flufball

Cheers, couldn't tell from the angle.

Just a quick question to sate my curiosity regarding the MTP units (as seen here), is that the camo done by SafteyCatch? I'm afraid I can't quite make it out clearly enough.

Matt, as far as I can tell and to the limit of my understanding of these things, I think the point being made is that much of the material is now publicly available and as of such no longer constitutes as confidential. I believe Pathy was merely trying to clarify what parts of the material can be considered to be public and thus no longer covered by whatever he has signed (that is - what he can talk about without breaking anything he has signed).

I'm still not sure what to make of this expansion. Some of it looks good, some of it, I'm not so sure about. Still, it's on preorder so I'm content to wait till it comes out before forming an opinion. Regarding NDA's - I have in front of me a copy of one I signed a few years back. Part of the agreement has as follows: It goes on to cover content developed by the Recipient (i.e. Me) and such like. I must stress that I have no legal qualifications, nor do I know the specifics of any NDA or Confidentiality Agreements signed regarding the BAF expansion, but I thought it might help explain what Pathy is asking and why it is a fair and reasonable question.

Cheers for trying anyway, I got a similar response from the people I know who play, so I thought I'd ask to see what the official plan is for the ArmA version. I'll be interested however they do it, I simply find myself caught up with a slight touch of insomnia fuelled curiosity. The publicity hack in me wants to know what the plan is and refuses to switch off.

At this stage, I have a query and please forgive me if I've missed it elsewhere, it's getting hard to sift through this thread for information. Have you decided on a plan for how you're going to approach your initial release and subsequent updates? Will you be releasing a stream of small-ish updates or be doing it en-mass in large bulk releases? Specifically I'm thinking about gameplay tweaks that (for whatever reason) need to be made client-side. Will these need to wait for x-date to be part of a larger package? Or will they be coming out as and when you deem them required?

If I can offer some constructive criticism here? You could do with a bit more cohesion when dealing with the publicity side of this. I'm quite fortunate, in that while I never got into Project Reality on BF2 I have a considerable number of friends who did, as of such I have a (somewhat small, admittedly) degree of understanding when it comes to the project. I am also patient enough to read through the thread and wiki to collate information that I need. That said, the first post is your gateway into any community, most people will look at a twenty page (at the time of writing this) thread and look for the key information in the initial post. If something isn't clear there, the chances are they will ask in order to clarify, often leading to repeat questions about the same subject. Many of these questions are answered later on within the thread, it is simply that they are hidden away in walls of text. Take for example the questions about if things will work with missions made with COOP in mind. Unless I'm mistaken, the answer is “Yes, it is possible to use PR and the units provided, however they are not themselves optimised with cooperative play in mind.†That's not really covered in the initial post, it's elsewhere if you know where to look, but you have to have that knowledge already. The issue I can see is that if people are reading this but are unable or unwilling to gather the later information, then they will most likely either be asking repeat questions or listing the mod as a write-off before it even gets off the ground. If I can offer a tiny suggestion here, I would say that, outside of the highlight reels, you might wish to link the later posts, FAQ's and general information (e.g. wiki links and so on) that could be considered important within your initial post. I'd also like to suggest that you might want to see if it is possible to make what you hope to achieve clearer. Right now, there is very little focus upon what appears to be your main aim with the mod. I can see what amounts to half a paragraph, at the most. Again, it's a gateway issue. The information is available elsewhere, in previous posts, on the PR website and so on, but it works on the assumption that people have the time or interest to do that. It's compounded somewhat by the fact that so far all the content and info released here has been about the British faction. I appreciate the approach that you have taken, I am aware that you intend to release information further down the line and that the new British Faction looks good from a media standpoint but being honest, it does have the ability to lead people on a very specific track, putting their train of thought on the shiny new toys rather than the gameplay. Personally, I'd suggest that it might be worth considering putting more emphasis on the fact that the new factions, models, units and so on are there (assuming I've understood it correctly) to supplement the multiplayer experience. It also lets you address questions like “will it work in coop†within the main text. Something simple - like: “Although many of our assets will work within a cooperative environment, they have been optimised to function within the environment provided by our gameplay. At this time, our resources are primarily focused upon delivering the best Project Reality multiplayer experience we can.†Now, it's four in the morning, so my brain isn't functioning and that's hardly a passable sentence to have in a gateway post, but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say. The great thing about this sort of comment is it's open and closed. On the one hand, by saying “We are focusing our resources on x†it's closed and final (I like the word resources, it's quite handy if you can use it in a manner that doesn't make you sound like a tit) on the other hand, both the part about assets working outside of the PR game-modes and the “at this time†part keep it partially open, allowing a glimmer of leeway in the future. Handy if someone does something unexpected three months down the line and you have to start back-tracking in an emergency. Regardless, I'll be interested to see how PR pans out. The more people in ArmA the merrier and it'll be nice to have something new to try.

