NeMeSiS

Buy ArmA3 a million times because it is ArmA3, not because of a mod. :p

And for driving cars, which gave us many hilarious jokes. But yeah... Still better than sausage-party island though.

Now that is the kind of story we want to hear. ;) It seems like BI had more ambition with ArmA2. With ArmA3 they seemed to go the 'less but polished' route, and apparently women didn't fit into that vision. I think it is a shame, immersion took a big hit. (Not just from a lack of women)

I thought it was pretty nice if you ever need to waste 30 minutes or so. Only thing i dont like is the limited inventory space combined with the 'losing my clothing because of a zombie and all my items disappearing', which keeps me from playing again for now. The advice is to gather a flashlight, wood and matches in the first 10 minutes? Can't, dont even have the pocket space. :D

Maybe not the best standard of measuring greatness, it just means that people in Mexico would rather live in the US than Guatemala. :p Anyway, this topic seems to me made purely for bothering Americans and their perceived greatness, which is kinda stupid. We also don't really need much discussions about it, in most statistical rankings the US does roughly (above) average compared to other first world countries.

Hold fire does not stop them from firing if they are already spotted, so stealth is already out of the window at that point. (They may open fire before the enemy does, but only after the enemy spotted them)

This. It wouldnt be nearly as scary if you could save and load at any time. Consequences are fun. That said: I do play on easy, because i have other things to do besides trying a level 300 times. :p Anyway, the game looks quite alright, but i really miss some anti-aliasing. Without the jaggies this game would look absolutely stunning. I tried to get some downsampling to work, but failed.

That explains SO MUCH. I though he was the first to use some kind of new coding magic since OFP was released. :) Still cool though.

I have absolutely no clue how he did this, i am amazed.

You didnt mention the name of the TV program, but have you tried http://www.imfdb.org/ ?

Games ruined me enough to make me believe that rivers are just very long ponds. :p

I ran it on a very old (163GB) HD and had no such stutter (SSD too full, other HD just died), maybe a lack of VRAM.

I liked and would definitely play more games like this, though not for 20€. At times i got a bit annoyed because the directions were either to vague, or completely non-existent. At one point i had been aimlessly walking around for an hour or so and decided to google a walkthough, because i could not find . I had been stumbling around it multiple times, but just didn't see it. EDIT: Also: Best window-textures ever.

Last Light is kinda weird though, the first one has better story, atmosphere and gunplay IMO. Something just felt off about the second one. I still like both and they achieve what they are trying to be: Linear, story driven FPS. Anyway: Fallout3. I loved Fallout2 but i get the feeling that Bethesda just didn't grasp the atmosphere of the previous games. The design is very kiddy, the combat is boring and i just didnt get into it at all. It also suffers from a bad case of 'frosting shader' making the graphics look shitty. Though i guess i am the only one who feels this way.

That is correct. But they do govern a level of behaviour concerning the whole 'bounding overwatch' and stuff. If you let 2 squads run in combat mode, and you disableAI "FSM" one of the groups you will see a big difference in speed. Unfortunately no FSM at all makes them a bit too stupid for any purpose, maybe even 'run for your life'.

Well, ive been working on that myself, but getting it to work well enough consistently enough in any generic situation proved rather difficult, while something like 'Dont engage, use static guns' is usually generic enough to be implemented safely. Problems i ran into: Figuring out good buildings, especially before enemies are detected, calculating which buildingPos's make sense to use*, deciding when to enter or leave a building, ... *Once i had this brilliant idea of lineIntersects from nearby buildingPos's to every known enemy and figuring out the best postions from that. Occasionally it worked brilliantly with units shooting from balconies all by themselves, but more often it took the AI too long and whatever they did would just be a pointless detour. Also, lineIntersects supposedly isnt very FPS friendly. @Variable, i tried to keep the suggestions as down to earth as possible. The defend behaviour is something i already use and is easy to do. The convoy one needs some engine changes, as 2 different behaviours in a group/vehicle are not currently possible, but switching AI driver pathfinding behaviour for a single predefined condition shouldnt be all that hard. ProfTournesols suggestion for a simplified combat FSM during assault behaviour seems very elegant.

Ive been thinking about this a bit, and what i would like to see is a second set of behaviour modes with modes like - Defend (DisableAI TARGET/AUTOTARGET, and automatically enter nearby turrets) - Convoy (AI drivers in careless mode, gunners in combat mode, currently impossible) - Assault/charge (No such behaviour ingame, but a 'fucking hurry up mode while still able to shoot' is desperately needed) - Default (Allround behaviour we have now) - More ideas welcome This would be seperate from the normal behaviour modes (safe, combat, ...) and you would be able to set these behaviours from the mission editor, as well as the command menu. Determining when what behavior is desired is pretty much impossible, there are just too many variables. But making it easy to set the desired behaviour for a commander/mission editor would go a long way.

I see the term 'campus rape' (or something similar) flash by occasionally when checking out US news, but i always assumed it was exaggerated (like everything else on US news..). Is it really such a big problem, or is this app just a big joke? Because it seems ridiculous.

This is one of those problems that just goes away if everyone just shrugs and goes 'Who gives a shit'. I dont understand why anyone cares, or why Zoey Quinn set it off.

You can also just imagine that the AI spotting and targeting values are tweaked for dirty sights. :p

I would like to expand on this a bit: There are several 'layers' to the AI: The bottom layer is hardcoded, and contains the low-level stuff like making AI play animations when moving, line-of-sight calculations, low-level behaviour, and pathfinding (calculating the actual path the AI takes). AFAIK the decions AI leaders make are also here. On top of that there are FSMs: These mostly govern behaviour, stuff like bounding overwatch during combat mode, engaging targets, etc. These can be changed, but i dont know to what extent the default ones can be accessed in ArmA3. I am not aware of any addons touching these, but i have been somewhat absent lately. I have tried this in the past (ArmA1 mostly, bit in ArmA2, IIRC it was introduced in ArmA1) but i found it very difficult to get a measurable improvement, and i assume most modders had the same experience. (A lot of people are much more talented than i am, so without any mods changing this for the better i am going to assume that it is impossible to do without getting paid to do it 40 hours a week) And on top of that there is another layer: Orders, like forced behaviour modes, waypoints(not the same as pathfinding, this decides where the AI should go, not how they move there) or targets given by the mission editors or scripts. Most AI addons exist in this space, and basically pile the desired behaviour on top of what is already there, and can clearly get some good results. Besides that there are a whole lot of configuration settings that govern things like spotting ability, engagement ranges and formation distances that influence AI behaviour. A lot of good AI addons also change these.

You could also make an addon that initializes that command on every unit automatically, which should work fine for SP.

+1 The game is currently in much, much better shape than when it 'officially'* came out and would have been received a lot better than it was. So support is pretty decent, even though it takes like 2 years to receive just 1 of the 15 most requested features. :p *As in not-alpha/beta, though that really didnt help.

Unfortunately you cant know beforehand where the best cover is until you are being engaged. Like when you put down a bunch of objects as cover and an AI group in combat mode (without revealing enemies to them), and they take cover on both sides of the objects since at that point there is no 'good' side yet, because there are no one to hide form yet.

While i am greatly in favor of offloading pathfinding to the GPU, there is more to ArmA AI than just pathfinding and you should not expect results anywhere near a techdemo.