ArMoGaDoN

First, an apology of sorts. I'd kinda given up on BI ever releasing a better flight model after ArmA 2 hit the scene, and now I get told to go look on the forums... Not only is a realistic dedicated helo sim coming soon (YAY!), but now the announcement was made that the flight model from TOH will be available in Arma 3? (YAY x1000000!) BIS have just made my every dream (wet and dry) come true. I should apologise for giving up so easily now. I noticed much great input from RL pilots in the forums, hope they are heeded (especially on the weedy tail-rotor authority which always bugged me too ;) Also several members of hovercontrol posting (haven't flown there for ages, but still got FS2k4 with scenery installed for Hood River and surrounding area) RL and not RL pilot representatives from these guys are well worth listening to. I want to add my voice to the flight model availability, where Arma3 is concerned, please please please make it selectable separately from general difficulty level, even in campaign mode for us masochistic sim-ers, and allow server admins to force expert/veteran flight mode for their specific server if desired (it's their server after all). I'm glad that the preview and Take On Helicopters itself will run on XP, but looks like I'll have to upgrade everything to run Arma3 - and first impressions look like this will be well worth the investment. The acid test for realism will be using NoE terrain masking in that Comanche to inflitrate under the AA radar a'la the old Comanche games, will TOH have low-level terrain training maps? (Fly through canyons below height at speed (AA optional) ). Ok, just here to say HI again after a long break, and to shout words of encouragement from every rooftop to the good folks at BI for the new direction they are heading with heavier sim focus on vehicles. Now I just need to get a working install of OA to run the preview... back soon.

Well, it runs okay on XP 64 bit.... So, perhaps a problem in Windows 7 itself, unless some weirdness happened with the install under 7..? Yeah, try Admin install again, and maybe look out for how to disallow sparse-files? No idea if it will help, but I dont like the sound of those tbh when the game needs loads of swap-space and virtual memory use.

I disagree with Wolle's rantings about OFP2 DR being great. I took a look and think it sucked. What are you thinking m8, posting stuff like that?? Back on topic: With these reports about 4870x2 cards not running right, I too am reticent to spend cash on a newer card until the bugs in them are ironed out. Shame cos the 4870 was my aim for a while. Is it only when in crossfire that you guys are getting problems?? Can you test both-ways crossfire on/off please and report results? p.s. lol, J/K Wolle - I know you were quoting really :P

reinstalled+re-patched, hmm - did you leave any addons installed anywhere?

@Mantis dude - sounds like a dodgy physical DVD disk, try re-installing or maybe lowering your overclock when you re-install first, then if you get same error go to store and get the DVD replaced as defective. Anyone else having issues with ATI crossfire or X2 cards, you may not have seen older threads about crossfire setups - so posting a reminder here - rename the arma.exe file inside the beta folder to FEAR.exe instead (due to ATI's driver corossfire support the FEAR.exe is the closest match to a good profile for ArmA 1, and works great). And use the beta shortcut to launch the game!

+1 to the thank-you for continuing to support the game, it is appreciated! First impressions on testing the motorcycle AI pathfinding - hmm. The bike AI seem to have the same problem that I do now on the bikes, and that is the steering/leaning does not go far enough, it locks too early - both of us get confident and go faster, then the bike will not steer or lean far enough and they spend more time off the road than on it - I know bikes very well in RL, and a bike will lean over and corner much more than this. Suggest trying to allow the bike to lean-over much further so that cornering works more strongly? The AI seem to need to react a bit quicker to over-steer in other situations too (zig-zag across road /\/\/\/\ ) The 'hitching' in the mouse input is better now - don't know how you managed it, but the mouse works smoothly again now on this quad-core x64 box - YAY! No game crashes so far (still ATI 1950s here). Will play with it some more and report back anything else of note. Thanks again. ArMo

