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Plenty of people are getting it as far as I know, myself included. Same with the chat items being overlaid on top of the actual chat box, so you can't tell which channel you have selected nor can you see what you're typing.

Yeah, it's annoying alright. The overlaying chat box can be overcome by changing the interface size to very small, but then that breaks the map screen, squashing it up and putting black edges down it, so that's really not a solution. Especially since the problem actually gets worse if you increase the size...

It's about the size of the Sahrani map if you include the ocean. I know how big BIS claim the OFP islands and Sahrani are, but if you actually check the scale on the editor, then measure the distances, you'll actually find that they're not quite as big as they'd like you to think. Of course, I have no doubt Codies are pulling the same stunt. Create an area Y x Z kms and stick an island in the middle somewhere. Then take the total area of the whole thing and state that as your island size. Voila. One technically incorrect yet, technically correct statement, depending on how you choose to interpret it. Funny old language, English.

While it's true that aiming a game at the console market will generally net you more cash, it always results in a dumbed down experience. It's par for the course on a system where you have limited resources to run your game and a clumsy controller that allows for minimal control options, depth or precision. Look at all the games that were simultaneously developed for consoles and the PC. No matter how good they are on the consoles, they almost all turn out to be absolute garbage as a PC game. Even the absolute best console games are merely "good" as a PC port (and ports are all they ever are - simultaneous multiplatform development is a myth). Consolification or "The Deus Ex 2 Effect" as it's also known, is slowly choking the life and innovation out of PC gaming. Do you honestly think that a game with the scope and depth of an ArmA would be possible on a console? OFP: Elite is not going to help you here. It was a stripped out, simplified version of OFP, nothing more. Take one look at your ArmA controls list and you'll realise quite quickly why it's such a problem. The only way this sort of thing ever works is when two seperate versions of a game are made, one for each platform. The end result is different games though, so the whole thing becomes null anyway. The day consoles come with a mouse and keyboard as standard and have the ability to be upgraded is the day that we may finally see the end of consolification. Until then though, every time a developer announces a promising title (or the sequel to a venerated classic) is going cross-platform I will continue to cringe as I have done ever since Deus Ex 2 became the pebble that started an avalance.

Flashpoint 2 doesn't look like anything. The only thing released thus far are a handful of promises and a pre-rendered trailer that despite the protestations to the contrary, is not indicative of the final product.

I remember seeing this back when they only had a single dot version working. It's come a long way since then! I don't have a webcam, but I've been meaning to buy one for a long time and this looks like as good a reason as any to do so! As for the components, I've got thousands of LEDs and resistors downstairs (my old man's electronics workshop) and a power supply I built a few years ago that's been gathering dust. If I remember and am not too busy, I'll try to get myself a webcam tomorrow and get one of these going by tomorrow evening. Or failing that, by this weekend.

It basically looks like ArmA with more shadows. I know ArmA looked like Flashpoint Elite when they first showed it off and that this will improve, but lets look critically at the whole for a moment. ArmA really is nothing overly new compared to Flashpoint and that's already soured the experience for a lot of players. Clunky systems, bugs, etc are still huge problems for ArmA, yet the sequel's already been announced and it looks identical to the product we already have. I know that ArmA was always meant to be the "in between" product, but one look at those screenshots makes it instantly clear that they've scrapped a lot of their original work and this is a "start-again" game based off ArmA. Considering the already mentioned problems and general bad feeling surrounding the ArmA name, announcing a sequel (no longer a brand new Game 2, but an actual ArmA sequel) so soon that happens to look identical to the current incomplete game (general widespread opinion, no need to take this up with me personally) probably isn't going to stir up excitement or praise. More likely there's going to be a backlash of resentment and questions about when the current game's going to be fixed, whether ArmA's being abandoned, whether people have been "tricked" into being paying testers, and so on and so forth. OFP lasted for almost 6 years before ArmA came along, but ArmA's already in trouble player-wise and officially announcing a successor less than a year after release (not to mention hot on the heels of the uninspiring expansion) sounds painfully similar to Infinity Ward when they tried to wipe their hands of the abysmal Call of Duty 2. I'm hopeful, but I honestly don't expect the previously announced Game 2 features to still be part of the development plan. That said, if they just fixed the niggling issues like improving the physics, the AI, making the movement less laggy and clunky (I have no problem with momentum, but having your prone command ignored for a full 2 seconds before anything happens is just not on), etc, I'd be over the moon. Fact is though, it's probably going to take more than a few fixes that should have been part of ArmA (in patches at the very least) to convince everyone else that it's a better investment than OFP 2. And believe me, I have no interest in buying the game if there's not going to be anyone else to play against. The online situation's bleak enough as it is now. I know I sound negative but I really do want to see ArmA 2 do well. Fact is though that the handling of ArmA hasn't exactly been stellar. I understand the situation BIS was in leading up to release, but most people don't and that's severely damaged BIS' reputation.

Well I'm afraid they're going to have to do better than "ArmA in a nice dress" if they want ArmA 2 to compete with OFP2. While it's true that we know almost nothing about Codemasters' new toy, we do know that there's a lot about ArmA that upset a lot of people. A quick look a the "ArmA is just disappointing" thread makes that abundantly clear. There are a LOT of OFP fans out there who didn't buy ArmA based on their experience with the demo/not-so-legal copies of the game and those people will likely take one look at ArmA 2, instantly think "it's the same bloody game" and disregard it for ever after. As it is, a lot of my squadies are regretting their purchase because they feel that apart from pretty graphics, it's really hasn't improved over OFP at all and in some aspects, has actually gone backwards. In some instances I tend to agree.

After that last post of yours, I love you too. Bang on the mark.

