NKato

The light vehicles we have in the alpha are obviously designed to be resistant to explosives, even of the shaped charge variety. Here are some tests I ran with different explosives on the Hunter MATV: Anti-Tank Mine: When driven over, blows out tires, and disables vehicle for five seconds prior to secondary explosion (rendering said vehicle into junk). Explosive Charge (C4): When detonated beneath it as it is driven over, same result as Anti-Tank Mine. Except damage is more critical and the vehicle detonates with fatal force before I can get away. Explosive Satchel: Same result as the Anti-Tank Mine. Except that this time, when I hit Eject, I got run over by the Hunter. Then when I laid there injured, it blew up, killing me. APERS Mine: Dinky. Ineffectual against the vehicle. Zero damage. APERS Mine (Bounding): When driven past with the Hunter, it sprang up and did damage to the tires. Still Combat-Effective. M6 SLAM Mine: Negligible Damage to the Hunter. Claymore Mine: No Damage. (Well duh, it's ball bearings.) I think that the MATV's bomb resistances need to be adjusted. My recommendations: Anti-Tank Mine: Needs to do damage to the engine and hull, while not damaging the tires. AT Mines are directional shaped charge explosives. Explosive Charge (C4): It's a concussive blast, so it should do light damage to the engine and severely damage the tires (as they are inflated with air), but still have at least some tires remain operational so that the vehicle can be driven out of the blast zone. Explosive Satchel: Same as the Explosive Charge, but with definitive disabling damage (blown tires, critically damaged engine). My main gripe with the MATV and the higher end explosives is that despite their obvious explosive-resistant designs, the vehicles are disabled far too easily. And my biggest complaint is how they explode so soon after being completely disabled. This, to me, feels inappropriate for a vehicle that does not typically carry large amounts of explosives. We have seen MRAPs in Iraq and Afghanistan survive explosions that left massive craters in the highway, and they were immobilized, but still combat effective (they have CROWS turrets) that enabled them to defend themselves in a heavy combat engagement. Therefore, I offer a solution: It would make more sense if the vehicle simply caught fire when its health reaches zero, and burned itself out over a period of time (five minutes?). This would require the use of fire extinguishers to save an MATV from total destruction, and the availability of an Engineer to repair it back to combat effectiveness. What do you think? Is this a workable solution?

Did you miss the part where the vehicle also blows up on its own five seconds later?

At this point, it feels unrealistic for heavily armored vehicles to simply combust in the form of a secondary explosion, when there are no indications that the vehicle has been carrying something particularly explosive. I would also prefer to have a higher chance of survival in these armored vehicles.

Oculus Rift support for ArmA 3, make it so! </Picard>

A battleship.

My advice to BIS is to consider completely rebuilding the AI code if they have to. In the long run (10+ years from now) it will be more beneficial to the company since they'll have a documentation policy in place at this time. Without that documentation, you may as well be staring into Pandora's Box. P.S. I don't see why they can't just, you know, rip out the old AI and replace it with xAItment like they did with VBS2. It can't be that expensive, can it?

I am already in the planning and design stages of a special mod for ArmA 3. I have a modeler lined up for production of the asset. Now, the question is...will I be able to get the programmer I need to help me with this project? ;) Here's a hint: In regards to the project, I plan on doing a separate forum thread for it, so that I can get feedback from the ArmA community on the design elements of the project. Please look forward to it! :)

