toloquta

I'm located in the US Central time zone. I work full time 8-5 and have three kids so I don't get to play as much as I'd like, but the public servers just aren't doing it for me. Are there any squads that play once or twice a week that are looking for another player? Again my job and family take priority over my gaming so I'm not looking for anything too serious.

Joint Operations did this and it worked pretty well. I've been begging for this for a while.

I'm definitely disappointed with the level of realism in ArmA 2 on almost every level. I was expecting more. Looking forward to something like ACE2. Of course an official patch to fix some of the realism issues would be awesome, but I'm not expecting that to happen. Main areas I hope to see improvement: Real damage model Different ammo types Rifle elevation adjustments Physics Hiding in grass has no effect past grass draw distance Wish the developers would go back and look at ACE and put some of those features in...

If I had piles of cash laying around I'd setup a huge capacity server for only Team vs Team play to ensure some diversity. There might already be servers like this out there but maybe they are always empty.

So will I never be able to use english officially with a german cd key? If this is the case I wish this would have been clear when the german version was launched because I WOULD NOT have bought it. If this isn't ever straightened out and I end up having problems playing MP (because servers don't install keys for language mods) I'll probably end up holding a grudge towards BIS. Hopefully they make this right.

So, will I always be locked out of using english officially since I have the german version?

Pay someone in the US to gift it to you over steam. It might actually end up costing you less (not sure).

I hope the BIS guys have played a fair share of JO. They ought to at least see some of the things NovaLogic did and maybe even add some of the ARMA2.

Sounds like the server is quite resource intensive. Hopefully we will see some optimizations to the server side code so it makes the most of the hardware available. Come on BIS breakout the profiler and find a few bottlenecks in the code. I'd do it for you, but I don't have the code. I'll forgive ya if you get around to it eventually, just wish the game had a bit higher budget to deal with this stuff early on.

Joint Operations had an alright way of dealing with this. I think they sort of camouflaged the texture on the person to make it kind of look like they were obscured by grass. It made it a lot more difficult to spot someone really far away with a quick glance.

I really hope we get a lot of players in the next month or so. The reason I stopped playing ARMA1 was not because I was tired of the game, but because there weren't many if any populated non coop servers. I really enjoyed playing on the servers running the Berzerk missions but those seemed to decline in popularity. Too bad I didn't hear of IC-ARMA until recently.

I setup a scenario in the mission editor with a bunch of copters yesterday then went in game to practice flying. I had a pretty easy time with most things but the biggest problem for me was trying to land the copters using the in cockpit view since you can't actually see where you are landing. Unless I was landing in a huge open area I would often end up landing on tree or a poll or something.

If they decide to get out of milsims I sure as hell hope they have the decency to release the ARMA2 code under GPL eventually, similar to id software so the community can take it over.

I like the idea of using GPG or something similar to build a trust web.

Anyone work at an ISP? It would be nice to see how a 64 player ARMA2 server would work right off of a backbone.

This is the only thing I've been able to find: http://arma2.swec.se/server/list

I was expecting more people to jump for the German version. Looks like we'll probably have to wait until the US version is out before we see many US dedicated servers or enough people to fill them.

A lot of working adults will probably be sleeping too. Like me.

When you're talking about view distance here I'm assuming you're really talking about the rate of position updates the client is receiving which would depend on the number of moving objects within the view distance radius. Its possible that if the client and/or server were smart they could further reduce the number of updates by eliminating object updates that could be determined to be irrelevant (object is too small to see at current distance, object is obstructed by terrain, etc). All client/server multiplayer games presenting a real-time environment are going to have to use position prediction on the client side for moving objects unless they simply don't change the position of the object as viewed in the client until a real position update is received (this would appear as jerky movement unless the updates could be sent at a rate which would match the clients rendering frame rate). The effectiveness of the prediction algorithm used is very important to providing an accurate jerk free multiplayer experience, although of course it is not the only factor. I haven't spent much time analyzing the behavior of the prediction in ARMA or ARMA2 if what you say is true then it must have a pretty effective algorithm. I realize a lot of games take a lot of shortcuts in their net code. From what I've seen ARMA (not sure about 2) takes quite a few shortcuts in that they don't make much of an attempt to validate data sent by the clients. Putting in more validation to test if the client is "lying" would make cheating much more difficult. As far as how the weapons work I agree that they appear to do it right in ARMA. If I were writing it, I'd have the client send out a packet as soon as the weapon was fired with the weapon vector. The server could then compute the bullet trajectory and determine if the bullet would hit anything along its path. When firing from a distance this could work very well in that server would still be computing the bullet path before the object you were going to hit was even there. I'm not sure if ARMA/ARMA2 is smart enough to check the weapon vector received by the server to see if it plausible. For instance if the server knows the player wasn't reasonably close to the position of the weapon vector last update it should throw out the packet and possible kick the player from the game.

