-)rStrangelove

From my experience it's an error that happens when 1 part in an overclocked system can't keep up with the rest of your hardware. It mostly happens with cpu-intensive games (hence why ppl saying things like "it only happens in game x !!"). It can happen after 5mins to 1.5 hours. I had this error in the past on various systems during the last years and yet i always fixed them with different solutions - so the cause are widespread. Google for it and you'll find millions of forum posts with that error message, for millions of different games. So generally it just shows there's something not optimized in your system, can be your gfx card, gfx cars slot, motherboard timings (cpu, ram, bus), can even be a slowly failing power supply, can be your rams or how the way they sit in the slots. Temperatures, power levels, timings, conflicting IRQs, old drivers conflicting with newer ones - can be anything. Best thing to do is to set back your system to normal speeds, rip everything out which is not needed for testing (esp a creative soundcard). Unplug all usb fancy stuff you dont need. Gently push everything you have left in your pc down on the motherboard again, esp rams. If you have a stable system, add 1 thing at a time then play for 2 hours. Overclocking comes last cause OCing an already unstable system is not a good idea. ;) Hope that helps somewhat. God knows i've been haunted by this error for years now.

I take it you both have different Steam accounts. Have you looked into port forwarding via router config?

I'm currently replaying L4D in MP, actually forgot how much fun it is. I love the feeling anything can come from anywhere at you at anytime. You have to stay together, but without getting into the line of fire of anybody. You have to pay attention to each other because some ppl might get pinned down and need help. You also have to pay attention to your environment: don't shoot special cars to trigger alarms, place fuel canisters in paths where enemy movement will be bottlenecked, try to reach higher places to get a better overview. It's one of the best coop games with a great atmosphere. Could we archieve something like that in an ArmA online coop session? I was thinking, here are my ideas: SCENARIO You are scattered in an out of control environment. Terrorists have overthrown the regular government of Sahrani and triggered a civil war. Members of the government party have fled the capital and american advisors have been ordered to leave the country. You and a few american soldiers have been left behind in the chaos. GOAL Like in L4D the goal is to reach a safe escape zone (airport, harbor). These might be overrun by terrorists now but upon contacting your folks with COM towers there extraction teams should arrive within 10mins from a carrier off the coast. START We could use random start zones so unlike in L4D players first need to figure out where they are. Start zones are not controlled by terrors, but don't hold any usuable equipment either. You just have a normal rifle and a few mags. Since not all players will be in the same places they can use markers to figure out where everyone is. So the first taks might be to bring the team together. LIMITED RESOURCES Vehicles are needed, also better weapons, ammo, fuel, repairs, medical treatment and finally somewhere to rest (scripted periods of tiredness?). Problems: - roads might be safe to travel, but most resources will be in the cities. Cities are full of terros. - local civilians might know where to find resources but most of them are trapped within the cities. Armed checkpoints hold them in place. If you can free civilians they might have valuable information for you. - alerted cities might send out waves of armed vehicles to your last known position, so it's best to keep moving. Stay too long in a location might get you surrounded and killed. RESPAWNS Like in L4D dead players respawn in a nearby safe zone but they are trapped and need to be freed by other players. This could be accomplished by placing the respawning players into a surrounded city, along with trapped civilians. There are no weapons around. The lost player could provide information about the surrounded forces to the other players coming to his aid, or might try to sneak out of the city undetected. A car might also come in handy to drive someone over. ;) START KITS (scripted) Something useful to enforce more coop are different capabilities of player kits, like in BF2. Kits might also make sense in this scenario: - MEDIC can build medic tent and a fireplace to get some rest (scripted) - ENGINEER can lay down/detect/disarm mines and find hidden support crates via a sensor beacon. - MG GUNNER can build ammo crates and sandbags/mounted MGs? - RECON can reveal enemy vehicles from a distance (without actually seeing them) - OFFICER can get infos from captured terrorists. These will reveal locations of trapped civilians, enemy checkpoints, ammo caches. RANDOM START RESOURCES Something that could encourage coop teamwork would be to give each player a resource at this start location which he cannot really use just on his own. Players will want to discuss what everyone has to offer, what is needed and where: - weapon crate (better rifles but no ammo) - ammo crate (can also reammo vehicles) - a light vehicle for travelling (low on fuel) - fuel truck - an armed light vehicle for firesupport (low on ammo) - repairtruck RANDOM ENEMIES Terrors patrol around cities to keep them in their control. Once alerted to player presence they call in vehicles. If players enter the cities single terrorists might be spawned anywhere at anytime. Mines will be placed randomly (won't be triggered by enemy vehicles). Outside the cities checkpoints & mines are spawned near the roads to hinder player vehicle movements. Farms and other remote buildings may be clear or spit out groups of terrors when players get near. There is no safety until the players reach the escape zone. THE END Upon clearing the escape zone from terrors a player can trigger an SOS signal at a local COM tower. Like in L4D it takes some minutes until extraction is possible, with waves of enemies coming in until all players are either safely aboard or dead. What do you guys think? Got other ideas? :)

