Squint

Rest assured, official support means a contract between two parties. There are too many legal and financial matters at stake to believe otherwise. If FreeTrack wants official support, they would need a contract with BIS. BIS, however, is under no obligation to entertain any company or group's appeal for support, much less sign with them. BIS will not come forward with an official word on FreeTrack until FreeTrack is signed with them. As Placebo said, it is on FreeTrack to provide whatever BIS requires of them, including liability for their software.

NP and BIS are in contract with each other, and that's hardly controversial. Companies go under contract all the time, and that includes exclusivity rights. Integrating an API takes development time and effort to do; it is not a brick you just put into a wall. FreeTrack is a completely independent endeavor, NaturalPoint is a for-profit business, and they're both going to be treated as such respectively. Since no contract exists between FreeTrack and BIS, BIS owes FreeTrack and their users absolutely nothing. If FreeTrack wants this to change, they have to operate on the level that actual companies like BIS and NP do. Unfortunately for them, that means they would pretty much have to be selling a product they themselves make, which defeats the whole purpose of FreeTrack in the first place.

Agreed. I think it's a little early to be talking about expansions when the original game still hasn't been released.

That's not very likely, as it's a whole new logistical can of worms. The market for either product is small, and the market for a bundle is smaller still. Not everyone who buys a TrackIR is an Arma player; in fact, we're the minority. TrackIR's bread-and-butter customers are the flight-sim people. If TrackIR bundled any software, it would likely be a flight simulator. To keep costs down, however, I don't see them doing even this, and for good reason.

What it takes for whom? You? Me? That guy over there? We all do things at different speeds. It's been well established that you will be able to move while reloading in Arma 2, and that goes a long way to increasing your survivability.

Project Reality is an excellent mod, but comparing it to Arma is like comparing apples and oranges. They deliver two different gameplay experiences by design. To claim one is better than the other is to claim that a plane made by Cessna is better than a boat made by Bayliner.

There is nothing stopping FreeTrack developers from releasing whatever technology they like. However, the history of the FreeTrack project is rife with shadiness, and most of it stems from code which shows up in both original and more recent FreeTrack releases. The short version of the story: FreeTrack took code copyrighted by TrackIR and used it in the creation of their own "open-source" product. So why would FreeTrack and its supporters be so up in arms about TrackIR's recent inclusion of more heavily-encrypted strings and APIs? Surely it wouldn't hurt FreeTrack since they make all of their own code from scratch and don't steal anything from professional NaturalPoint programmers, right? I mean, we're talking about two completely different products here... right? Why does the success or failure of FreeTrack hinge so much upon what NaturalPoint is doing? Well, let us assume that the old shady ways are behind FreeTrack and they really are doing their own thing now (albeit after having had a good look at what NaturalPoint was doing and taking extensive "notes"). Being an open-source project—especially one which requires a degree of DIY on the part of the consumer—they might find it difficult to find official support from commercially-involved companies such as BIS. When you include support for such a specific peripheral as head-tracking technology in your software, you want assurance that there will be things such as professional tech support, longevity, and future compatibility. NaturalPoint has all of those. They are a commercial entity committed to making a professional product. Asking BIS to officially support and make low-level changes to their software's peripheral support for a product that requires some guy on the Internet to glue things together at home is rather silly.

Façade? At no point was Dslyecxi trying to hide the fact that he thinks you should buy a TrackIR. Dslyecxi is neither a NaturalPoint employee nor a BIS employee—if you think he's doing this for purely selfish reasons, then you've got even me beat in the cynicism department. He wanted to show you something awesome, and let you know it exists. As a bonus, you get new footage from Arma 2. How nice is that? Look, it should be well apparent by now that Dslyecxi is involved in a closed beta of Arma 2. A closed beta usually means a non-disclosure agreement, which means that any footage or screenshots he posts would first have to be cleared by BIS. There has not been an uproar from either BIS staff or the moderators, so it's a safe bet that Dslyecxi has gone through the proper channels to bring us this. BIS approval puts it a step above the content of a "common" forum member, and if folks are really that upset about getting new Arma2 footage just because of the context in which it was delivered, then perhaps Dslyecxi and others who have been trusted with an NDA shouldn't even bother to try sharing in the future.

You aren't a publisher, though, you're a fan of the game. Publishers have to look at the bottom line. "If I spend x amount of money promoting, advertising, pressing copies, boxing, and supporting this game, will I get at least y amount of money back?" Keep in mind that the Arma community is still very, very small, as game communities go, and while we're all enthusiastic about the game, there still aren't that many of us. In the big picture, publishers might be viewing Arma 2 as a risk. This is not to say that BIS cannot find a publisher, but the process may not be as simple as it would seem it should be.

I can confirm that the TIR5 software does work with your TIR4, and you get to enjoy all the benefits of the software that you see in the video. So there's no need to feel like your TIR4 is now a useless piece of junk, because it isn't. :) I've been using my TIR4 for almost two years now and it's still the greatest investment I've made for my Arma gaming, not to mention being able to use it for Live for Speed, Flight Simulator X, and IL-2. It sounds like a superfluous gadget until you actually try it out and play with it over a few sessions, and after that it truly becomes indispensable. When Dslyecxi mentions ShackTac's old WGL sessions and TIR owners trying to instinctively move their heads to look around, I'm one of the people he's talking about. ;) For those of you who are invested in convincing yourself it's not worth it, that's fine, but Dslyecxi is not easily impressed, and if he put this much effort into getting the word out about something, it's worth your notice. To the folks leveling veiled accusations that Dslyecxi's just trying to sell a product, let me just say that he would not have gone to the trouble of setting up a coupon code with NaturalPoint for people to use along with years of personal endorsements if he wasn't first completely satisfied with the product himself or believed that other people wouldn't be.

Piloting helicopters benefits greatly from the many axes available on modern joysticks and controllers. With the dual thumbsticks on the 360 controller, you can control pitch, yaw, and roll very easily, not to mention throttle. Speaking of throttle, the triggers on the 360 controller are another axis, which I use for throttle. In any vehicle, even land vehicles, you can control the speed to a degree that you simply can't with the standard keyboard Q/W/E system of controlling speed.

Done.

For those people getting the IFC22.dll error or other runtime errors, it may be better to think of the beta patch as an addon rather than a patch in the strict sense. What I mean is that, even after installing this patch, you could still run 1.08 ArmA if you wish, simply by running a different shortcut. Here's the nuts and bolts of a beta setup, if you want to make your own shortcut: 1. Ensure that the actual executable being used is in the \beta subfolder. 2. Ensure that you're calling the beta subfolder in your mods list as you would any other addon. 3. Ensure that your "Start in" line still points to your original ArmA game path.

Voice-over-net is something every server admin should check out and consider implementing. The direct communication alone should knock your socks off.

Remember, folks, there were about fifty players taking part in this mission, so even the people mentioned by name account for only a small fraction of everything that was going on at once across North Sahrani. For instance, I never saw Dslyecxi nor was I a part of anything mentioned in the account, but I was there, along with many many others. If you took the personal accounts of everyone who participated and sewed them together into one narrative, you'd have quite a hefty read on your hands.

Why would you need to place the init line into that script? Leave it in the mission.sqm and you should be fine. Also, there is no "lowFuel" event handler in ArmA; that's why folks are telling you to make a loop. I'm not sure how vehicle magazines work, but Pulverizer's code will definitely keep a flying chopper fueled.