Chill xl

If the lad has problems handling the sweeter images, he might struggle with the messier pictures aswell. The ripped up bodies do look pretty sick from up close, thats if he can make it that far...

I hooked up a Wii controller with motion plus to my pc and mapped it to be compatible with Arma 2 and i have to say it works pretty well. First i made Glovepie script that used the gyroscopes for general movement, quick looking around and the IR sensor for senstitive aiming. After much tweaking and testing i was able to come up with a script that used the gyros / motionplus sensors only, both precise and quick. Most of the buttons on the Wiimote and nunchuck. Several combo's are needed to get the most important functionality accesable. This controller setup can be used in a relaxed sitting position, even on the couch. Ive tested so much different controllers and i like to do it differently, i have to admit though the mouse + kb combo still rules...

Lots of good locations for a nice firefight, depends though what sort of fighting you like. Personally i like the more hectic and closer ranged fights, anywhere between 100 and 300m on terrain that provides cover and concealment (so that enemies can flank and pop up to attack) but also gives a fair bit of overview. I really hate, and tend to avoid, sitting on the top of an hill and ripping up the poor dummy's that are struggling to find some cover in the open field ahead. I like to get "into" the fight if you know what i mean... For these fights i look for terrain that is not too steep like some of the mountains and not too flat either so you dont have any cover or concealment. The "big" mountains are too empty and its easy to completely overlook enemies passing by and vice versa. Takistan: Last sunday i setup a mission in the Par-e Siah Oilfields and a great time with some nice firefights. On first the terrain seems to be pretty open en flat, but theres actually quite alot cover, oilpipes, the oilpump and towers, not to forget the dips an small hills that also give good concealment. We flanked and were also flanked a couple of times. I also liked the terrain in the south, approachin the airfield from the Town Sultansafe. Here the terrain is again pretty open, but it also has alot of small dips and hills, some patches of trees and small groups of houses. The airfield itself also has some nice cover. like the wall to border it. The big hills around it could give some nice flanking routes. The terrain north east, above Karachinar, also features this type of terrain. Altough more open it also offers more rocks for cover and a few ridges that proved excellent flanking routes. Then are the greenzones which give very nice shorter ranged fights, much harder to spot enemies and you get easily ambushed. Very entertaining! I like the green zones around Rasman and Nagara the most. Oh yeah, not to forget the town of Nur and its direct surroundings, also very nice terrain. The town slopes up and has some nice patches of houses, trees, some walls here and there. Then theres also the surrounding "forrest" that allows you or the enemy to get close. Zargabad: The area between the mil complex and the villa is also a great fighting area with some different types of terrain close to each other. The rocks and low hills and dips around the mil complex. The open fields more south to the villa and close to the villa a nice hilly / green terrain with again quite some good cover. Let alone the building that provides pretty decent cqb possibilties. West of the city is a small green zone and a crash site of an old Russian chopper, the terrain is pretty detailed there, lots of very small hills and dips to crawl behind. Then to the south the green zones close the dried river beds also gives excellent oppertunites for fire and manouvre. Fallujah : Take Fallujah for some awesome urban fighting, the city both has very narrow alleys and streets but also more open city areas (long and wide streets, the park, industrial park) for a bit more range. Podagorsk : I tend to take us to North Podagorsk for the best forrest fights, the forrest there are just awesome. The trees are spaced out enough so you can see pretty decent up ahead but close enough to give that real eary forest feeling. Also quite a few rocks can be found there and some open spaces to get some distance. The best of this area is that its remote and theres lots of space to move around without stumbling upon yet another village like on some other if not most other maps. Also the Southern island with the airfield has the hills and forests but also the open terrain of the airfield and the bottleneck of the passage the mainland gives excellent firefight possiblities. Chernarus: The area just above the blunt rocks, very very nice small hills and dips, rocks and lots of trees that are spaced out very well. Cover and concealment and yet quite some overview into the forest, take it slow though... as you can get amusbhed easily. Furthermore pretty much the whole west side to the north of this map is excellent, hills, forest, open fields. A very nice mix of these features that offer a good "base" for a good fight.

I did some tests back in Arma 1 and if i remember correctly and i noticed then that the fog was substracted from the viewdistance. A high (client) viewdistance with the same fog setting gave more range then a low (client) viewdistance. Somewhere i rechecked this in Arma 2 and i was under the impression this was changed, setting the fog was absolute and was not related to the VD anymore. Just recently i was fidling around with the fog again and noticed the same thing as in arma 1, the fog is again connected to the client VD.

