Squint

Let's assume I haven't. Now what? This isn't a Ghost in the Shell or Rainbow Six community, so having to rely on the audience's knowledge of either isn't a good idea. Nobody's going to do research just to understand what you're trying to say. You want big cities in Arma 3. That's the meat of it, and that's fine. Plenty of other folks do too! Big grid-based cities would be awesome! All the rest of what you wrote, however, is fluff, and it only serves to muddy your message. Your original post could have been one paragraph long.

I approve of your choice of name.

When making listboxes and comboboxes in you can include pictures with the entries using lbSetPicture. However, for me at least, these pictures appear "squished" horizontally: As you've probably guessed, I'd like the lower icon to look like the upper icon. I am pulling the icon in the CA files used by the main UI, so I know the actual image's proportions are correct. Changing the font and control size does nothing. I haven't located information on how to define anything specifically related to list/combobox pictures. Anyone have any insight?

Well, the phased release is what it is, and Steam isn't an exception, of course. I'm just saying that Steam will be the primary method of availability in North America when it arrives. Seeing as how Arma didn't have a big retail presence here, this will probably also be the only way for many people to get it. If your main issue is now how it will be available but when, all I can advise is to sit back and be patient. Making posts on the Internet won't get it here any sooner. ;)

I was wondering how NKato would work his deafness into a discussion about finding a North American publisher, and he did not disappoint. :icon_eek: Steam looks like it'll be the best source of the game for North American buyers. I do like having an actual DVD, but Steam isn't going anywhere, there's no reinstall limit, and no e-mailing for more registration codes. Sit tight, folks, the game is coming and all is well.

Three letters. S, Q, and F.

Mods, please don't ban him. He's wonderful.

You wanted to know when the game was coming out for PS3. A couple of us did answer that question, and the consensus was "don't bet on it." You seemed to ignore that, however, brushing it off as some kind of fanboy nonsense, and instead chose to focus on the people pointing out your immaturity. Sorry the answer wasn't what you wanted to hear, but there really is no evidence yet that Arma 2 will see a PS3 release. That's not fanboyism talking, it's just the facts as we have them so far.

Air combat is only important if it's made a focus of the mission. I suppose that's true, especially if the mission-maker ignores all of these ground-based anti-air assets. You're just crafting a scenario in your mind that supports your opinions, which isn't hard to do. Rearmament is done however the mission maker sets it up to be done.

...you don't really get how games are made, do you? :(

Well, guesses are easy. Everybody has a guess. My guess is "never." As for split-screen, I don't know if it's outright impossible, but the engine certainly wasn't built with split-screen rendering in mind. Arma (and, by extension, Arma 2) is not the sort of game that would lend itself well to halving the screen real-estate. There are commands menus, the group bar along the bottom, the map screen with briefing information and the HUDs for various vehicles. Even if it's possible, I wouldn't say it's a good idea. There's a lot of information that needs to be displayed, and split screen simultaneously halves the available space to display all this as well as doubles the amount of the island which needs to be rendered at a given time. Anybody who's used setPos to teleport to opposite sides of Sahrani can tell you that Arma cannot precache the entire island, so it would probably struggle with two displays going at once.

Unless otherwise adjusted, any player can operate any vehicle they come across. However, the setup for a mission can be made more sophisticated by allowing only players using the pilot model to use aircraft, only players with a rank of Sergeant or higher to enter the commander's slot of a tank, or hell, players whose name is "JimDandy39148374" to operate a Sopwith Camel. It's all about how the mission is scripted.

HavocDemon, I am starting to suspect that you're just making stuff up as you go along. Your posts are full of contradictions and generalizations. Yes indeed, just about anything you can think of can have an approximation in an Arma mission, but then you go on to say this: No they don't. They don't require large teams. They don't require small teams or tanks or planes or even guns. Arma missions only "require" whatever the mission maker dictates. You said yourself that anything is possible, so why can you not conceive of small-scale co-ops? Why can you not conceive of simple missions that are indeed pick-up-and play (such as the missions you yourself made for your friends)? The PR system takes some time to learn as well, after all. This is nothing but a guess and a worst-case scenario you dreamed up to justify your own opinion. Do you have any idea what "open source" actually means? It certainly doesn't mean this. PvP games are more tightly regulated, and public servers shy away from them for good reason. For example, I'm in a private group and we play PvP quite often—in fact, I'd say the majority of the missions we play pit human players against each other.