There's always an element of risk. If you ignore the public banlists collated by the likes of PunksBusted the risk still remains with any system you run, the more restrictions you have, the more potential there is for someone to get caught up unfairly. As soon as you choose to have a system that identifies and then issues a ban (and thus prevents further use of said anti-cheat software by a player) based upon the offence committed you open yourself up to varying problems and elements of risk. Automated systems, as an example can cause mass problems when they go wrong by dint of being automated with no human oversight. Expansions, patches and changes to the game can often compound this. It happened with the original Call of Duty upon the release of it's expansion. A large portion of players got a global hardware ban from Punkbuster simply for running the expansion on the day of release. It took some time for the issue to be rectified, during which players suffered a degree of stigma that was quite unfair. Likewise, Call of Duty again has caused problems in a more recent setting with VAC banning a large number of Modern Warfare Two players. To be fair to Valve, they sorted this out quite promptly and even put in a free game for those who suffered from it. The fact remains that autobanning has it's risks. The reverse of this of course is having humans in the mix. If you push past the immediate concerns of trust when humans are involved you run into one simple inhibiting factor - cost. Lets say you've an autobanning system that flags up cheats and will issue a ban on a delayed process (that is - cheat is flagged, ban is issued a while later rather than immediately, this is fairly standard practice) but as a fail safe you add a human team checking the bans going through, investigating any flagged issues coming up and as a final precaution to function as a process of appeal. This is time consuming and will cost quite a bit keeping a team on hand to do the job. The people doing this work will not only have to be skilled at dealing with bans efficiently as they occur but also at investigating any appeal that may be made. It will take it's cost in effort and time as well as keeping people about to do the job, not to mention the abuse that will undoubtedly come from having an appeals process. That said, keeping a human team on hand to do this has it's advantages, it allows you to deal with any false positives as they occur by having a human on hand to investigate and it allows an easier process for dealing with players who feel they have been wrongly issued a ban. That's not to say either system is unworkable or that either is superior, both have their flaws and both have their advantages, how one adapts to these is what separates each instance. Choosing not to issue bans has it's attractions but also has it's share of problems. There is the obvious and classic system that simply boots people from the server for running a cheat, without any global banning, any hardware linking and so on. This is a minimalist approach and is a tried and tested way to successfully do the job, the down side of course is that it means while it allows honest players the leeway to solve any issues they may be having it also allows cheaters to remain free to carry on trying until something works (as opposed to a hardware ban that would keep them from entering anywhere using the anti-cheat software). There is also the approach that Cheating Death took, which was to work in such a fashion that it made it very difficult for cheats to operate in a normal manner. Rather than kicking or banning a player cheats would simply cease to function. This again has it's advantages but also has as similar drawback that by not identifying cheaters it provides the scope for cheaters to return with new methods of bypassing the anti-cheat yet again. No system is fool proof and sadly the gaming community operates on a “no smoke without a fire†policy most of the time when dealing with cheats. You could make the perfect system, designed to identify any problems as they arise and some sod will still show up and say “Well he must of done something X-System caught him!â€

Take a look at the sales page as opposed to your order status, it says the second there. I suppose it'll be one of those thing where we find out on the day. :)

For what it's worth Amazon's updated their release date to the second as well. Friday tends to be the favoured day for releasing things. Play haven't updated their page yet but they may just be slow. I'd hazard a guess that the twenty ninth is the day any pre-orders will be allowed to be shipped out via post.