Just a quick sitrep: Some progress has been made on the map, altough alot less then some time ago... I have alot going on at the moment which keeps me away from map develolpment / research. I'm struggling with roads and trails network, which are not like i wanted. Roads are quite problematic with OA and to get some roads in i need to add Arma II roads... Anyway, i have added 2 villages in the past time, will try to drop some shots here asap. It's weird to see these villages in this map, as it gives much more idea how big the map really is...

I'm experiencing weird fps drops when moving and turning around fast, it happens even more when zooming in and out at the same time. When just stationary and i've looked around 360 combined with zooming in and out, the fps becomes stable @ 60 fps flatline and i it will stay like this untill i move around and most likely it needs to load new data. The fps drops are quite severe, it goes from flat 60 to 25 and after a 3/4 secs it raises and crawls back up to 60. The problem is most apparent when doing this in the center of Zargabad which is known to be "heavy". This tells me it's something to do with loading / processing enviromental data like buildings and objects like trees and bushes. I've defragged the hd several times, drivers etc are all fresh. Furthermore i've tried -exthreads 1/3/5/7 but it has no effect on this problem. Only thing i noticed so far is greatly reducing viewdistance (@500m) which makes the problem less obvious but its still noticable. I'm out of options, maybe some could help me out? Here are my system specs: i7 920 @ 3.6ghz 6 GB Ram 2x 5850 crossfirex 2x HD in Raid 0 which holds my system and Arma2 / OA installment

Scorpius, what video settings are u using? If you don't already have disabled AA try this, to get a form of AA back set the 3D resolution at 125%, 150% or higher. ATi cards seem not to like AA very much, it runs verry sluggish even possible with quite good fps. Upping the 3d res often seems to work better. Also try to lower PP setting as that might hurt performance aswell.

Shots are looking good, very nice lushly green enviroment! The grass colors also fit very well. One thing, if you would add more detail to the ground texs around buildings, it would look even better. I miss the transition from the grass to walls / buildings, it seems as if the buildings are on top of the grass instead of the grass around the building if you know what i mean...

Tnx again for all the feedback from you guys, its been very helpfull and have gotten some nice ideas from it! At the moment im working on atleast one village, possible 2 other smaller settlements aswell. Furthmore therewill be one or two of these outposts and these will be build as realistic as possible, in configuration and positioning. Then ontop of the big mountain plateau there will be some sort of insurgent "stronghold" / camp with some mujahideen fortifications. Then all this will be tied together with a minimal road network. All in all it will still be quite empty as far as human stuff goes. This suits my personal preference as far as maps goes, saves time and leaves a sandbox environment for others to use... I try to get the best possible result in a short time, as i'm not willing to spend months on this project. As with most of my projects i apply guerilla tactics, hit well and run... :D Anyway, hope to provide some new shots on the village thats being worked on atm. Keep the suggestions coming as they are very much helpfull, i will for sure consider each request and see if it possible and fits the map / concept. One thing that would be even better is to provide some pics or photos or any other research with the suggestion or idea. This saves me alot of time and illustrates your idea or suggestion even better.

Here's some more shots of the map in its current state: Some finishing touches to the terrain and environment before i move on to the next step: adding an outpost, some fortifications and a camp in the mountains and a few clusters of qala's / houses here and there...

Pics of latest build, would gladly hear what ya all think of it so far?

Tnx for the thumbs up and feedback on the work so far. The heightmap and the sat map dont have any relevance to the real deal, unfortunally. I named the map ToraBora to indicate what kind of terrain i'm after, i'm inspired by it but am not trying to replicate at all... The heightmap is actually a modified 100% 1:1 10m dem of a piece of some Hawain island. I have edited it to give it more detail, more roughness etc. From this heightmap i created a base sat map using L3DT software. Then i edited the base sat map in photoshop to adjust the colors, add more detail, grass fields, forests etc etc. Very time consuming work i must say, the psd file sometimes exceeds the 3gb which makes saving and editing a pain in the u know what... For reference i have looked at many pictures, mostly taken by us soldiers operating in that area. At the moment the map is exported and binarized, once done i will have some new shots incoming. The main goal for me is to create an "afghanish" proper mountain map, remote and rugged terrain for missions like mountain footpatrols or air assaults. Something i miss in most maps is that you never really are "far away" if you know what i mean...

Tnx for all the great feedback, some excellent ideas! Am already working on some of them... The terrain in the video shows more or less what i'm after, altough im not sure if i will go into creating all those terasses. The grass and such is already being incorporated atm.