I'm not talking these third-world cities. Let's take a moment and examine one of my favorite entertainment properties: Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. "Hi, I'm Tachikoma!" GITS: SAC takes place in Japan, after the Nuclear World War Three and the non-Nuclear World War Four, centered on an offensive anti-crime organization that specializes in information warfare, unconventional tactics and generally kicking ass against anyone that threatens public order. It should come as no surprise that the majority of Section 9 are ex-Military. Public Security Section 9. The smallest, most ass-kickingest Special Ops organization you'll ever know. Public Security Section 9 has access to the following large-weapons arsenal: Tachikoma Think-Tanks. (Today's equivalent of an M2 Bradley IFV) A Tilt-rotor based on the V-22 Osprey, but using rotor technology based on Kamov's helicopters. Armored Vehicles. This should give you a good idea of what to expect in a day's work of an urban-domestic special ops unit. PSS9's operations could be described as a hybrid between Rainbow Six: Vegas, SWAT 4, and other in-depth tactical games. Now, for the pitch: What if we had this kind of game experience, but set within a massive city, on an actual island? With ArmA 3's technology, I realize there will be technical and graphical limitations, but the idea is to offer replayability for players who like to play in small groups (10-12 players), which seems to be the most common playercount in servers in ArmA 2. For example, if I were leading development for an expansion to ArmA 3, I would probably develop a fictional island based on the UAE, which would conceivably have a large metropolis on the island with plenty of desert around it - kind of like a oasis. I would develop that expansion to include fast-roping, breachable buildings, flashbangs, and other tools that urban special operations often have. The storyline of the expansion would focus on Counter-Terrorism Operations, focusing on investigating and shutting down a terrorism organization that has become entrenched on the island. (And I'm talking about old-school counter-terrorism, none of that big-army bullshit we've been seeing in the past decade!) For Co-op multiplayer, there would be potential for the community to develop modes similar to Domination, except that it could be based on urban, domestic operations in that players on the team would go out to respond to random calls for assistance by local police, or respond to hostage situations, in addition to situations that would be otherwise difficult to handle for conventional police. Small-scale investigations into local crime syndicates could be another aspect of this co-op experience. For TvT Multiplayer, well. There was a scenario someone offered up to me: "What if the enemy holes up in the upper floor of a skyscraper?" My answer? C4. And lots of it. And if we don't have C4? Use an attack helicopter. I'll let your imaginations run rampant there on the possibilities for TvT multiplayer. A modern urbanized environment is not a forgiving place to be. What do you think, folks? P.S. I'm willing to put together a blueprint and a starter "design document" for modders when ArmA 3 launches, if there are people out there willing to tackle this challenge.

Let's not forget that it would be good to have overwatch snipers, people who would watch the sides of a building (the windows, to be exact) with guns ready to take out any targets when necessary. This was a feature in SWAT 4, and the concept of having people watch the building externally while a squad goes in, would be very much doable.

I just thought of something else. You know what would make this city an even worse nightmare for infantry? Subways. An underground system of sewers and mass transit networks. That would be an interesting thing for BIS to implement, and it would actually give us a real function for bunker-buster weapon systems.

One quick mission scenario for such a city map would be to be a ground soldier leading a squad, fighting against 12 enemy helicopters patrolling the city. This is reminiscent of the finale of the GITS: SAC finale for the second season. That said, I think the vehicular AI will need to be tweaked a bit for urban combat. Indiscriminately shelling a building to try to kill the people inside it would be out of the question. It would need to be done in a manner as such that the AI will only open fire when it has a confirmed line of sight on the target. This way, collateral damage is kept to a minimum. Of course, it would be a good idea to have three different AI configurations for urban warfare: "Indiscriminate" where the Ai will just blow up anything to get at the enemy, "Discretionary" where the AI will sometimes blow up buildings, and fire directly on a position even though it has no visual contact, and "Cautionary" where the AI will avoid shooting unless it has a confirmed line of sight.

I think the main problem is that they are still stuck in an old school of programming when it comes to waypoint and pathfinding for AIs, especially when it comes to three-dimensional combat in buildings - as a result, the AI is unreliable by current standards. They will need to rip out the old AI code and replace it with something completely new for a proper urbanized FPS from BIS to become reality. There's a bevy of reasons why many urbanized FPS's are heavily scripted in singleplayer, and rarely involve co-operative play in multiplayer, and this problem is one of them.

So they want us to sit through three generations of pissy indoors AI? Scratch that, four generations. I forgot to count Operation Flashpoint/ArmA X.

