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Great! We were big fans of the FHQ coops back in ArmA2. Going to try these out asap. Thank you very much! :-)

Absolutely brilliant mission! Gave it a shot earlier, thoroughly impressed. I love how the role assignments make the mission planning a lot more straight-forward for the team. One thing I would like to ask: Once a headless client joins, it gets automatically assigned to the first available player slot. This slot then disappears. I can re-assign the HC to any slot, of course and it seems to be working. Would it make sense to add an independent (side CIV, for instance?) slot for the HC to occupy? I am sorry I cannot provide a lot of feedback on this, as I am entirely new to the whole thing and just set it up for the first time.

Hey nkey! Quick feedback: Everything is working. The problem was indeed my ArmA3 name. It should match the respective TS3 name. Or at least it shouldn't consist of less than three characters, which TS3 is not able to deal with. Thank you very much for your dedicated help - this mod is utterly fantastic. Really enjoying it! I'll keep a close eye on this thread! :)

Sent you a pm, nkey. Thank you very much for the swift reply!

Oh. My. Gawd. This is absolutely brilliant! I am determined to get this to work and make it our group's "default" radio mod. I particularly love how it is tailored to ArmA3, instead of having to use a jury-rigged version of ACRE (at this point). Unfortunately, I am running into problems trying to get it to work. I believe I set everything up correctly, using the latest version of TS3 (3.0.13.1 x64). However, when I start the game TS3 spams me with "invalid parameter size" and neither radios nor direct talk seem to work (although the radio HUD pops up and I am able to use the radio menus). Would anybody know why this is happening and/or how to fix it? I would be grateful for any constructive replies here; really looking forward to trying this mod!

Very nice, Bigpickle! Loving V2 so far! One thing I noticed: While the mod is loaded the "DAR" rockets of the AH-6 Littlebird are extremely slow. I haven't gotten around much testing so this might be on my side, but disabling your mod seems to fix this issue. Can anybody else confirm? At any rate, this is a superb sound mod. Thank you very much for sharing :-)

Absolutely stunning, Windwalking! Looking forward to trying this out when I get home. Thank you! :-D

Some quick feedback: Absolutely amazing addon. Played this in a coop mission, with each client loading the addon (same .hpp settings). Absolutely an improvement. We tested a scenario involving a raid with SD rifles and the difference in gameplay was vast. Enemies ducking for cover and trying to pinpoint our location. Amazing work, Windwalking. Thank you!

Hey tpw, Just a quick heads-up: This add-on does not seem to be working in a dedicated server environment / in multiplayer. We loaded the addon for both, the server and clients, as well as server-exclusive/client-exclusive. Enemies either flinched after being hit or dropped dead, without bleeding. It does work in single player (obviously). Thank you very much for all your contributions, man. Really appreciated!

Very nice, Windwalking! Will give this a shot as soon as possible. We will test this on a dedicated server later (with each client running the addon). It should also be interesting to see how JSRS' seemingly increased sound ranges will affect AI behaviour. Do feel free to pop by if you are interested to find out how this runs in multiplayer. At any rate, I will gladly provide feedback. Thank you very much for sharing this with us! :-)

My, you are quick, JW. Can't wait to get back home and try it. Defeat ALL the enemies! \o/ Thanks for the update! WCG: Join us for a game sometime. A proper coop with a few players and no respawn is quite awesome :-)

Hey JW! Quick update on my feedback: We played the mission again yesterday; we won - but mostly due to the fact that the mission seems to end shortly after you blew up the tower. Any chance you might find the motivation to add an 'extraction' goal to 'properly' end the mission? It was utter excitement to get to the tower and we had a lasting firefight, barricading ourselves inside the building next to the tower then slowly probing the vicinity to plant the charges. It would be really cool to have the mission 'succeed' only once the team makes it out of the base alive. Another (unrelated and probably unimportant) 'issue' I noticed: The squad leader, for some strange reason, does not have a radio when playing with ACRE. Any idea as to why this is in this particular case? (this is a problem that arises from using additional addons and I do not expect you to 'look into it' or anything - just through I'd mention it quickly) Anyway, I am REALLY looking forward to trying this mission again.. great job!

