Madus_Maximus

I think I lol'd myself haha. There's some damn good shooping involved there. They must have got the same guy Iran used for their missile launch tests.

I'm afraid I know of no such books, but check out Amazon for "game design" and "game programming" and so on, I'm sure you'll find a bunch on there. Also, you may want to change the topic title, it doesn't really reflect what you're asking, which may explain the lack of replies.

To be fair, it kind of fits with Syndicate. I can't see it fitting with ArmA though. I'd love for BIS to make use of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, seeing as they're local and all lol.

Here be one I conjured up in my spare time lol. I've made them as 1920 x 1200 and 1920 x 1080, so they should easily scale properly with the majority of people's resolutions and their respective ratio. 1920 x 1080 1920 x 1200 Enjoy!

Oh well, good luck to them trying to steal whatever tech was in it, they can't even manage to make decent missiles even when the Russians gave them the blueprints. Their Photoshop skills are a little more impressive however.

What's all this crap about BIS having such "limited resources" and so on? Their team is pretty huge these days, and they have NATO as a customer for christ sake! I mean seriously! They know what they're doing. They've been giving us the improvements they've added to VBS for years now, and it doesn't look like that'll stop any time soon. They've recently done a pretty drastic improvement to their air simulation such as dynamic view distances and so on and improved the flight model. I know there's only a certain amount they can do for a civilian game, but they're working with and for the most powerful military alliance in human history to simulate these things. Have faith people.

Wouldn't that involve an OS level work around and rely entirely on how much RAM you have beyond what the game generally needs? The easier option is to just get an SSD. Problem solved. The main issue in performance is down to how fast the stuff can be sent to the GPU and so on, and that bottleneck is 99% of the time the storage device. An SSD will reduce this bottleneck substantially, just like a RAMDISC does, because it's the same concept.

People have been bitching at BIS to add this for the last decade, they finally do, and people bitch they've added it. What is it to be? No wonder BIS are so quiet most of the time, they know people will whine no matter what they choose. If you want an example of a game that implemented it next to perfectly then look at Hidden & Dangerous 2. That thing had the best implementation of it I've ever seen. Bodies had mass and hit the ground like a sack of potatoes when they died, like real bodies do. Most games with it aren't realistic because the games themselves aren't. They're mostly arcade style, so they go with the over the top stupid stuff. If you do it right, then the results are amazing.

Compare the gear we went into Iraq with and what we're using now. It's changed to almost unrecognisable levels for a lot of it. We use totally different camo's, different helmets, different webbing... The US went in with M16's and it's rare you see them now, it's all some variant of the M4A1 no matter the branch. The SA80's we use now use ACOG instead of SUSAT, they're fitted with RAS plates and use bits made for the SOPMOD project. Things change, it hasn't even been 10 years since then, and things are already quite different. Who's to say things won't change as much as they have by the date ArmA 3 is set? The story is they've been at war for a while. Things change very quickly when you're at war. Improvements are rushed into service and costs are cut where possible, so you end up with things you'd normally not have during peace time or under less stressful periods of budgeting.

There's only some many times you can pit a brand new totally cutting edge latest thing in military tech M1A2 TUSK upgraded to the balls against a 70's era, manufactured in the Ukraine cheap ass poorly maintained T72. With this story it gives them the chance to show the best the world and their respective opponents have to offer on a more level playing field. The use of many of the things in the screenshots and so on can be easily explained by the storyline. It's set in the not too distant future, they've been at war for some time. Things like the Comanche for example may have been cancelled, but they still exist and are a very viable option when fighting an equally advanced enemy. They were scrapped because we've been fighting farmers and militia with less equipment than your average American private citizen and they just simply aren't needed for those kind of conflicts. There's room for artistic license, it's a game remember. Most people don't buy BIS games for the campaign, they buy them because they're massively moddable and have a mission editor built right in so you can create any scenario you can think up pretty much. They're just giving us a much bigger selection of gear to use by doing things this way. Don't whine that they're giving us more content on the grounds of "but it's not accurate to how things are NOW!". People would whine at them even if they did that, likely the same people, complaining about the lack of content for mission makers. BIS are giving us a solid foundation for us to create our OWN scenarios and our OWN extra content. If you want total accuracy of the current state of things, then go for it, the engine and game assets will make the best platform for us to do such things, just like their previous (and current) games do.

The engine is actually capable of streaming unlimited sized maps apparently, it's just that so far nobody has really bothered to put the time and effort into making truly massive terrains for us to play on. I remember someone working on a map of Australia back in ArmA 1, but I've not idea what came of it, my guess is they gave up because it's such a massive undertaking. Aircraft are very much needed. We don't even know how big the map will be yet or what the flight model will be like (and if it's too small... make a new, bigger one with the updated version of Visitor they're no doubt going to put out there at some point). They've done a LOT of enhancements to it for VBS and BIS love to give us those same enhancements in their civilian offering too. It annoys me how people think BIS are so incapable of doing anything, they just put them down without knowing anything it seems. We know next to nothing of the game so far, it still has a YEAR in development, a LOT can change (and will). The engine is being constantly updated and improved and it's capable of FAR more than many people seem to realise or give it credit for. Also, getting rid of aircraft would be silly. If you don't like the air aspect of things, then fine, just play it how you like. That's the great thing with BIS games, they give us huge amounts of wiggle room for us to be as creative as we like and give us the tools to make it happen. It'd be stupid and not in their interests to remove a portion of the game that adds so much to it.