Congratz for buying a good game Leonidus. Be aware that most servers won't allow any mods or specific mods to be run and will disconnect you instantly giving you a message what modfiles they had a problem with. So i'd advise you to first find some servers you'd like to play on, connect to them with your original unmodded version of ArmA and then ask / read server messages if and what mods are allowed there. With ACE servers it's the other way around, you should already have the mod installed before connecting. :P If you can't find answers try to find a website / forum of the ppl that run the server.

This is a feature in certain missions and is done via scripting, it's not an official ArmA feature. Besides, if the mission carries on after you left the server you will get your score back when your rejoin. If you don't like it search for 'unlocked' ranking missions that will give you the highest rank after shooting a handful of enemies or play different missions that don't have the ranking included at all. And no, ArmA is not BF2.

For radio messages you could also use computer-generated voices and then mix some distortion (to sim bad communication quality) via Waveeditor into them. Most text-to-wave programs are actually pretty good and if mixed with distorted sound it's difficult to notice it's not a human.

I still can't see a Download button to DL your wonderful mod. :rolleyes:

Thx Kyle, actually i was thinking it would be best to develop it in ArmA first. I can't do it on my own though and when looking at the answers i get the feeling the idea isn't very popular. ;) Nvrmind

Judging the AI sight at night isn't enough to judge overall gameplay imo. Personally i prefer to play with skill down to 0.5 to get decent gameplay atm, maybe BIS will change AI settings later on. Although i really dunno why ppl are complaining, i mean it's not like AI performance is the only problem with ArmA2 atm. Low FPS when zooming through vegetation while in an AI intensive campaign mission is actually much more important to fix imo. I hate to set objects to LOW and staring at ugly bushes.

Lol it's getting crowded like a workshop here. So much help posts to choose from, he can't fail now. :D

1. You have a west center in the mission? ( createCenter - command) You need this if there's no west unit in the mission yet but you want to spawn them. 2. The create unit command syntax is different from yours. _CdfMan1 = "CDF_SOLDIER_TL" createUnit [getPos cdfUral1, _cdfGroup1, "", 0]; 3. If you're starting the script from the truck init line it's elegant to reference the truck object via this. This way the truck doesnt need a name: nul = [this] execVM "grpspawn.sqf"; _truck = _this select 0; _CdfMan1 = "CDF_SOLDIER_TL" createUnit [getPos _truck, _cdfGroup1, "", 0]; ... 4. You can't use a group with moveincargo. Look up moveincargo in the biki.

Well, i had crackled sound when i enabled HW sound in ArmA2 and ArmA1 so something def changes. Haven't looked into fps changes.

Yup. 1. Find Spooner's buy & sell / money scripts (they're simple and work pretty well) on Opfec and rework them for the stuff you want to have in the mission. Test the shop script if it works. 2. Make your own random mission generator and a conversation script for VIPs, together with scripts for faction 'scores' and other bonus / bounties when completing a mission. 3. Make your own random spawning of civilians script and try to use the garbage collector module to clean up abandoned areas. (i think the BIS civilian life module doesn't work with the garbage module, so civilians will fill up your mission) 4. Make your own guard watcher scripts so you get punished when commiting a crime. Imo you'd need 4 basic modules to pull the whole thing off. Can be done, but is a huge workload (scripts & tests). And this is only for SP. MP is a more complicated area.

I don't think AI fights all over the worldmap is a good idea for lags etc. If you just want to have the atmosphere why not playing soundfiles of battles in the background or from the direction of each city? Once you get there you can spawn everything you want to get involved into AI fights, when you left the city everything is deleted again and the soundfiles restart. This has been done for OpF / ArmA in the past and it worked pretty good imo (except the sounds i think).