The thing is, ArmA 3's graphics engine is based off of ArmA 2, and I am concerned that the graphics engine will not handle a high-poly environment well. See, when I play Chernarus in Combined Operations, I get the occasional hiccup, but Takistan has zero problems for me because of the near-complete lack of forests to increase the rendering overhead. That's why I feel a graphics engine that can "scale down" graphics with adaptive culling (we already have a version of that in ArmA 2) or a better LOD. Frankly, the very fact that we're going to DirectX 11, and that high-end DX11 cards run DX11 games quite well, tells me that if the game's graphical assets (textures, models, etc) are optimized in terms of LODs (Levels of Detail, less polys for the model in the distance, more polys up close), ArmA 3 will have fewer problems adapting to a heavily urbanized metropolitan environment. @SGTice: I personally think going for a smaller island, around 30 to 50 square kilometers, with two cities, one large (25 sq. km footprint) and one smaller (10 sq. km footprint) situated on opposing ends of the island, would be a good test case for Bohemia to use in developing the technology to support urban warfare. ---------- Post added at 01:26 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:24 AM ---------- Exactly like that. They will need to integrate Xaitment into the ArmA 3 editor if they want to support true urban environments. However, there are still problems with AI collision detection - when the AI goes into that high rise building, you can see him clipping into the inner wall of the stairwell. That will be a problem.

My personal assessment of BIS' ability with their existing technology? Doable. There just needs to be a lot of work done on the AI programming so they have two subsets - one for in the field like we have traditionally had, and another set of AI programming specifically for indoor combat. In my honest opinion, it's possible to consider developing a separate line of games specifically designed for urban warfare while using a heavily modified version of the ArmA engine to ensure that the game retains the same amount of customizability as the ArmA series. This would probably be the easiest route to take - keep the scripting of ArmA, but develop a new AI, pathfinding, improve the graphics engine so that it works specifically for urban environments, and so on. It's a lot of work, to be sure, but that doesn't diminish the potential payoff.

It also explained what limitations there would be in the interiors - 15 floors in all would only be modeled, for a high-rise. If you've been inside an office skyscraper, you'd know just how bland the hallways are. With ArmA 3 supporting DirectX 11, it's possible to have all the hallways be a single flat poly for each surface (4 surfaces in all for the floor, walls, and ceiling), with the exception of doorways and intersections, and use tessellation to give depth to the wall textures. The end result: Interiors are going to be VERY low-poly compared to a BMP-3 vehicle. In fact, some skyscrapers could be low-poly in the first place, thanks to the use of tessellation.

The link has been fixed, and in response to the bolded part of your statement, I explained part of a solution in a previous post. Why are people missing that part?! Seriously... :|

As I said before...Fallujah is a generally flat map. Flat maps are boring. It offers no real strategic or dynamic changes forced upon air power. Skyscrapers force pilots to change the way they do things. That is one reason why I want a real high rise city map. Let's say you do things in a high-rise city like you would in ArmA 2. You laser designate a tank. A jet comes in, drops a bomb... A minute passes. The bomb explodes in the distance. What happened? Oh, it hit a building that was in the way! Same issue applies to attack helicopters. Therefore, it adds a new layer of danger and excitement for pilots. Case in point: Compare these two photographs Fallujah, Iraq Dubai, UAE (Link fixed) The most Fallujah has are low-rises (between 5 and 15 story buildings), and that doesn't offer much excitement or diversity. Dubai has actual high-rise buildings, and mid-rise buildings, with a similar sprawling footprint as Fallujah. Which would be more exciting to do milsim ops in?

I wouldn't be against that, but I'd actually appreciate having at a minimum, 5 to 10 high-rise buildings in a city, with 10 mid-rise buildings dispersed throughout. That way, the dynamics of the city for aircraft are vastly changed. A flat city is boring. A flattened city is only slightly less boring. Actually, you misunderstood my statement. DirectX 11 is more efficient in handling the graphics of a game. Most DirectX 11 games I've played have had consistently higher frames-per-second than their DirectX 9 versions. To all recent posters: Thank you for participating in this thread, and I hope you will continue discussions in here. It has been interesting to see the responses from everyone. For the design, modeling, and implementation of high-rise buildings, modeling every single floor is unrealistic, so a compromise solution is needed. I described this solution in an earlier thread post. Please let me know if you think this solution is realistic and implementable in a metropolitan city design, even if the city's footprint were scaled down to 15 square miles.

Dis shit is what I'm talkin' about, bro. Just with a lot more buildings. That would be fixed with DirectX 11, improved object render distances, and other techniques. Now, tell us!