Hi sbsmac, Just found this topic after a long absence from ArmA etc., and downloaded the pdf to take a peek at what you guys have been up to. Looks like a very well thought out and slick interface for the user you've come up with, far better than the bodge of arrays I tried. VERY nice work indeed, gratz to you and your team! I haven't looked at the MP of ArmA2 myself, so can't really be of any help as yet, though a question is nagging at me since I first looked at this topic, how many maps are being made and played now using your templates so far? Looks simple enough to use that I would expect the uptake to be high, have folks been using and playing these maps now, or is the prevailing mood still mainly in Sahrani life and evolution-only stuff like Arma 1 became? If the uptake-rate of these more serious map-types looks more encouraging than last time I might be tempted to look again at ArmA and script developing again. Comments? edit: One thing that annoyed folks in earlier AAS maps was the lack of indication to the player of the direction/distance of the next objective. The reasons why similar AAS game mode in "frontlines:fuel of war" game works and is very popular is due to two factors: one: the on-screen map shows the objectives. two the 'HUD' shows the direction/location of the current/next objective, on-screen so the nOOb knows where to go next, without bringing up a map. FatMan did ask me to look at this, but I couldnt get it working on ArmA1. Perhaps you could implement such a thing now to get the game modes more popular and fun? p.s. take apart the ortego and paraiso maps i made for aas ages back, see the layout in cities? sounds like folks need some smaller maps like those from other noises i see on forums.#

Thanks for the info. guess I should retry a bit harder if you guys are now getting decent-ish frames on 1950s already. FYI for anyone reading this thread after some of the comments... Crossfire DID and STILL DOES make a considerable difference to the FPS in ArmA1, if I ever get this ArmA2 running expect details to follow...

As stated already, I know what the GPUs are capable of. Unlike some, I had patience and when finally tweaked in Crossfire DID make a massive load of difference to ArmA1 on my rig, renamed to FEAR.exe and many tweaks, many of which I relayed on these forums at the time. ArmA1 FLIES on a good crossfire setup to the point I had to limit the FPS to 75 in the drivers WHEN flying low-level with good ViewDistance. That was originally with a core2 1.86 running @2.6+GHz and 2GB RAM, now it's even better. I could run ArmA1 high-ish settings but medium textures (256Mb cards) no problems at all. Looked gorgeous. Ran smooth. Still does when I fire the game up. Why ArmA2 has so radically different performance and clarity when forked from the same engine I really fail to understand. At no point did I request a new demo "right now" either, read and understand the OP before deciding to denigrate my opinions, huh? My point in summary was that the current state of the game coupled with the shoddy demo is causing harm to sales. @P75 Since when does relaying an honest opinion based on experience count as bitching? This is a forum for relaying information, hopefully at times to be helpful to the BIS guys and others. As an OFP and ArmA fan, often accused of being a "fanboi" by some, I find your comments about "bitching as a non-customer" most unhelpful. I am a "potential customer", have loved BI products and was active in-game and on the forums for years, though it looks as if the community might have slipped somehow into confrontational mode... again... I did not come back here to attack anything or anyone, nor do I appreciate being semi-flamed for bothering to relay my experiences now. ArMoGaDoN out. FYI, from Wikipedia entry on ArmA2: System Requirements (Minimum / Recommended) Microsoft Windows Operating System Windows XP or Windows Vista CPU Dual Core (Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, Intel Core 2.0 GHz, AMD Athlon 3200+ or faster Quad Core CPU or Dual Core CPU (Intel Core 2.8 GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 + or faster) Memory 1 GB RAM / 2 GB RAM Hard Drive Space 10 GB Graphics Hardware Nvidia Geforce 7800, ATI Radeon 1800 or faster (with Shader Model 3 and 256 MB VRAM) / Nvidia Geforce 8800GT, ATI Radeon 4850 or faster (with Shader Model 3 and 512 MB VRAM) Network Internet or LAN connection required for multiplayer I would say that two ATI 1950's in crossfire far outstrip the performance of the single 1800 mentioned in this minimum spec information.