It was rather late so I kept my reply (too) short. Let me reply to your questions: We tried stealth, got compromised and once a firefight starts, you are done for. This is GREAT! You created a classic "sneak" mission and that's just awesome, man! We usually use skillEnemy=0.88; precisionEnemy=0.23; and found this to be a good balance for most missions No. Four. Although one of us seemed to have felt a slight ethanol-induced sensation of tipsiness ... and another one was temporarily blind (long story..) Two factors are important here: 1) Sneaking through to the radio tower on your own is arguably easier than sneaking as a group. 2) We suck. I mean, really. My description of "onslaught" wasn't meant as criticism, however. This mission rocks! We'll definitely play it again. No need, JW! The mission is challenging, exciting, quite original and highly re-playable as it is! Considering the overall quality of current user missions I couldn't agree more with Variable; glad to see you back in ArmA3! Cool thank you! These tags are a nice touch. MAYBE add an option to remove them for the ACRE players out there, though? :) Anyway, thank you for sharing this with us!

Awesome atmosphere, JW! Really eery twilight. You come and play that mission with us though, good sir! - I would love to see you explain to us how in the hell we are supposed to survive this onslaught! :-P How did you do the player markers?

I can only agree on this! I find Steam cumbersome and unnecessary but if it solves BIS (immediate) problems, then there's not much one can do. You won't hear me not bitching, though!

JeffersPang does have a point, Alwarren. I don't mind a Steam version of ArmA3. I sincerely hope BIS makes millions of it, in fact. Get many new customers, no matter how invaluable they might be for an actual contribution to the game and its community. Please don't turn away the existing community, though. For this reason, I wish they would have a stand-alone version as an alternative, for those who like to have their truly own copy of the game that they can trim and maintain. Manually. When they feel like it. I actually do enjoy keeping my ArmA installation up to date myself - and I think I am not the only one that likes keeping track this way.

It was explicitly stated that ArmA3 would need Steam to run, after all it is their DRM. Are there any examples of games on Steam that had a patch release that would "unbind" the game from the Steam platform? That'd be interesting! Nice, I didn't know that. I'll look into it, thanks! My OFP/ArmA/ArmA2 backups won't and I'd have loved to include ArmA3 in that "collection". Why does opposing a (permanent) DRM equal elitism? I would like to actually "own" a copy of the game. But even with regular DRM I wouldn't be bothered as much as having to launch the platform every single time. I really dislike it. I do, of course, understand the decision from an economic point of view. BIS needs money and fast and this is the way to go.

Hmm, no. ArmA2 certainly is not. As I wrote a few pages before, I expected some dodgy copy protection that enforces the use of a disc during the first few months after release. ArmA3, however, will be restricted to Steam. Always. Right? Well, it certainly bothers me, be it from the minimalist's point of view or the fact that I do not like redundancy. :-) I can freely shift my ArmA2 installation to any place I like. Its internal folder structure is kept intact, of course, but I can run it from a USB stick if I wanted to. Anything packed into a .zip or .7z file that does not rely on steam to be usable. For instance, I wrapped up my OFP installation into such an archive (including the required registry keys) and I can extract/install it fully modded and with savegames and play it "out of the box" on any compatible system. The game's modding in terms of provided infrastructure is not what I am criticizing, is it? My main concerns are the permanent binding of ArmA3 to Steam and the fact that such a move not only drives away some potentially crucial community contributors (as you can see here and elsewhere around the forums), it also makes the game more accessible to people with, shall we say, a tendentially shorter attention span. I find all this regrettable.

Alwarren, the debatable qualities of Skyrim aside, my point is that ArmA3 will be permanently restricted to Steam. Every time you want to launch the game you are forced to launch the Steam platform. You have to keep its folder integrity, you will never be able to create a Steam-independant archive and you most certainly will not be able to keep a personalized/modded copy of the game that plays "out of the box" without previously installing Steam and validating the game online. All these possibilities are gone with a Steam-exclusive approach. Edit: Brilliant! :-D

Thank you, JeffersPang, my sentiments exactly - you are certainly not the only one :-) Steam is "great" for mediocre game titles and stuff that is not really worth "collecting" or personalizing, in terms of modding and customization. ArmA2 - and ArmA3 for that matter - do not belong there, at the very least not exclusively.