On the assumption that I've understood the situation correctly, I would personally go with the opinion of your group of experts. If the limitations in the engine prevent you from creating a flight model of simulation level then I would much prefer to compromise and work within the engine.

Forgive me for saying so but I've obviously been playing a different game from you as often I find myself in close quaters. Considering all the time that is spent at close range, a pointy, edged weapon on the end of a rifle would be most welcome.

The thing about anti-cheat software is that there are so many inherent compatibility issues that you will always end up with a number of people with issues regardless of the software being used. At the end of a day, an anti-cheat program has to deal with the various hardware configurations people have, the drivers that come with their hardware, the game engine, various versions of operating systems and all sorts of third party software (including the various versions of the game itself) running in the background. To make matters worse, most of the above can be used in various forms to create cheats or to provide the means for hooks and bypasses to slip by the usual scanning methods. The more restrictive you become, the more conflicts and issues with the program people will have. It can be anything from simple things like routers not liking the communication between the client-side software and the master servers (which is quite common in anti-cheat software) to more dubious things like issues with specific drivers and hardware configuration. On top of all of this you have human error, and the more you automate a system the more human error will appear. When the expansion for the first Call of Duty was released (in the States, those of us in Europe had to wait) someone forgot to put in some variable somewhere that meant that the master servers where picking up a large number of people running the new expansion on release day as cheating. Thus a large number of players where globally hardware banned for a day. This particular example always sticks in my mind because at the time I was still working as a volunteer at a software company what was, had (and still is) producing an anti-cheat product of their own. I remember it because one of our policies, one that remains to today is that we try to keep as much human involvement as possible. When bans are given, they're not automatic on the spot, instead they are investigate by a team of humans before a decision is made. This was in contrast to PunkBuster which is automatic, so at the time people where flooding the forums saying they where banned a large number people who considered themselves “experts†on PunkBuster took a sneering attitude to the issue with the usual “you shouldn't have been cheating†comments showing up left right and centre. That sneering attitude from members of the public and the lack of apology and being unable to admit that they where wrong afterwards is something that has kept the incident stuck in my mind for all these years and was one of my own personal points to avoid when I was still heavily involved in the anti-cheat community. Even Balance, to their credit, where quick to sort out the issue, but it's a good example of how much a simple human error can also be the cause of a problem. The removal of humans does not solve the problem as often it may require a human to identify their own mistakes. On top of all the hardware and software issues that are bound to spring up there are the usual cost concerns and what the intended purpose is. A game might only be designed to sell a lot of copies, in which case a highly robust anti-cheat product that catches nearly everything might not be the ideal choice because it may limit the amount of people playing a game. Likewise, a game may be intended to be a showcase example of a new multiplayer series which needs to go down really well, in which case a general all purpose anti-cheat product that catches a lot but still lets some major cheats through won't be the ideal choice. PunkBuster, as an example, is fairly widespread. It doesn't stop everything and has some major issues with (a now common thing) commercial bypasses but it's shown to work with most computers, it isn't that restrictive and it's a name people recognise. The important thing though is that regardless of what anti-cheat program a game runs it cannot replace good server admins. You still need the admins to check things like screenshots, to be paying attention to players to make sure nothing dodgy is going on and to generally be seen to have a presence.

On the contary, I think most people like that sort of post, it provides the in-flight amusements so to speak. :p The trick to bayonets, as far as the game is concerned, is that they not only provide you a useful tool when fighting in close encounters but they also give you a reason to be in close encounters. I've found situations in the game where I've found myself both wanting a bayonet when I'm too close and (in ArmA with ACE) wanting a sensible and reliable tool to aid me in the of storming a bunker. I've had pleanty of irritating situations where I've needed to reload or had a stoppage and knowing that my stick of death has a sharp and pointy bit on the end is nice and reassuring.