galzohar

Well considering we've had quite a lot of sessions of DTAS and Escalation (on ArmA-IL IDF server as well as ArmA3.RU and other servers), I'd say those should be more than good enough to get PvP nights going. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?153398-Dynamic-Take-And-Secure-Randomized-Round-Based-No-Respawn-A-amp-D http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?160536-Escalation-Squad-based-PvP-with-respawns

Never "resume". Only "restart". In mission selection screen, that is. Once you are playing a mission, do NOT use "restart" - Only way to properly restart a mission is going back to the mission selection screen (#missions if it's a dedicated, or just use the menus if you're hosting) and restarting from there. This is a bug in ArmA. Missions will not properly restart unless you do as I explained. Nothing to do specifically with ACRE, but it can probably break ACRE just like it breaks many other things.

It's not the same as motion sickness. Some people just have darker monitors, so for their monitor to show the same image as yours they need a different setting. You cannot tell the difference between someone who increased gamma because his monitor is dark to someone who increased the gamma because he wants to make night look like day, even if it was possible to check the setting from a script (which is not possible as far as I know).

Gamma and brightness check is impossible, since as far as I'm aware this setting is not accessible via scripts. Additionally, some people have darker monitors than others, so forcing a certain setting will still be extremely unfair. It's a problem that really cannot be fixed without everyone using the exact same hardware. I've had night missions where with default gamma and brightness some people saw perfectly fine while others were staring at a black screen.

Snipers still have uniform under the ghillie suit. Sure the "vegetation" is the same, but there is still uniform to be seen. For the rest it's a pretty obvious difference. Especially if player does not take off his helmet. Even the divers are quite different. I don't think you're losing out to mods that are easier on the players. You're losing out to mods that allow the players to "farm" for better gear, style farmville / world of warcraft. And of course since this goes completely against any kind of tactical gaming, it's something no tactical mission will be able to compete with unless we get enough players who care about tactical gameplay combine effort and play together, due to how much harder it is to "kickstart" a tactical-based server.

Yes, magical healers are no better than magical respawn. Actually, respawn can be considered as new reinforcements being sent in to replace the dead soldiers. "Magic Healz" has no excuse other than "it's cool to run after your dead teammates to revive them", but it's really more of an arcade feature than a realistic one.

To be honest, everyone I know who were b!@#!ing about the models being too similar will probably be embarrassed today if you were to remind them they actually said that. I mean, there is absolutely nothing similar about the models. It's simply a lack of will to learn what your friends look like. It's a proven fact that it is possible to learn to tell the difference (the complaints only come from new players or players who don't like to put any effort into playing). Using the "score" to determine whether to punish for a teamkill means you force the new players to realize that they can't just shoot anything they see, but allow truly accidental teamkills (with just a "X teamkilled Y" message so that the poor guy knows his death wasn't his own fault), as if you killed more enemies than friendlies you probably know how to tell the difference after which it is no longer the mission's responsibility to prevent you from making mistakes.

It doesn't have to be a choice of either 1-hour long no-respawn missions with multiple objectives and 15 minutes of planning before the mission or a spawn-die-respawn style TDM/CTF. In DTAS you have no respawns with rounds long enough to be tactical about it, but short enough to not get the defenders to die of boredom, and of course no need to restart the mission between rounds and replayability due to high randomness of the mission objective location. In escalation you might have respawns, but score granted for life/vehicle losses are balanced with score for the objective, so just suicide-running in trying to capture the objective like you would in most C&H missions is not going to work, as if you lose too many men and vehicles you will lose the mission even if you hold the objective for the entire mission. In both missions the time between spawning and dying averages in the 5-minute ballpark, which IMO is a very good balance between the sub-60s duration you get in most TDM/CTF and the >20min you get in some A&Ds. In the Israeli community we have quite a few players interested in PvP, but it's just not enough to get a good game going (5v5 just gets old too fast), which ends up with them stopping to show up. I'm sure if a weekly event with enough players, good missions and good server settings takes place, we'll have quite a few show up. In any case, if you're interested in any kind of PvP, feel free to add me on Steam so that we can invite each other while playing.

Automatically killing any teamkiller with score of 0 or less (score being enemy kills minus teamkills) seems to also make teamkillers stop teamkilling pretty quickly, and actually gets the long term benefit of teaching them to identify uniforms. No FF damage doesn't achieve the latter :(

If you have a problem with the armor play on a server with more appropriate difficulty settings. Default difficulty settings are just plain bad. But yes, at least in latest stable the difficulty settings don't affect AI skill and precision.

PvP would be good, but I'm not sure how many community members actually like PvP... Unless things changed, in which case that would be great. I enjoyed a lot of games with the Zeus community, but am just tired of playing against AI.