Remember Halflife(1) back in 1998 and how one of the biggest modding scenes on the net built up over night and by itself? 1. There was only little delay between the game release and the tools for modding. 2. They were easy to use for everybody. 3. 99% of the modding wisdom was centralized on a few famous sites. Problems we see here (imo): 1. Tools aren't there yet and the game will be patched over and over. 2. You need to know many technical aspects of many different filetypes used for many different things ingame. BIS raised the complexity of the game without thinking how to 'hide' the complexity to 'casual modders'. It starts with writing a briefing for your mission and ends with configuring the LOD values of your o2 model - no matter what you want to deal with, it's far away from just 'testing around a bit'. You are forced to invest a lot of time studying how things work or you won't go very far. 1st steps are the hardest, whereas it should be the other way around. A big workload has to be done first before you see some sort of result which provides valueable feedback for your skills. With lots of sparetime invested and no feedback, frustration is lurking around the corner. 3. Why do we need different sites for modding? Why not do it all here, on opfec or on the wiki? Instead i have to make accounts for sourcesystems and exchange public crypt keys etc etc. Mod development shouldn't be exactly like proffessional dev work where you earn money. Keep the information updated on a central site and keep it open for everyone. Don't create obstacles with registration or other things that get in the way of the 'give and take' approach.

Yeah i accidently mixed factions and sides up a bit, but they're basically the same. Since you can't make 2 factions of the same side fight each other, it doesn't matter what you use. Factions are just a good way to make your mission more believable as not every missonmaker wants to use USMC scenarios for example.

I agree it could be done. A lot of scripting & testing involved though, esp when you'd want a MP version. Oblivion had perfect gameplay and took ages to play through will all the side missions & factions. In ArmA2 we basically only have 3 factions and civilians, but that should be enough. Players would either play on west or east side and then could become enemy or neutral to the guerilla side, depending on what missions they do and how they behave. What i loved about Oblivion was that freedom, you could just walk out of a city and explore the landscape without any missions at all. Raiding all those bandit campsites alone was great fun. For an "ArmA2 Oblivion" you would basically need: - cities with civilians and guards (to chase you down if you steal or kill in a city area), shops to sell / buy stuff - randomly spawned bandit camps with a crate to loot - VIP chars that you can ask for missions. A mission is randomly created for you and you need to come back to the VIP once finished / failed. You can get special stuff and some sort of "respect" score for the faction the VIP represents. Once you have enough respect you can go to a faction HQ and do more dangerous missions together with AI soldiers of that faction. They first need to trust you before you can use special weapons and vehicles. My 2 cents.

Found a pic of the little "Mini-Hunter": http://throwingchicken.com/offsite/terminator%20referance/Body/Side_T2_Life03.JPG You might also want to roam that site for other great reference pics. Found it while googling around randomly. ;)

I don't think it's the PSU as Empire total war is also a very stressy game for the CPU. It should shutdown there too if it was stress related.

Show me another infantry simulator that has the same features as ArmA2 and i'll leave here. But since there's no alternative i try to make the best out of it. At least i know this game WILL be patched, fixed and optimized for the next years - something that you also don't have with other games. Yes, BIS aren't perfect developers but they are trying to fix things, one step at a time and listen to the game community. Ever heard about EA paying attention to customers? Haha.

Why do you get more fps if you prerender 8 frames instead of 3? Isn't this like the gfx card is waiting until a memory buffer is filled until it shows the next frame on screen? If so waiting for 8 frames in the buffer should take longer, shouldn't it? I remember that decreasing this setting to 2 or 1 gave me MORE fps in GTA4. Weird. But this situation reminds me of the ArmA1 release tbh. We had lots of hate posts from newcomers here, stating that they 'should have more fps in ArmA because they had 100 in COD4'. The newcomers left the ArmA scene when other games came out and the real fans enjoyed a better ArmA1 when it was patched a year later. So i guess i'll just keep on playing ArmA1 until next year. ;) Until then i can play around in the editor.

Go for Quad cores @ 3Ghz at least, and leave fillrate at 100%.

Game vets should stay with ArmA1 now that all kiddies play on ArmA2 Evo servers. I'll switch over next year or so. ;)

Grass makes no sense in PVP. You lie in the grass and can't see anything but anyone standing in the distance can see your back&head sticking out of a plain surface (grass doesnt get rendered at some distance). He shoots you, you complain about cheaters and the whole game atmosphere goes down the drain. :P

It might be a good idea to tell us what your problem is exactly. Any error messages? You want a new feature?