private plowjoy

Hello everyone, I haven't played Arma3 in a while but decided to reinstall and have another go. Since the last time I played it, my PC has been totally upgraded, essentially its new. The issue is, the game experiences a video and audio freeze of around 1-2 seconds, every say 10 seconds or thereabouts. This is seen on the menu screen, when altering the video settings and in game. If the client is running, the problem will happen. I have already gone through the launcher settings and tried with and without the various settings options (around core selection, hyperthreading, etc) and its the same in either state (some of the settings set, none of the settings set). I've altered the in game video presets from Ultra (the default auto detect) to Low and its the same, regardless of settings there, which I was certain would be responsible for something like this (it feels very much like the PC is struggling to keep up) I've also disabled the analytics tracking in the launcher, no difference. My specs are as follows... Windows 10 - up to date 8700k i7 running at 4.4ghz 32gb of 2100 DDR4 TitanXp GPU with the very latest driver installed Client installed to a Samsung 860 PRO on SATA3. Tracking my PC hardware during these events, the CPU is bubbling along very happily and the GPU is running 10-15 degrees under its normal peak load. Does anyone have any ideas on what this may be? Thanks

Hi, Its a completely fresh install of Arma3 with the files also verified. I've gone from Ultra to Low presets and also then lowered other settings like view distance too. Makes no difference, as its also happening in the in game menu that just has water or a static background. FPS is coming in at 143. Interestingly, I was about to update this post anyway but moving the game install to my m2 drive has fixed it. I've since run a bench of my 960 and it came in over 520 write and read so I can only assume the controller that the 960 is in, is somehow being overloaded but its SATA3.

That makes total sense. Missions are 'one off'. Campaigns are huge, sprawling affairs. When you say Campaign 'just crashes to desktop', I assume that you mean after X amount of hours gameplay? The error you're getting is pretty much consistent with a memory leak, which would only manifest after a while playing (but sooner, the lower spec you are).

I run with 12gb in triple channel, with an i7 plus Nvidia 295GTX so we're not a million miles apart in this respect. I don't have the problem that you're talking about. What OS are you on?

Well you suspect wrongly. I run SLI and do not experience any texture flickering issues. Texture flickering, AFAIK has been more to do with VRAM being too low and in game settings being too high combined with prolonged gameplay bringing the memory leak on the client to the fore. The amount of misinformation on these forums is staggering

Hi all, I've done some forum searches but can't find this info. I want to force all missions hosted on my server to not render any grass. Is there a server.cfg or a server profile entry I can set to force this? All I seem to be able to find are references for the actual mission scripting. Cheers

Thats nailed it! Thanks for the help with this, mate.

Aha! Will give it a go! ---------- Post added at 11:53 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:20 PM ---------- Sorry fella, no joy. Grass is still being rendered on the clients. All I have in my globalServer.sqf file, now is... setTerrainGrid 50;

Ok fella, appreciate the effort!

Clean install of Arma2, patched to 1.3 with the 1.3 arma2 server executable. The only extras are MP missions that i've added. Nothing else.

Ignore me, was looking at the start of the file, ahem :) Right, got an error... 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error in expression <[] spawn { //game settings, setTerrainGrid 50 remov> 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error position: <//game settings, setTerrainGrid 50 remov> 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error Invalid number in expression 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error in expression <[] spawn { //game settings, setTerrainGrid 50 remov> 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error position: <//game settings, setTerrainGrid 50 remov> 2009/08/24, 19:40:25 Error Invalid number in expression

Thanks for the heads-up on this mate but it's just not working. I still get grass in MP games. My Arma2 server folder is as follows. Root of the folder has a 'serverSide' folder which contains an 'Addons' folder and inside that a 'serverSide.pbo' file. 'globalserver.sqf' also sits in the root of my Arma2 server folder. The globalserver.sqf file contains 'setTerrainGrid 50; My server startup batch file contains -mod=serverSide Where am I going wrong?

With all due respect, 40k upload is seriously low and if anything else on the network is using any connectivity online it's clearly going to get a lot lower than that. However, having said that you're now confusing me. You have poor upload speeds yet pings are low? I assume you mean the pings are good? How good? To put some perspective in place, I host Arma2 on a 3.16ghz C2D with 2GB of system RAM and aside from initial connects/game starting up there are no ping or desync problems whatsoever. Now, i'm on a 20mb down/750k up cable connection so system spec is clearly not the problem. It's going to be down to a combination of mission content and network connectivity i'm afraid. If I have a lesser spec server running on a better spec network, it's clearly not a server spec problem (in your case).