Tnx. There will be less rocks for sure, it will remain a rocky mountain area though... The rocks are already mostly done and are far better positioned then Aiaktalik. The open areas will be more open and you will see alot less rocks and boulders there. The whole terrain has way more "micro" hills, so the need for rocks etc to provide cover is less needed.

Latest Catalyst application profiles (July 14th): http://www.rage3d.com/xmp/ Maybe theres a profile for OA in there...

Indeed i do not get the logo nor with soft nor with hardlink nor beta renamed, unless i add the -winxp param. I checked to see if CF worked in Arma 2, there it shows the logo without using any param and works great, performance is nearly doubled... I'm using the Steam OA version, 10.6 driver + latest profiles on win 7 x64, but have tested 10.5 and 10.4 all with the above results. ---------- Post added at 04:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:27 AM ---------- Just retested renaming the beta and i have a go on CF (without the -winxp param) with added performance!!

Same goes for me, renaming the exe using a soft or a hardlink doesn't get me any crossfire. The -winxp param however does the trick, but the performance is worse then without this param. Same goes for the beta build... This is with 10.6 and latest cf profiles (23june).

The hitbox model of the big rocks found in Takistan is not very accurate. AI can see and hit player while the player is behind the rock. Problem becomes more apparent when the rock gets bigger since the offset/inaccuracy is scaled aswell... ---------- Post added at 11:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:59 AM ---------- When M14 + Aimpoint is fired impact of round is to the left of where was aimed. Problem becomes apparent when targets are further away, 250m+

Good idea, to build further upon: holding the "F" key brings up a quick menu that allows quick selection of preferred wep mode. Often seen nowadays at console games where limited buttons need to have multiple functions.

I got CF running by adding the -winxp to the startup parameters and renaming the .exe with mklink to arma2.exe. However CF at the moment does not really help, it seems to run more or less similar fps only unstable. Looks like i need to wait for the official profile. I'm expecting that CF in the near future will increase performance in OA for sure as it works already very well for A2.

The M113 is found as Opfor and not Blufor. Not sure if it's a bug?

I managed to get crossfire going again, on arma 2, but not for Operation Arrowhead. :( OA came trough Steam so i couldnt easily rename the exe but i tried the workaround using soft/hard links. Both without succes, the game worked using the name arma2.exe exactly like Maruk suggested. It's just that the profile doesnt kick in. I have tried several clean installations of drivers and profiles, from 10.4 to 10.6. Not sure where to go from here for OA as i have tried it all as far as i know...

I have used Crossfire to great succes in Arma2. My crossfire system is based on 2 cards with 3 gpu's, a 4870 + 4850x2 and a oc-ed i7 920 @3.6ghz. The game runs on very high settings and a resolution of 2234*1436 (133%), only shadow is on high, pp on low and no AA and i get 60fps in almost every situation, it hardly ever dips below the 60. At the moment i seem to have a driver probem as i have not been able to run OA with crossfire, but nor does A2 run crossfire at the moment for me. Hope to solve this tonight with a fresh driver install (from 10.5 to 10.6). For me crossfire makes a massive difference as to running just 1 single gpu, especially when going for the big resolutions...

SIX Aiaktalik map Here's the first Beta release of my map "Aiaktalik" project for ArmA II. The 10x10km map features a remote and barren desert terrain with plains, hills and mountains, it is inspirated and loosly based on some environments seen in Afghanistan or Arizona USA. I've created the map mainly as a sandbox/playground to be used at our Coop community, the 6th Sense. The map is mainly created for infantry battles, i've focussed on overview and cover. You will find lots and lots of cover of the massive ammounts of rocks, furthermore the terrain is lightly covered with pine-trees. At the moment there are no human created objects or features to be found on the map. Maybe in a future update i will add some trails and tracks to have the AI move around a little bit better. The island is exclusively released, updated and maintained on the excellent Six Updater Platform by Sickboy. Not only does it save you, and the mirrors, a lot of bandwidth, every update, also after configuring it once, fetching updates and information about the latest releases is extremely easy and very fast. Check out the work in progress Six Updater Portal Site for the latest update, version, size and changelog information!

I have stopped devolpment on Aiaktalik for a while because there was a bug that crahes the game, when loading the map, for some people. It seemed it had something to do with the very steep surfaces, an important feature of the map that i didnt want to remove. Anyway, the latest beta patch seemed to adress a crash on certain custom maps, so far i'm under the impression that the weird loading crash on aiaktalik is fixed with this beta aswell. Would appreciate if those that experienced that crash before could confirm if its fixed now? If it is, i might pick up devolpment on Aiaktalik...