st!gar

Could you elaborate, please? Anyways, cool thread. :)

Cool idea. :) Two quick questions, by the way: 1) When the Ambient Combat -module is activated, where exactly will the soldiers spawn? Randomly all over the place, or can you set this for yourself? 2) Okay, so you have to use scripting to edit the GL. But... how, exactly? When you select the Ambient Combat -module in the editor (Or any Game Logic, for that matter.), what screen appears? Is it like when selecting regular units and objects, and you have the old init field in the middle where you are expected to write a string of code, or is it something new and, dare I say, simpler?

Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Quick question, though... in the first video, when in the forest, I saw soldiers running from tree to tree in over, but I never saw them actually leaning. I know they can lean from house corners when in towns, but can they also lean from trees in forests? Thanks in advance. You're awesome.

Sure, I can agree with that.

Hell, no. Because it's proven very true in way too many situations. it's not just immaure USA -haters who get annoyed and borderline offended over bullshit like that. I, for example, am not annoyed because I'm a "eurotrash USA-hating teenager", as you so elegantly put it, but because I'm a staunch opponent of heavy-handed nationalism in general. I'm from Norway, and believe me, there are more than enough nationalist, overly patriotic pricks over here as well. I have no more respect for them. I quite like the idea from OFP: DR about a war against China. A welcome change from the usual Russians, sure. I think the main reason why people like the idea of a conflict between the US and Russia is, like people said, because we have two pretty much equally technlogcally andvanced superpowers that has had a history of conflict in the past.

True. God, I remember playing the "Road to Independence" -campaign in Empire Total War. Not a single cutscene without tear-dripping music with a slowly waving American flag in the background. :j:

...Yeah. Heard that one before. If you ask any soldier on any side in any war, that's pretty much what you'll hear.

Oh, that greatly, greatly depends on exactly what I'm giving up on. I'm not all that pessimistic, though. Looking back a few pages, you also have people say how awful ArmA 1 ran on their computers, and, like I described, I never had any real problems with ArmA 1, even on an earlier, (and weaker!) computer, and with high > max settings. And from what I've seen, the graphics in ArmA 2 aren't that radically different... The point is; I just recently preordered ArmA 2 from Play.com, and I'm not sure if that was such a good idea, based on some of the user comments I've read. Right now, I'm just frantically hoping I've made the right choice, and so, the whole optimization controversy is quite disturbing. I would really, really like a demo, to be quite rank.

Eyecandy? I certainly want the game I've bought to look like it does on those official screenshots that the entire forum was drooling over. If my game ends up looking worse than ArmA 1, even though my computer can handle just about any other game I can think of on maximum, I really haven't gotten my money's worth, and something's fundamenally wrong. If I had a low to mid-range computer, then sure. But it's not.

Ah. So that's a "yes", then? Fuck. :j: I'd just make it clear that if I have no real problem "lowering 1 or 2 parameters a little", but that highly depends on what I'm lowering. I can't understand people who find it acceptable to play with the detail on the people set to Low or Medum. Some of those YouTube videos I've seen had the soldiers look like they were made out of clay, or something.

Okay, the comments about the performance in ArmA 2 scared the crap out of me. I was able to play ArmA 1 on high settings on my last computer, and my current computer plays Far Cry 2 and Empire Total War with litterally every graphic setting maxed out, and the resolution set to 1680 X 1050, with the FPS rarely going below 40. And with all the money I've spent on my computer, I wouldn't have had it any oher way. You guys make it sound like I can play ArmA 2 at Medium - Low at best. If that's so, I'd rather go buy Crysis Warhead and play it with everything set to highest, like I'm used to.

Awww, is that how you do it? :butbut: Writing down and memorizing lines of code? I'd hoped it would be more user-friendly, seeing as the Editor was advertised as such. Like being able to select the options from a drop-down menu, or something...

Can you make those GLs work with the Ambient Combat Manager?

That's a real shame. The big battles are the cool ones. :plain:

No. That's why I'm really anxious for someone to show me how the AI is. I did. Not much info there. It didn't, for example, answer why the heck the enemies were running blindly, mindlessly and seemingly randomly around in the open like in some really, really perverse shooting gallery. You said that they didn't fire at you because they were out of range, but really, being out of range was the least of the AI's problems... I didn't complain about your skills, did I? :confused: Like I said; I honestly couldn't care less. I'm interested in the AI.

