barmyarmy

Nice work..

Fundamentally Steam is VALVE - One of the few games publishers with a reputation worth a damn. If Steam was run by any other company like EA I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. As it is Steam has flourished, as have the myriad of small software companies that publish their games on it. Once BIS get the hang of releasing games via steam then esp. the Combined Arms type problems, it should be good. BA

It has to do with the size of the map/island. Utes is so small that it does not fill the whole screen when zoomed out... leaving the black bands. BA

If you can produce multiple buildings with variant textures that would be great. So that say when building a suburb housing estate the houses do not all look identical. Say different coloured doors and paint work. Just a thought Very nice work by the way

AFTER THOUGHT If BIS are serious about moving to steam then the following needs to happen. They need to ensure all of the historical problems that have plagued steam users are addressed completely. They need to then allow use of sprocket/idea/retail CD-Keys to enable the steam version of the game (I've seen this done with other games such as UT3); that way the doubting thomas's can try the steam edition and see if they can live with it. I think if you force this, it will tank.

[x] It depends. I own a large number of games on Steam, and for alot of games it is my prefered platform. However I have always bought the BIS games on original rom. Anecodotally there have always been issues with BIS games on steam, which is why I have always bought them separately. Besides I enjoy the Czeck language refresher courses every time BIS do a new release. BIS would have to show a REAL commitment to overcoming the current issues that exist with ArmaII and Steam before I would consider moving to Steam for their software. BarmyArmy

Simple and brilliant - this is a good idea. Either that or allowing multiple objects to be manipulated with a single edit window, so you can select "playable" and they all become playable. Ctrl-p works for me too tho'. BA

( Dear Santa....) For me one of the most frustrating things about ArmaII/AO is camo packs, most players I guess own Combined Arms; as with Marmite, this game you either love it , and buy everything or play COD4 instead. So I have a AO gave us a Bradley with desert camo making it look out of place on Chernarus, and likewise the Woodland camo tooks wrong in Takistan. I'd like to be able to use any of the equipment at my disposal, on any map. I'd happily pay $5-$10 for some properly drawn texture packs do allow us to mix equipment up, and maybe some arctic camo too (please). Thats before we get onto BAF and PMC. It would provide BIS a good way to futher monetize their existing models, I have no problem with paying BIS for what they do. yes the community does sometimes eventually rework the textures, but as BIS have the original artwork, then I guess it would be much quicker and easier for them to do it... and get paid for it. Merry Christmas BA

Some of us use CAA with Arma1 and still enjoy Sarahni. If nothing else the winter textures you guys created for South Sarahni were great. Thank you for the effort you put into your projects and the Arma community, should you decide to stop, it will be a poorer community for it. BA

Vanilla BIS: M16A2 Iron Sights The optics just get in the way, esp. the ACOG in any close encounter. I prefer the M16 to the M4. ACE: M16 ACOG Best of both worlds. :D BA

Update Armed Assault II - Theatre Of War Tournament First Full Campaign on Armed Assault II. Battledays Sunday 1700Z, see web-site and forums http://www.arma-tow.com and web-site for further information. Co-op team play on a large battlefield environment using combined arms. Arma-style realism and Fun, in one neat package. Warm up, and coin-toss on Sunday 11th October, first full battle on Sunday 18 October, so there is still time to sign up. Enrolement open to individuals and groups, where possible we will attempt to place groups together but this is not always possible. For those who have played before we have returned to a more C1/C2 style of play after the experiment that was C3.

I would actually say that the BIS documentation is some of the best I've seen considering their primary focus is producing and selling a game as oppose to a development environment. Try finding developer resources for modding for BF2... The main problem is as everthing is web based finding the gentle introduction is extemely hit and miss. For instanced I downloaded the new tools; and was interested by the FSM editor - what does this do I wondered.... ? This is the FSM manual linked from the installer...... http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/FSM_Editor_Manual This should NOT be the first thing you read about the FSM Editor; hell its 100% appendix content; and useless for the first time user. Hell the "Terminology" section doesn't even explain what an "FSM" is, nor is there anywhere a link to this page which is far more enlightening. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/FSM ( well until I edited it :D) There are "official" bohemia sources like this one; or ArmaHolic and OFPEC; plus the nice guys at dev.heaven ; ( thanks for their help in decoding FSMs ). The learning curve is steep because unlike a book, on the web there is no beginning no "page 1". The best way to learn; find something that almost does what you want and "break" it until it does exactly what you want. The real question is once you have discovered how something works; what have YOU done to make it easier for the next guy who comes along behind you... ? I have no time for people who expect to be spoon fed ; by Bohemia, or anyone else. BA

I must admit I can't don't condone software game piracy. DRM just pisses of your customers; like gun laws they only affect law-abiding citizens. Lets face it who do you really want to take advice about the games industry and customer service from ? This guy: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22378 or http://www.riaa.com Shrugs and ambles off.