I think they're just showing off the new models and stuff and aren't going for dead on accuracy for the moment. The way it looks from the images is that it's a NATO mashup, so it could simply be a truly NATO task force where they operate under the NATO banner and not their respective nations. The Merkava and so on could easily be that one of the NATO nations bought them as their new MBT, or maybe the story has Israel as a member of NATO? It's in the future, but it's still set in reality in terms of the way things work.

That may be the case, but I'd be surprised if the majority of ArmA players don't use Steam, even if they don't play ArmA through it. It's about the only way to get PC releases these days thanks to the ever dwindling PC sections in retail stores, and more and more games require it as part of their DRM schemes too, even if they get nothing from the service itself.

On top of that it's recorded from a fair distance away which distorts it even more. Stand next to it and assuming your recording device can handle it, it'll sound more like a giant "snap" followed by the release of the gasses from the barrel. Kind of like how it sounds in ArmA II.

I'm pretty certain that the main reason they're going with PhysX are: they've already implemented it into the engine for VBS2, it's a well documented and mature library. The competing libraries that run on OpenCL (and thus, both sides GPU's) is still in development and has yet to be proven. If it's possible to build the game in such a way that you can swap out the physics engine being used without a massive rewrite of the source code, I'm sure BIS will do this so it leaves them open to implement a better supported engine at some point in the future. I don't see this happening however. Maybe by the time the first expansion pack is on the cards the competing brand agnostic library will have been released, be proven and be mature enough for them to implement this instead, then charge us for it, which I'm sure people will be happy to pay for if it benefits a good number of the community. On another note. The people complaining in this thread about something we've been asking BIS to do for over a decade now is the main reason I really lost interest in the community. Back in OFP days everyone helped each other and took what we got graciously and gave constructive feedback. Now it's turned into a bunch of entitled snobs who question everything we get given with suspicion and then demand something else, or just complain for the sake of complaining.

Apocalypse Now was more about the battle against the mind that just happened to be set in a war zone. It's worth reading Heart of Darkness if you like the film, it's what they based the movie on. Stalingrad is a superb film. I found it in HMV a few years ago for a fiver and wasn't expecting much, but was plesently surprised with it's depth and atmosphere. It does a brilliant job of portraying the realities of being on the losing side of a conflict.

This looks like something Google Analytics does for website analysis. Obviously not as wide spread and comprehensive, but a good specialised example of it.

Ignore everything but the images on that page. It's written by the Daily Fail. They hate everything non Middle-Class English, so God forbid if you're a foreigner!

I think that's a little too far. If anything it'll be closer to here in the UK. It's not really censorship but ensuring it's rated accordingly for the correct age groups. Younger children are more suseptable to picking up bad behaviour than more mature people due to how the brain works. If you know anybody will small children you'll realise how simple it is for them to pick up naughty words if they hear people say them (and often put them in the correct context too lol).

The Guardian is brilliant if you're into tech and stuff.

We've had a legally binding official rating system here in the UK for decades called the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification). They rate visual media like films, TV and games. It's part of the law. You have to submit your works to them for classification or it can't legally be sold within the UK. Games have a little more leway with the "PEGI" system, which is a GUIDANCE system rather than legally binding, but games still have to go through the BBFC if they contain large amounts of violence and so on. It's illegal to sell products to people under the age of the rating with the posibility of criminal prosecution if you're caught doing it, so shops are rather strict on asking for ID to avoid losing their licence and stuff (much like places that sell alcohol can lose their licence to sell it if they're caught selling to minors). I'm quite shocked this wasn't already a law in the US. It makes total sense to have it. It'll also reduce the claims of many of these people and groups who say games are corrupting our children! They shouldn't be playing them (or able to get them) if they're under the age of the rating, so that leaves the parents or someone they know over that age to buy it them, someone who should (in theory) know better.

I'm pretty sure the last releases (the original ones at least) came out on PC before the console versions, and at the very least were simultaniuous launches. All but the fourth came out on PC (think the fourth was a PSP exclusive).

I notice an instrumental (and remix) of F.E.A.R. by Ian Brown in the background of that video, so thumbs up there. CM have generally made reasonable racing games, if not a little samey. I'll wait for a demo.

The problem there is the vast majority of PC releases are mediocre at best these days. They're either poorly made console ports (either poor buggy code like GTA 4 for example, or just no thought of the difference in play style/control the PC has), or just poor in general. You get one or two good games coming out every year if you're lucky. I wouldn't even class the others as fillers with the tripe that hits the shelves. Just looking on Steam shows how bad it is. There's hardly anything out there. I wouldn't mind so much if they did some extra work on the PC version. How hard is it to add say going prone and leaning into FPS's? It's not like we play against console players so there's no advantage to be gained from it. There's just way too much mediocrity these days. The game industry has become like the film industry. Just pump out unoriginal crap with shiny effects, or remake older stuff with the new shiny effects then market the hell out of it and ignore the actual game part of the product. Rinse and repeat. I'm greatful for developers like BIS who seem to understand that games are more than just a marketing campaign designed to sell as many copies as possible in a short time span before people work out what they just bought isn't really that good. BIS seem to do it for the long haul. I'm sure they get a somewhat steady stream of sales over time rather than a massive spike on release then that's about it. BIS games are like a fine wine, they mature and get better with age (sounds corny but it's true). Let's wait and see. Things like this Live online game streaming thing may push things in the right direction.