Oh boy.. I know I will probably harvest some really hateful comments for this but here it goes: I expected ArmA3 to feature some kind of dubious (but, sadly, a presumably necessary) copy protection, something that would make me rant and rage for a couple of months and force me to wait for the release of the first proper beta patches. I expected the usual release troubles, the inevitable glitches and bugs that a game of this complexity will always have to suffer from during its initial release phase. I expected to be able to tolerate all this, because the (OFP/)ArmA games and expansions have managed to overcome literally thousands of deficiencies. They overcame these faults, partly thanks to a developer team with an open ear but to no small part thanks to an incredible community. A very industrious community dedicated to polishing the rough edges of what I would call one of the last bastions of true PC gaming. A Steam-only release not only means this game will never be independent. It also means a major part of this community, certainly the die-hard classical PC gaming supporters, is not going to be very happy with such restrictions. I find this particularly sad because it seems to me that with the release of ArmA2OA the number of capable and talented community contributors was as high as ever, even compared to the times of Operation Flashpoint. Instead, please excuse my polemics I cannot help it, we can expect a flood of Herp-Derps, adolescent short attention span drones that could not figure out how to install a beta patch before, much less how to run and/or configure add-ons. Yes, call me an elitist but the nicest thing about this game series is exactly this: It is not meant for everyone. It takes patience to learn not only about the gameplay elements but also about the game as a program and its structure. It is supposed to be a niche market, I thought; a game for people who still care about complexity and true challenges, who value emergent gameplay and immersion above today's "top seller" recipe - a recipe that can be best described as "a pseudo-railshooter with contemporary graphics and an orchestral soundtrack slapped over it". Somebody in this threat wrote earlier something along the lines of "So what, Steam won't interfere with the game in any way, you can still play it." - On this I beg to differ: Considering you have to load a rather cumbersome online gaming platform that bombards you with pseudo-ads to mostly shitty console-port games and an unnecessarily large GUI just to even change so much as the ingame options seems very frustrating to me. Dear BIS, I understand it is very important to make a profit and to be successful as a company. However, if your solution to do this is by constraining your flagship title to an awkward mandatory online gaming platform and potentially sacrificing a truly radiant community in order to milk the console-port / Steam "mainstream" segment I find this absolutely disappointing.

karphead, thank you so much for updating this! I can comfirm what Kerc Kasha observed, however. With the current ACE version we get a constant fade-to-black layer for both, the BAF and the US missions. This only happens on a dedicated server (listenserver seems fine), as far as I can tell. The scripts were fully loaded, "tasks" was showing. I would dearly like to see this mission back and "updated". It's one of the greatest coop missions I've played for ArmA2! Any chance we can talk you into "fixing" this? I gladly offer you to test the missions using my dedicated server, of course!

Maybe this is only me, but for some reason since Build 95660, there's "stuff missing" in multiplayer missions like Takistan Force (no vehicle spawn / distribution sites) or some Coops with additional content (fan-made weapons are missing in the weapons crate). The .rpt did not reveal anything unusual, as far as I could see. Happens with builds 95660, 95724 and 95777 and the problem disappears when reverting to 95417. This was tested (as far as it didn't crash immediately) on a dedicated server with several clients reporting the problem. Can anybody else confirm?

I see your point. There are people out there who see this as a deathmatch variant and do not care about them having to respawn. However, either make respawning more tedious for everyone (implement a waiting time, but nothing like a "death penalty") and thus make the current virtual life seem more precious for players. This will also force groups of people to act more careful around zombies. I like the strategic component of firefights in zombie-infested areas. Just a thought: What about setting up two "modes" for this mod: "beginner" servers that have restrictions and show newcomers how it is played and "expert" servers where everything is allowed and the mod can, in my opinion, truly unfold. Team up with other bandits. Works well for me. :-)

BoneBoys, this is fine! I do appreciate the fact you seem to know how to play (and plan!) well enough to be able to cope on your own. I do not wish to see the game's atmosphere being watered down by restrictions to make survival more "convenient" by players who are not able to do what you do. In my experience exactly those people are the ones who complain about the difficulty and exactly those people are the ones (on the servers, not those with constructive suggestions here on the forums!) who do not form groups of any kind. You have to admit it gets easier if you stick together, as you think twice about attacking a group in comparison to a lone wolf. I do not "blame" you for relying on your own. It's some fantastic gameplay, in fact, I know.