To handle that many players, JOTR's netcode was hideous and stripped down like BF's. Bad netcode's the stuff of nightmares. *shudder*

If it weren't, then it wouldn't have worked perfectly up to this point. Nor would all the player details and logo appear in the playerlist correctly. For the record, they're hosted on a webserver I use for my old WoW guild website. I have it running on a professional webhosting outfit with a 99.9% uptime and it's been steady as a rock for the last 2 years. The problem's not with that. It's that the game servers are doing something crazy with the squad files and images. I just don't know what. Nothing I try is making one iota of difference, and I'm nearing the end of my tether.

I'll pitch in here as well since this thread seems to be perfect for it. I've been running a single squad.xml for a few weeks now and all has been fine. In the last couple of days though, I've decided to try and individualise players' logos. I have to say though, it's been a nightmare. First problem - it appears that the game is ignoring multiple xmls and treating them as one. If all xmls have the same clan tag in them, it takes the sqd_logo.paa from the first person in the server and then assigns it to everyone else who joins with the same tag thereafter. I tested changing the tag for myself and suddenly my logo was working correctly. Obviously having different tags is counterproductive though, so I thought perhaps I'd try giving different names to everyone's paa files. Second problem - or is it still the first? I was attempting to test with another squad member and we'd been in a server where another member's logo had been cached from earlier (as sqd_logo.paa) and we kept getting it as our own. The correct ones show in the player list, but arms/vehicles showed the wrong one. I renamed my .paa and changed the reference accordingly in the xml, then rejoined. Mine was now working. Sensing success, I changed my squadie's in the same way and we both jumped into another server. This server has MY logo cached on it (as sqd_logo.paa) already, but the new image names should have bypassed that. And they did, but not in the way I expected. Mine worked on the other server. Maybe it was the cached one, but since I'd changed my xml file completely and the other details showed that it had been reloaded by the server, I had to assume it was loading the logo under the new name. So, +1 to me. Not so good though, was that my squadie's was NOT working. His showed up fine in the player list, as did mine, but while mine worked in game, his did not. I just don't understand how the player list shows them just fine (most of the time) but the game world doesn't. It's the same damn file! I have tried EVERYTHING to try and get it working. Eventually after yet another change/rename/something mine stopped working as well and neither of our logos would appear, despite my best efforts. We changed back to the first server and the problem was still happening - no logos anywhere but the playerlist. Now here's where it got weird. I dropped, renamed mine back to sqd_logo.paa and reconnected. My squaddie stayed in game the whole time. His logo had not been appearing at all up to this point. When I got back in, I was able to see his logo, WITHOUT him reconnecting. Problem was, his was the wrong one. It was the cached one from earlier, except that it was a completely different file name, so I don't know WHAT was going on. This is despite him still having the correct logo appearing in the player list. Now that can be easily explained so far, but now it gets REALLY weird. He looked at my arm and it was my logo. I looked at my player list and the logo there was the cached one! Somehow I was seeing the cached logo as mine in the player list and as my squaddie's in game. Baffled, I disconnected again, changed my logo name back to something different, reconnected and my logo was my own once more. Yet my squaddie, who didn't disconnect once throughout the test, had no logo again. His was still showing correctly in the player list, but it had vanished on his arm/vehicle. I honestly have no idea what the hell is going on or how the server interprets these xml files. Clearly it's attempting to associate different xml files as one and the same based on the <squad nick=""> value. It begs the question - what happens if two squads have the same tag? It completely breaks things for whoever's second into a server. Obviously a lot of you have got this working with individual xml files and logos, so can anyone shed some light onto this strange behaviour? I've spent the last 5 hours on this and I'm more confused than when I started. What am I doing wrong here? Each person has their own set of files stored in their own subdirectory. The only thing that's causing them to be linked is the server seeing the same tag (<squad nick="">) under the Squad section and deciding that they all must be the same. What am I doing wrong here? I've run out of things to try.

Not a fan of the new bullet crack. It sounds more like a pistol shot than a whip crack now. I removed it and went back to the default, but all the other sounds are top-notch, as always.

I'll play devil's advocate here and say that I would actually like to see the FM made harder. The first few pages of this thread were quite funny and I was relieved when a couple of helicopter pilots finally stepped in and set the record straight. Just because everyone wants to be a top gun or an ace chopper pilot doesn't mean that they should be. By making it harder to fly helicopters (BF1942: Desert Combat springs to mind), a class of pilots would naturally emerge and people would learn quicksmart that they should let the practiced pilots do the flying instead of turning their entire aerial arsenal into scrap. As it is, I can't believe how many people insist on taking the controls, only to fly directly into enemy fire and then hover there at just the wrong height to eject, plow into the ground for no good reason, slam into the side of a mountain, hit trees and powerlines, etc, etc. I'm building up a huge mental database of people I won't get in a helicopter with and that's with the current basic FM. Clearly it's not difficult enough to discourage these morons, so it needs to get tougher.

I get that second one sometimes. I'm sure it's an engine glitch, because it's literally part of the terrain. Artifacting from overheating moves with you as you move. That happens when I put my texture detail any higher than "low". This is different. I usually see it on the east of North Sahrani. Near Masbete. It takes different forms though - sometimes there's a texture that looks like the old OFP bushes, but stretched along the ground for hundreds of metres. You can walk up to it, along it, through it, no worries. It's just a pain because you can't see through it, even though for all intents and purposes it isn't really there. It's only 2D as well. Other times it's simply a wall of grass texture. As in, a knee high wall of the grass overlay that normally replaces grass at range. You walk up to it and it doesn't disappear. Walk through it and it's gone, walk back and there it is. Again, not game breaking, but it could be a problem if you're playing a mission and someone's behind it. Or at least, behind where your PC's drawing it.