Desync is caused by two things.. 1) Initial connection/reconnection to a game that's already running. Widely established problem with the game which settles a short while after connection. I had this very thing occur with my own server when a friend joined, to test it. We had the red disconnect flag up and desync was at 10000 but after 20 secs or so the desync dropped to 0 and the red flag disappeared. 2) Desync is very very likely when you have a lot of AI going at it. This explains why some small CO-OP maps tend to be fine due to the limited amounts of AI running and why larger scale CO-OP scenarios such as CTI and Dom, which can spawn shedloads of AI as the game progresses tend to get desync'd. The faster the machine hosting (in terms of CPU) the longer it will take before desync kicks in.

Could be a hardware conflict that's being exaggerated by the new drivers. Obviously the first thing to do is clean the audio driver off and reinstall the previous one, to see whether you still get BSODs.

Do some Google and search for 'setting the pagefile size in Windows'. Self-help is still required around here and it will help you grow your PC maintenance skills.

First, do you have a set-size pagefile or is it system managed?

Always keep in mind, new pagefiles always seem to result in a speedier system...to start with. Like all files, they become fragmented and get bogged down over time. Some people even suggest regularly recreating the pagefile as part of system maintenance.

For what it's worth, i've experienced exactly the same with Nvidia, specifically the 295. I encountered it when the SLI profile wasn't set properly, so my card was actually only running at half spec, thus half VRAM. From what I recall, it started to occur after a while of gameplay which is why I put it down to VRAM being topped up and then being unable to release old/unused textures. When I had it, the game would normally crash with an application error about 4-5 minutes later and the only way to 'fix' the crazy geometry problems was to look straight up or down but thats obviously not conducive to playing the game. Checking Task Manager, I could see that it tended to blow when the clients physical ram allocation (on a 2GB machine) topped 1GB. Since getting the SLI profile working properly and upping my system RAM to 12GB, i've never seen it again. It's interesting how you say that flying over a city generates the error, as that's surely the quickest way to fill up VRAM and system RAM with textures, and that matches the circumstances by which my old error cropped up. When being respawned at the base in Multiplayer. I suspected that the client was reloading the same textures or at least not performing sufficient garbage collection to flush them all out properly. You could try to repro this by doing the heli flyover and in the middle of it, flushing the game. If you then continue halfway thru the city the other side without seeing the problems, that might indicate that it's a texture caching problem. Dunno, just throwing ideas and thoughts out. Head is fubar with insecticide fumes ATM.

I don't know if this is worth anything or not but I had micro-stutter on Arma2 when I had a C2D processor and it actually turned out to be Task Manager maximized and running in the background/on a different monitor. As soon as I closed Task Manager down, the stutter disappeared. If you have anything like Task Manager running, monitoring system performance just try closing it down. Worth a shot, I guess.

And yet, BIS haven't actually said that they've identified or even been able to reproduce the issue. So how are they working on a fix?

Then explain one simple thing to me. Why do I not encounter 'mouse-lag' with almost all in-game settings to the highest@1920x1200 with V-Sync locked ON? And dammit, I just tried to lick my own elbows!!

V-Sync being ON implicitly reduces performance, therefore will implicitly affect 'mouse-lag' in a positive manner. That there's no in-game setting for this and that it then affects ATI owners negatively isn't a bug with 'mouse lag' it's an enhancement request to include V-Sync in game, which will then when switched off improve performance, which will then reduce 'mouse lag' due to improved performance. And you make no mention whatsoever about what kind of spec PC, running on all minimum settings will achieve. If I dropped all in-game settings to low, I will not encounter 'mouse lag' or any other kind of lag. Hell, I don't even get 'mouse lag' with all the in-game settings apart from Post Processing set to the highest they will go. With V-Sync ON. Your last comment is the most intriguing because it sounds like what you want is twitch-based aiming. Which Arma2 will never have, due simply to the fact that it's not and does not want to be BF2. Grab an M60 IRL, hold it straight forward. Spot a target to your left. Swing the weapon across to a get a bead. Does the weapon cause drag? Can you immediately get a bead on your target or do your arms, thus weapon react more slowly than your eyes do? Arma2 is a military simulator. It is not BF2. If this is what people are complaining about, Arma2 is not the game for them.