No you won't. You won't be happy. Nobody will. Oh, we all say we'll be happy, but as soon as the demo is in our hands, there would be a dozen new threads on here complaining about this or expressing concern over that, then the dance would begin again. People's memories are short, and they don't really know what they want even as they ask for it. The evolution of this thread is amazing, as it has become a bunch of people bargaining with an invisible BIS employee for the release of a demo before a demo is ready. People post as though they have only to write the correct combination of words to inspire BIS and unlock the demo for everybody. BIS has it under control. Sit back and wait. Stop wringing your hands over what the demo may or may not be.

I agree with the others who say this thread really is pointless. There have always been and will always be differences in force size and composition. After all, this is not a Quake or Unreal Tournament game where both sides are supposed to have the exact same weapons and equipment, just with blue or red colors. Arma 2 will provide the tools, but it is up to mission makers to balance gameplay for their own missions.

If an island is small that does not necessarily mean that only arcade-like missions are made with them. The size of an island has nothing to do with the amount of realism the mission taking place on it may or may not have.

I won't tell you it's not possible. I will, however, tell you that bigger doesn't mean better. Look at some of the islands which came out with WGL and ACE (73 Eastings and Canyonda spring immediately to mind). They're massive, but how many missions truly have need for all that space? A compact, well-detailed island such as Afghan Village is generally much more useful for mission settings.

Exactly. Leave the minutiae for the community to put in, let BIS take care of the sweeping low-level changes and improvements. There is no possible way BIS could put in even a fraction of the stuff asked for in this forum and still have the title launch before you're in the retirement home.

The demo is of a two-year-old version of Arma, and Vista support hadn't been completely ironed out by then. The full version is working much better with Vista now.

In addition, a little velcro strap is attached to the TrackClip cable, letting you attach it to your headphone cable so that they stay and move together.

The crosshair helps compensate for the loss of some of the natural situational awareness we all have. When playing a game, you are looking at a three-dimensional image rendered in two dimensions. It may not seem like it, but your brain loses some of its ability to judge the spatial relationships of objects in the image. Essentially, all 3D games are optical illusions, fooling the brain into believing there's actually depth where there is none. The path of bullets—especially those you fire yourself—is primarily along the depth of the image, where, as I said above, there actually is no depth at all. In reality it's much easier to aim without looking down the sights and generally hit or be close to what you're aiming at. In Arma, and especially with the "float zone" feature that lets you move the rifle independent of your view, judging the bullet's path is much more difficult than it would normally be. The crosshair alleviates this.

Everything you've mentioned here can be incorporated into a mission via scripting. By default, however, it's open to anything, because BIS cannot guess at what sort of mission you might want to make. It is better to have a million possibilities and use one than to have one possibility but want a million.

Are you sure? Are you really, really sure? Personally, I think you're just making generalizations based upon what sounds like a good reason to you, but hey, maybe you know something I don't. America is the #1 importer of non-localized games in the world, especially from Japan, which uses NTSC and the same voltage as US outlets—and if you think Japan is in the habit of incorporating English translations, you're quite wrong. Besides, wouldn't most people prefer to play games in their own language? If a game is released in more than one language, and you understand one of those languages, wouldn't you get that version of the game?

I use the TrackClip Pro because I don't want to wear a hat while playing; I've never actually tried the vector clip. It works great, but I'm sure the vector clip works fine as well.

I understand this. You and others have made it very clear. I am trying to explain why you might not get this support, official or otherwise. "Support" entails more than just nodding and agreeing to put the API in. There is the professional side to it; support means accountability, liability. FreeTrack does not have a professional presence. By "professional," I don't mean that their software doesn't work, or is made poorly. It simply means that FreeTrack is not a company, and that makes their offering unattractive to actual registered companies such as BIS. With half of Free Track functionality relying upon hardware that is made by the end user, you find yourself in a minefield of liability. You simply cannot support a DIY job. I said this in earlier posts which were dismissed because it was me posting them, but the best chance FreeTrack has of getting official support is to become something it's not, which would defeat the purpose of FreeTrack in the first place. It's not impossible, even now, but you have to look at it from BIS's perspective and understand why they might be reluctant to say that they're bringing FreeTrack on board.