Well, the main problem of organizing a united PvP event/community, is that nobody will come because nobody wants to be the first one joining in and waiting for players. Everyone want to join something that's already working and full of players. This can only be achieved in wasteland-style missions where there are always some public noobs playing there on their own to get things started. Without having anything on the server for the lone wolves, you'll need a lot of PvPers to actually keep a server alive. A lot more than ArmA has players in any game mode. Because in serious PvP missions you simply have nothing to do if you don't have a group with you and enough players on the other team to play against.

Yeah the idea was that you can write normal sqf code, run an extrenal tool, and get a debug version of the mission, and maybe only include debug features on specific scripts. That way when you actually play the mission none of that overhead will run. Wrapping an entire language though will always have extreme overhead... Writing a scripting language within a scripting language is just too crazy to get any reasonable performance out of it :(

Sorry, but it's quite out of scope right now. Combining the technical effort required with the balancing effort required adds up to too much right now. Thing like how to decide who the hell gets to use the tank, how to make sure it is actually used (rather than just left at spawn so it doesn't get destroyed for an auto-loss), and lots of other possible issues that something like this can cause. There is basically no good way to get this in the mission, and any changes to the rules will require a lot of work adding it properly and then testing for bugs and of course playtesting with enough players for balance. If you want vehicles you should check out Escalation, where vehicles are balanced by their score value if they are abandoned or destroyed, both sides having the same quality of vehicles and equipment, longer respawn times for heavier vehicles (so once destroyed it is out of the action for a while) and the simple fact it takes longer to bring one to the field than getting there on foot from an MHQ or driving there with a jeep. In DTAS an MBT will simply be too good, and will thus have to be balanced by excessively improved AT capability for defense, and/or limited only to a select few players resulting in anyone not getting to be selected to quit in frustration. Some ideas look cool on the forums but when you think about how to actually put it in the mission and make it works they don't sound so cool anymore, not to mention after actually trying to play with those ideas in-game (and yes, I had to scrap a lot of ideas that took me a very long time to script simply because the gameplay ended up not being enjoyable enough). Since overall serious PvP missions are simply not played much at all (at least not when I look at the server browser), I'd rather focus on trying to fix/improve any critical issues that do come up when games actually do happen, rather than trying to add a lot of options that will not be used often enough in order to actually make them good. And lets face it - Something that barely gets played simply cannot be improved enough to be worth people's time. If there were multiple DTAS servers active at any given time, then variations might have had a bit higher priority (though again that tank idea simply won't be easy and maybe even impossible to make it work properly).

A possibly more realistic idea of a debugger is writing some kind of preprocessor script that converts your entire mission to a debug-able mission, using macros to set breakpoints. Due to parsing you'll be able to tell all the possible values that could theoretically be watched, except of course for variable names created from strings generated during runtime (aka "variable variable names", usually very bad practice anwyay). For "release" builds the mission will be practically the same as the macros can be defined to nothing. Of course you'd still have to make proper in-game UI for it and even if you do perfect job it will likely not be easy to use. Trying to monitor memory during run-time will probably result in the values changing faster than you can monitor them :(

Yes, they may be popular, but there are also a lot of people simply not playing at all because all they can find is those missions that they don't like. They're mostly popular because the servers can be populated with any kind of population, while anything higher level would require more advanced players, and thus never actually reach the critical mass of players required to keep the server full. The less a mission requires from the player/team, the more likely it'll get your server full, but that doesn't mean it's actually good. Think McDonald's...

Yes, but if someone edits it to do something else and puts it on his server there's not much I can do. The warning is more of a fool-proof, as in "oops the server admin forgot to tweak the settings, be aware", not a "the server admin completely edited the mission", as in the latter case he can just edit the message too.

Yeah, as SavageCDN said, you can only verify mod integrity properly via verifySignatures, and can only properly require mods by making the all mods either required by the mission (either by script or by straight up requirement in mission.sqm) or required by mods that are required by the mission. Unofficial servers with poor settings/performance is always a problem if you don't want to completely block anyone other than yourself from hosting a server using your mod. We'll just have to hope the smart players will be playing on the good servers.

If it's a variable name, you can use _value = missionNamespace getVariable _varName;

PvP made by BI will not happen, and if it does happen it'll probably be terrible (with all due respect, I've never seen BI make a mission that was actually played as-is on public servers for more than a couple days). In fact, didn't they make some? Didn't really get to try them, as every time I joined a server with them it was too empty to find any enemies, servers were usually configured with default difficulty settings (enemy map markers, 3rd person, etc), and often I'd just start in a broken vehicle far away from any area that's supposed to have combat in it (and usually it didn't actually have any combat going on anyway once you do arrive). You'll have to grab some friends and try help fill a server that runs a different style of PvP mission, or even join random PvP servers, vote yourself admin and check their mission list, and if it has something good, bring your friends over. Once you have more than 10 players on a server (not to mention 15-20), it'll go up in play count very quickly regardless of mission chosen. But yes, you can't change the situation of the server browser just by yourself - Think about it as if 1 guy would come at you and say "Hey check this out it's so cool" as opposed to 10+ guys doing the same. And of course the fact that there are already 10 players on the server meaning you won't have to wait as much, and of course it shows on top end of the list in the server browser.