Hopefully this is true since I already bought the German version and don't speak German.

I think the position prediction net code is a bit lacking. If the algorithm can make a good guess at the position of moving objects the corrections (warping) required when the actual position disagrees with the real position will be smaller and less noticeable. The Quake3, Source and Unreal engines all have good prediction code. If the server is hitting 100 percent CPU load things are probably going to start getting screwy even with good prediction so you'd want to verify that wasn't happening at the first sign of excessive warping. Due to the nature of some of the game modes with lots of AI there could be a lot of load on the servers. I'm not sure if the server code will take advantage of 8 - 16 cores but I think that is what you would want to shoot for a high capacity server with lots of AI if it did.

I missed quite a few opportunities to get people hooked on ARMA at LAN parties because of this. Most people had never heard of it and weren't about to go drop $40-50. With other games that had no CD-key check or disc requirement for LAN play people would run out and buy a copy of the game after the LAN party because they had so much fun and wanted to play online.

It doesn't have to take so long. In Joint Operations you could usually respawn near the front line at your sides farthest held position. I was playing CTI yesterday and you can fast travel as well but I found staring at the map for up to 2.5 minutes pretty boring (I usually went AFK and did something useful while I was waiting). Its not all bad some times this type of thing is nice because it encourages people to be more careful and tactical. If I only have 45 minutes to play though I'd be more likely to pick one a bit less epic. I had a lot of fun in the 32 player Chernogorsk TDM server yesterday. Later in the day I also played a much slower pace coop game. Both are fun sometimes one just fits your mood or your schedule a bit better. Or you may just want to take a break from one to play another for a while. Anyway I like the idea of having a public game servers for each region for each game type. Among other things I think it makes the game more accessible to know there is at least one server with a good ping running a game mode that you like 24/7.

Its funny you say that about CoD4 because that was my biggest problem with it, but I was surprised to find a collection of servers that were geared toward tactical play. I found that a large percentage of the players were actually active military service members playing while on leave or at their base. Extending a hand to these folks that may not have ever heard of OFP or ARMA would be a good thing for everyone. Hopefully active military service members can afford computers fast enough to play ARMA2. ARMA2 won't ever appeal gamers who are stuck on playing run and gun first person shooters. I do think it can and probably will appeal to some hardcore CoD4 players (who play on squad centric servers with realistic damage and run and gun restrictions), Joint Operations, Delta Force players, Red Orchestra players and Project Reality. These type of players would fit pretty well into ARMA2. It might make it easier to lure them if some public servers were setup in game modes they are most familiar with. I think a lot of these players would adapt to the full spectrum of ARMA2 shortly after being pulled in.

I wanted to wait for the US steam version too but I couldn't. I'm telling a lot of people about ARMA 2 so I hope to get quite a few people addicted, but the biggest issue right now will probably be the hefty system requirements. I'm probably not going to recommend the game to someone that has never heard of it if I know they will have to upgrade their hardware to play it. That being said I'm glad they didn't make the game to run on utter crap hardware just to inflate sales (just doesn't seem the game scales very well at the moment). A lot of people will also probably not be interested because of the amount of travel required to get into action in many game modes. One thing that was interesting with CoD4 is that they obviously had the normal game servers for the masses but quite a few hardcore servers sprang up that were modded to increase realism and to appeal to a different crowd. It probably really help ARMA2 sales if bohemia setup some public US dedicated servers each in a few different game modes (TDM, hold, CTI) to bring in different types of players. I always had quite a blast on the NovaLogic public Joint Operations 150 player servers. Something like that would be awesome for ARMA2.