windows gameservers of all games together and you wont have as much as linux halflife servers. but there are linux hl and hl2 servers, linux q2/3/4 servers, doom3 server also on linux and so on. and now tell us why the heck you ignoring the requirement to release maintenance and update linux server binaries at least as fast and good as any windows server binaries if not even the linux server binaries are lots more important since more hosters (as us for example) use linux in the first.... Simon Lange CEO Rack IT Solutions CEO theCENTER netWork

Hi everyone! Here the problem. OFP:R dies crash ALWAYS at the very same situation. First mission: after the russions did arrive in town, i am leaving the office and leaving the city to the north. when im (running/driving/whatever) the street to the north, suddenly the screen does fade to black. Guess there shall come a sequence (animation, next mission, whatever). however - after fading to black i can count 3 secs down 3 - 2 - 1 CRASH. OFP:R just quits and drops me to the desktop. No errormessage - nothing. so i have no clue what happening. Meanwhile i have tried nearly everthing: different detail settings, different resolutions, different systemsetting (swap) System: Windows XP Pro Athlon 1.2GHz 512MB RAM ATI Radeon 8500 2 x U2W LVD HDD All Drivers (GFX/SMD/Chipset) are up2date and has been validated aganst other state-of-the-art games (sof2, gta3, sum of all fears,...) guess this is a OFP:R related issue. any ideas? i cannot continue the campaign because OFP:R does ALWAYS crash at the very same point. frustrated Simon