Everyone have a different perception of what should be allowed and what should be blocked, as you can see in current missions. Some missions don't allow any changes at all. Some allow you to take anything in the game (like sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and 50 grenades). The problem is that ArmA's inventory, stamina and weapon handling are not realistic enough to allow you to just pick and choose your gear and face the consequences, because there simply aren't any (or at least they aren't realistic enough). Therefore to keep the game behaving in a somewhat realistic manner, missions have to include restrictions of some sort. The more freedom you have, the less realistic the gameplay will be. Maybe in 2030 we'll have a game realistic enough to simulate everything to the point where full freedom in loadouts is possible in a realistic fashion. Having a choice is nice when it's actually a choice. Currently, though, if you're given the freedom to pick any weapons/magazines/items you want, it's pretty obvious what you'll pick if you have a clue how the game works. You'll never pick a non-scoped weapon because all scoped weapons also have backup sights with no real downside (though even without backup sights you'd still probably just stick to scopes if you learned to shoot unsighted and have at least some basic mouse control skills). You'll always carry a launcher with at least 1 rocket, because there is no real reason not to. You'll always carry a backpack full of ammo (rockets, grenades), again since there is no reason not to (small stamina loss but you run out of stamina quickly enough regardless that it doesn't really matter). For a primary weapon you'll most likely just pick the one with the highest caliber and highest magazine capacity (yes, so you might have to choose between a zaphir and a sniper rifle, but you'll never pick an MX, TRG or even MK200). This is the main reason why good missions cannot allow you to have freedom with your gear choices, as some choices you could make are simply way too powerful compared to how powerful they would have been in real life.

Well, the server won't load the mission until there are players connected. If you set persistent=1 it will continue to play the mission, but it will not start it with no players. I don't think there is any way to make the server automatically start the mission when it is empty.

Also, some things can only be done in an addon as far as I'm aware. For example, you cannot include new units or weapons in your mission file. If it's just server-side scripts, you can have them in a server side mod that the clients won't need anyway. If it's general scripts then you can include them in the mission, but if they're 50mb you're going to have a lot of bandwidth usage on your server, will take long time for players to join your server, and you might have connection issues if players connect (and download the mission) while there are a lot of players playing.

Yes, the effect of low server FPS is that when the AI need to react they will be more dumb and/or slower in their reactions, and when you shoot them there might be an additional delay until the hits actually register. But it will not affect your displayed FPS at all.

Well, if there is a lot of crap on your mission that needs to be calculated, it will make both server and client FPS lower. But it's not the server's FPS that makes your client's FPS low. You can, for a fact, show an example where the server has 7 FPS and the client has 60. This is achieved by creating a mission with a large number of patrolling AI infantry units (enough to bring the server to its knees) and nothing else, while having the player at a remote location looking at the sky. Try it yourself. Even if the server dies, your FPS will remain the same (except everything will continue to move more or less in the same direction it was moving the last time you received an update, but you will still be able to move around just fine, at least as far as you'll be able to see). If your mission is a CPU killer, it will kill the CPU on both the server and client. But if your server's CPU is dead, it does not necessarily mean your client's CPU will be dead too. Of course, if the server has a decent machine and the mission kills its CPU, it's likely to kill client's CPU too (though not necessarily, as shown in the "only infantry AI" example). As for a frame, it's practically the same on the server as it is on the client in terms of what it means. It's just that the server has to do a lot less every "frame", as it skips all graphical-related calculations. What the server calculates every frame is the same as what it would need to calculate before it can render the next graphical frame. So yes, you can safely use the term "FPS" when talking about the server's performance. You just need to realize the server doesn't actually draw the graphics every frame, but it does still do everything else non-graphic-related same as you (plus handling network traffic, of course, but that part has been shown already to not affect client FPS). To me the problem is obvious - In addition to the game having extreme graphics which bring the most modern GPUs to their knees (which is OK, since you can always just lower your settings a bit and be fine with an average GPU), most missions that people run nowadays are simply too much for modern mid/top-end CPUs to handle when played on the current version of the engine. You can blame the missions, you can blame the engine, or you can blame both. In the end we don't really have a basis for comparison, as no other game really runs these kinds of missions to allow us to compare performance of different engines. I just hopes BIS lets us know what we can do to make our missions put less stress on the CPU rather than just wait until they optimize stuff some more and/or better CPUs are produced. For now, you can just play missions that don't have 1000 vehicles all over the map. Stick to smaller PvP (or even COOP, if they're small enough) missions that periodically clean up the trash and your performance should be fine if your CPU isn't an aged piece of crap.