Then let me give you a challenge. What would be the most interesting scenario you would encounter in a metropolitan environment using ArmA 3's engine? Think long and hard, use your imagination and anything goes. Me, I think I would really enjoy maneuvering my helicopter between the skyscrapers, preparing to deliver my passengers to the objective rooftop via fast-rope, and evading enemy fire using the buildings as cover.

You're boring. Try combining a firefight in a skyscraper, with an enemy AH-64 or MI-24 Hind, and some C4 explosives. If I were the gunner in the Hind, I would have the option to fire rockets into the skyscraper, or using the machine gun to suppress them. Of course, THEY would have the option of very easily firing a barrage of RPGs right back at me and potentially sending us careening into a nearby Skyscraper to our fiery dooms.

That would generate too much of a complexity. We want to keep it simple. We're not looking for Red Faction-level destruction dynamics. I think it would be easier to design it in a way that could allow you to cut off avenues of access without destroying the building (disabling the elevator, for instance, and blowing up the stairwell). When total destruction of a building is the objective, the following means would probably suffice: C4 placed around a set number of supporting beams (For a high-rise, you'd need to blow out approx. 15 support beams) in the basement. The idea is that you need to balance defensibility with destructability. If you're fighting people in skyscrapers in multiplayer and you can easily one-shot kill them all with a single airdropped JDAM, that defeats the combat purpose of ever having a metropolitan city in a game like ArmA. So the basic parameters for a high rise building would be as follows: Generic Skyscraper #1 Height: 50 floors, plus helipad. Actual Accessible Floors: 15 (5 Ground Floors, 5 Mid-Level Floors, 5 Penthouse Floors) Means of Access: Elevator (2), Service Access Ladders (4, situated at corners of buildings in access shafts), and a single stairwell near the elevator shaft. Destruction Dynamics: Stairwell is Destructible between each set of accessible floors. Ex: Stairwell linking the first floor of the ground level to the 5th floor of the ground level are NOT destructible. Access Shafts can NOT be caved in or cut off. (However, you can throw grenades down 'em, or restrict mobility by placing Claymores at access points.) Elevator can be disabled. (One way is by shutting it off at the circuit breaker, another is demolition of the motor located on the roof or destroying the elevator shaft between floors. Deployment of explosives for demolition of shaft would probably be done while riding on top of the elevator. Or just deploying explosives in the elevator and sending it down the shaft on a timer.) 15 Support Beams in basement of skyscraper. All must be destroyed to ensure total demolition. (Objective-based, forcing players to consider strategy in TvT) Any airstrikes or launched ordinance will simply gouge out the building in predetermined quadrants, except for when the scripted mission calls for a different outcome. The power of ArmA scripting can allow for different means of demolition apart from the "hardcoded" methods described above.

Rebuttal: 1. The urban war market is saturated with games that are on fuckin' rails - the level design isn't open ended at all. No real open-world stuff, unless you count Saints Row: The Third and Grand Theft Auto 4. (And no, BF3 doesn't count, simply because BattleLog is a piece of shit.) 2. They'll be interested if they end up having to invade Tehran, Iran. At the very least, the urban scenario is doable with TvT multiplayer, you have fewer collision bugs and AI glitches with that. In fact, I would love it. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to hole up in a skyscraper, snipe a squad, and then move elsewhere, keeping the enemy guessing in a constant game of cat and mouse? I doubt in-building formations would be doable with the amount of scale we're talking about in ArmA 3. Sentry positions and tactics for building assault and defense, however, could possibly be programmed into the AI. The building bug is probably going to be addressed in ArmA 3, if at all. On top of that, if we're to have skyscrapers and high rise buildings, you'd need to determine how those buildings would be brought down through damage. Localized damage? An overall HP bar? Doesn't come down unless it gets damaged in critical locations such as the load-bearing supports in the basement? (Would prefer to avoid encouraging explosives or jihad-jetting into the upper floors, as that would invite 9/11 comparisons)

Let's start with the AI basics. Pathfinding in the interior is dodgy at best as far as I know, but it has improved since the original ArmA. Collision detection needs work. And then there's the fact that in most cases, AI will know where you are regardless of your position in the building, even if you take into account line-of-sight status. I'd imagine that this would need a good deal of work, if AIs are to be used in high-rise buildings, quite possibly to the point where BIS would have to develop an entirely new subset of AI for building interiors.