UNNs code is sound however the dirty hack you want is something like: _global="HeliPad" createVehicle ([0,0,0]); _global setInitCommand "hint ""seen on everymachine"";deleteVehicle this;"; processInitCommands; sleep 2; However I recommend getting UNNs code to work, while he says "I haven't done much Arma2 scripting...", I suspect he's being truthful and modest at the same time. He knows what he's doing. :D

Ok, you've been reading other peoples missions. So you are reading code. This is a good way to learn. However what you need to do is get your hands dirty, and write some code, and get some stuff wrong. You know there is a difference between isNil and isNull, so when one doesn't work, the other will. Trial and error is an important part of the learning process. Because by the sound of it you have seen and read lots of examples in other peoples code. So by now you should have gotten a grasp. If you are only ever going to read code, then frankly it doesn't matter if you understand, you're never going to need it. _vehicle = "HMMWV" createVehicle position player; _driver = driver _vehicle; if ( _driver == objNull) { // vehicle has no driver; } else { hint format["driver is %2",_driver]; }; _respawnTime=_vehicle GetVariable "RespawnTime"; if ( isNil "respawnTime") then { // no respawn time defined } else { hint format["respawn time is %2",_respawnTime]; }; Its all about data-types: "driver" will always return an "object" so it will be "an object" or "null" aka. no-object. "getvariable" can return any type string/array/object/scalar or "unknown" So I suppose the difference between isNil and isNull is the difference between "is unknown" and "is nothing". Any wiser ? BA

We did some thing similar for AToW; couple of caveats - one you assume that the player will respawn; as oppose to timing out. Also to avoid confusion we renamed the 'corpse' object once the player respawned to avoid confusion. Tho note for MP devs. setVehicleVarName is "local" so you need a mechanism for propogating the change to all clients. Here I cheated and created a pubVar. Also I will hold my hands up - I am a waitUntil refusnik - if I don't need to check every frame then a sleep lets the CPU do something more useful. _unit=_this select 0; // only for human players if ( isPlayer _unit) then { _unitName=format["%1",_unit]; _debugplayer sidechat format["unitName:%1",_unitName]; // did someone name the unit ? if not 'bad' things can happen - so (re)name it if ( isNil _unitName) then { _unitName=format["unit%1",time]; _unit setVehicleVarName _unitName; }; _corpseName=format["%1corpse",_unitName]; _giveUpAfter=time+30; _respawned=objNull; while { time<_giveUpAfter} do { _respawned=call compile _unitName; if ( alive _respawned && _respawned!=_unit) exitWith { _debugplayer sidechat format["corpseName:%1",_corpseName]; _unit setVehicleVarName _corpseName; // not sure why I need to do this but without it other clients recieve _unit as a "scalar bool array" // ... answer setVehicleVar is local specific; so other clients do not get the new name... _unit call compile format["%1=_this;publicVariable""%1"";",_corpseName]; _debugplayer sidechat format["unit has respawned:%1,%2,%3",_respawned,_unit,_respawned==_unit]; //[eventPlayerRespawned,[_unit,_respawned]] call sqfFireEvent; }; sleep 0.1; }; };

Personally I DO think that the BIS forums and wiki should be the primary go-to place for all things related to BIS development. While I can also see a place for dev-heaven as an Arma-forge type location for providing source control, bug-tracking, etc. which Bohemia do not offer in their forums, care need to be taken to compliment and not compete with what bohemia offers in their forums/wiki. As for the elitism, I've interviewed enough CS graduates to know that possession of a piece of paper, or a university education is NOT a requirement or a garuantee of or coding ability. Talking to your audience in plain english and not "comp.sci." speak, or taking care to explain the terms to a layman audience on first use. "Anonymous function", and "lambda expression" anyone... I don't know why it is many scripting modding groups do appear very elitist invite only affairs. I know I had terrible trouble getting in to my first dev. team, despite several offers to assist. This does seem to be a who you know community still... Posting examples of good practice, and revealing known pit-falls and traps which will catch unwary/new developers is a good idea. For small projects such a coding standard may seem overkill. In defence of ACE a larger project needs a basic coding standard, for it to succeed. Letting each person do there own thing means you get code which only the author can maintain. In large projects with larges teams, people come and go often without much notice, esp. in volunteer projects where RL can throw curve balls left and right. You need to know that any dev. can pick up any code and get up and running with it quickly, they need to be interchangable. Plus the modules need to integrate and work together, having them work the same agreed way will always help. If Jimmy is they only guy who can read and understand his own "brilliant code" your fucked. Give me an average developer who will listen, learn and do what they're told, over an prima-donna genius 9 times out of ten. I wish dev-heaven and all who use her the best of luck.