Oh, dear God. Where do I even start? :butbut: Absolutely, completely disappointing. If anything, it simply confirmed several criticisms of the AI. Four people fighting an entire squad of enemies without once getting shot back at. No, no, no. :confused_o: I have seen it twice now, and I can say with complete honesty that I never once saw them shoot at you. Not once. When you, at the start of the video, used your scope to zoom in on the enemy squad and everyone started shooting, I saw them react by running for cover with only minimal random milling about. Okay. So far so good, I guess. But then, at 0:28, you suddenly decided to zoom your aim out. You had a perfectly decent opportunity to keep zooming in on them, watching how the AI reacts. But no, you inexplicably zoomed out again, using the free look -thingy to look at your teammates to the left and right! No offense, but why would you even do that?! Did you wonder if they were still there, or something? :confused: Later, when you finally started zooming in again, the catastrophic clusterfuck was a fact. They would run or crawl sporadically around, randomly standing completely still, aiming at absolutely nothing, only to be picked off by you. It was a freaking turkey shoot. Just look at 2:00 and onwards, where you're just shooting leasurely at a whole squad of enemies just running around in the open like headless chickens. Or at 2:55 to 2:59, where you're aiming straight at an enemy just standing stiffly upright like a freaking scarecrow, not even reacting to the bullets swishing past his ears. And the friendly AI didn't exactly sweep me off my feet, either. But don't get me wrong; it wasn't really bad in itself, it just wasn't very good either. They would run after you, lay down and shoot at enemies, sometimes yelling "Cover me!" (Even at times when they weren't really doing anything in particular that needed any covering. :raisebrow: ) In short, they hardly did anything they weren't already able to do in Operation Flashpoint and ArmA 1. Phew. Okay, I'm seriously done with the negative, now. Time to focus on things they did that impressed me in some way. 1) At 9:38, we saw a soldier leaning from a corner. 2) At certain points, we saw friendly soldiers sidestepping and backing away, and generally maneuvering more intelligently. Weird that we never saw any of the enemies doing that. 3) At roughly 4:50 and onwards, we saw friendly soldiers maneuvering around corners, moving one at a time and covering each other. That was cool, although at one point, "4" would claim to be "engaging" someone, without there actually being anyone around to engage. :raisebrow: But hey, that wasn't really all that important. Overall, the scene showing the troops moving around the house was pretty impressive. --- Look, maybe the AI in version 1.01, and even ArmA 2 in general is very good and massively improved. But unlike some in this thread, I saw absolutely nothing of the sort in this particular video. Maybe the enemy was just unlucky. Maybe you had turned their skill-level all the way down? I know you have posted two other videos, "Arma2 - Firefight, Razor Team vs. Russian MG Troop and NAPA Motorized Infantry" and "Arma2 - Utes CDF Firefight vs. Russia+NAPA with 'Ambient Combat Manager'". I haven't seen them yet; they're buffering as I write this. Maybe I'll see a completely different side of the AI there, I don't know. But this particular video left me with nothing but a foul taste and a sense of utter frustration and disbelief.

Pretty please?

How's the AI with the new patch?

I really, really find it fascinating that in all those numerous user-made YouTube videos that has been posted in this thread; it has not occured to a single person - not a single person - to simply place down two opposing infantry squads in the editor; have them attack each other, and stand back in the distance, recording on FRAPS or something how the AI does. Instead we have had a few videos of the player running around shooting things, running from cover to cover and generally not showing the AI itself very much, a couple of videos of heliopters flying and shooting rockets, (Most of us here has played ArmA 1 and OFP; we already know what a helicopter looks like when it shoots!), and assorted other things. Sure, they show some AI movements, but hardly enough to offer any insight in how good it is. All these pages, and not a single video about that, so far. Just seems like such a wasted opportunity... --- Oh; and there was a discussion a few pages back about ragdoll physics, (or lack thereof), but some of those death animations shown in a couple of videos looked pretty ragdoll-y to me?

Yup. Was just about to say that, myself.

They have with corners. In one of the pages in this thread, there is a screenshot showing it.

But no one has had tried it with trees?

I'd like to repeat an earlier question of mine: Does the AI know how to take cover beind trees and vegetation as well? I thought the devs themselves said that the AI will only use suppressive fire as long as you manually tell them to do so using a Game Logic in the mission editor?

This is an excellent thread. Good stuff. :) Questions, though: Is the Urban Patrol-script a user-made mod, or something of the sort? I'd rather prefer it if you could tell me how the vanilla AI performs without mods... :) Also, two questions: 1) Urban mvement is all fine and dandy, but how do they react to trees and other kinds of protective terrain? Are they able to take cover behind trees just as well as with buildings? 2) Does the AI know how to lean out from cover? Thanks in advance. It's good to have people willing to help others out like this.

^ This.