After the aggravation that was ArmA1, I decided not to just rush out and buy ArmA2 until the forum reactions had time to settle, and the first couple of patches had arrived and been absorbed. Based on the forums, I was braced for disappointment but ready to be pleasantly surprised when I downloaded the demo. The screenshots and videos from other folks looked promisingly detailed, and I did manage to tweak ArmA1 quite nicely, even early on after it's release. I upgraded my rig to quad-core, and treated it to 4 gigs of RAM and XP64, the same twin RAID 10Ks, and a stable OC to 3.3 GHz. Still got the old 1950 Pro GPUs in crossfire tho, but then I was hoping to at least be able to get the program running at close-to ArmA1 graphic levels, seeing as the Arma2 engine is a development fork from that same engine. At this point I was considering upgrading the GPU(s) but wanted to see how the game would run on this setup before committing to further expense. So: Demo installed. First run: FPS jerks horribly, well under 5 fps, Everything very blurred, Trees look like candy floss, Mouse lag worse than awful, and the "shine" from the sky is so overpowered that the sky+clouds white-out and the shine bleeds into everything so far that it looks like the world is viewed through spectacles fresh from a sauna. So: To the forums. Tried everything on the optimisation threads, played with all the settings for hours on end. World far less blurry but now cartoon-looking, the "sky-shine" bleeding over everything was still the same but actually looking far far worse without so much blur, Mouse lag slightly better without render-ahead but still horrible because the FPS remained about 10-15 FPS (which was an improvement but...) And No Matter what settings I tried, I could not succeed in seeing the trees as others have posted screens of, they remained as very coarse-grained candy-floss blobs on sticks. Anyhow, then I tried the bootcamp. Hmm. Got to the rifle range, got told to shoot some pop-up targets by a guy with a horrible attitude. So: bring up the sights... pop pop pop pop...., you FAIL, said the man. Ok, np, retry... pop ... you FAIL said the man. Ummmmm, on first shot? Hmm... retry ... pop ... you FAIL ...wtf? Having spent not a few hours of frustration trying to tweak the game into something that was half-playable and with the question on my mind of whether to buy new GPU hardware for this game alone to improve things, the VERY FIRST experience I get when trying to play it is a crummy bug in the very first part of the bootcamp... At this point my patience expired, and so did the nuts of the overly sarcastic and rude instructor. So: Uninstall. BI, please listen to the many requests on the forum to make the post-processing sky-shine, eye-blur and motion-blur OPTIONAL. Fix the stupid bugs in the bootcamp at the very least! And when that is done, re-build a NEW DEMO, that has better performance, can be tweaked into something useable, and has the scripts fixed. First impressions count for a lot and for the scripts to fall over in the very first part screamed FAIL louder than that rude git of an instructor ever could. The demo as-is is a serious let-down, and no matter what improvements are made in the actual game, the demo will not reflect the improvements made. I know that I for one will not be buying more hardware, nor the game itself when that decision will be based on the demo that is available. The LOD on trees were a major problem for me somehow (I even tried GPU tweaks on LOD from my side, to no avail). Before anyone out there starts to flame this thread, or accuses me of being anti-A2, I would say to them that I really REALLY wanted this to be tweakable, and worth investing more money in hardware for. ArmA1 had problems, which were overcome. Hopefully ArmA2 will also prevail given time, and effort. I will continue to "watch this space" in the hope of seeing a patch which works for people, and a demo that will make me want to buy the product it's supposed to be selling, not lead me to uninstall it in frustration. ArMoGaDoN

Just a question: Does anyone know of anyone that has done anything toward making the "A Team" for ArmA? Hannibal, Face, BA, Murdock would be great to see in game, not to mention BA's van..

And I would hope that the TrueMods will be ported across to ArmA2 so that you will still be able to choose whether to display icons, or not, on your own machine, as you can already in ArmA.

@USSRSniper: re: Tu-154... You might like to take a look here as no payware addon has ever come as close as this to reality.. http://www.protu-154.com/

Teasers and hype is all I've really seen from CM so far, IMO the only real in-game footage for OFP2 seen has looked quite far from the dreams they are conjuring in our imaginations. Only time and further footage will reveal what they are REALLY gonna come up with.

oops, missed that one. Thx