It is sad that with the new release so close that one of our better developers has such a negative view even before the game releases. I beleive that the support and the community has only improved over the years, the learning curve is still steep, but I think it is getting easier. Yes the abilities of the engine means that getting a perfect release right is getting more and more difficult. However I beleive that the wealth of information now available in the community means that is much easier to get to Rev 1.0. And there there is the talent and support within the community that those who are willing to share their efforts early with the community will find the constructive criticism and help and support to then create incrementally better releases, hence revs 1.1 and 1.2 etc will come along and I hope get better. Someone will offer advice on uv-mapping While I do admire those people who take pride in their work, it is frustrating knowing that something is being worked on but that it won't ever be released until its 101% ready and perfect. Release early, mark clearly as "beta" get feedback, you might also find that people send you "fixes", and you make new friends, and that in my opinion is how the community grows. BA

Nice work RKSL. BA

The accuracy of "self positional awareness" of the AI has been much improved they seem to drive better and follow fences building, find cover much better when on foot. Also they do seem to check-six and other details which does seem a vast improvement. BA

Much of the twitter recently was arround the 505 Games release in London today. Taken from our community pages at AToW. I'm a scripter so I am challenged journalistically, but here's what we got. opinions are my own and not those of BIS or 505games.

@Spellcast As with BF2 I found the best way to avoid the kidiots was organised tournaments I played many undisturbed games over at BF2Combat.net on BF2 and if you look you'll find similar mulitplayer tournaments for Arma advertised on these forums check them out. 50+ players on a server, organised command structure, so you team mates act in team as oppose to just having the same uniform on... ICArma and TheatreOfWar immediately come to mind, and there are others. Most are planning to support Arma2 on release as well as Arma. BA

I don't mean to seem a killjoy, I consider myself more of an engineer, than a scientist. I am also team leader for a development house in RL, the biggest challenge is getting code which is easy to understand and maintain, esp. when the person maintaining the code might not be the person who originally wrote it. I am not a fan of "clever" code, if that clever code can only be maintained and debugged by the person who wrote it, thats just "bad" code. The initial example is somewhat trivial and in my opinion a bad example of what can be achieved more by the use of "anonymous methods" than "closures" per-say. All you have done in the first example obfuscate the code, and ended up with data that looks like code and code that looks like data. consider pointA= [1,2] call createPoint2D; "hint" call pointA; Deciding which method to execute to call by passing in a string? Oh dear. I think there are better methods of achieving OO without closures, or at least you need to be *much* clearer in your naming of variables if you want to use this technique in "production" code. While proper Object-Orientation in SQF would indeed be nirvahna this is NOT a good way of achieving it. However I did find bn880's tracer example much more interesting after I had sat down and spent ten minuted reformatting it so I could see what it did, and how it did it. Thanks for taking the time to post that. Sorry, what the community needs in my opinion is large body of well written easy to understand and maintain code. While this "science" is all very good, unless used correctly what we will end up with is a mess that is easy to misenterpret. Having said that this thread was interesting reading, I am trying to be cautious as oppose to negative. Far to often I have seen "interesting" technologies used for the sake of using them as oppose to because they are appropriate, XML was a particulartily good example of this, Linq is becoming another. However it seems to be case that this happens alot with new technologies, they have to be experimented with before their limitations and usefulness can really be discovered. There are those in the community who are considered leaders, the problem is with being a leader is that people follow, which creates a responisibility to take the care to set a good example for your followers. BA

You could compare us with IC-Arma. I'm not going to try, or encourage others to do so. We've both been around a while, IC-Arma fights on Saturdays, we fight on Sundays. We have players who play at both tournaments. Try both see which you like, you might also end up playing in both.

Armed Assault: Theatre Of War Campaign 3 - Tour 2 After their first ever Tour 1 Victory the US, both armies are gearing up for the rematch ( at Theatre Of War we play each map twice - like changing ends at half time in Soccer). Tour 1 had a couple of little hiccups as we have integrated A.C.E. into our campaign, but most of the issues seem to be resolved now. So for those of you looking for some multiplayer team-vs-team A.C.E. action, pop on by for a boot camp. We will proceed with Tour 2 starting on 19th April. BarmyArmy AToW Dev.Lead My thanks as ever to the guys over at ACE team, for a cracking conversion-mod. Thanks to Vipermaul,Moody,Super64,-7-,PuFu,Iceshark,DaMan,BazookaBoy,Nhor,Dren,Jag,Sprite,ArmaTech,BlackViolet,Lawman,Michael and everyone else who has made TheatreOfWar what it is today.