Masterfragg

It really bugs me how there are so many people in the PC gaming scene have this problem of being overly elitist. Console games, whilst rather arcade-like some do bring important features that a PC game would benefit from. Stealth kills in a game such as this would be a decent improvement if done correctly, no knives, no rocks, although enable controller support so people can enjoy SP missions on their own if they prefer a controller (If you bitch about it you are quite frankly not a bloody gamer, it opens the experience to people and that is GOOD. We should all be able to experience the game and if you complain about the idea then you are quite simply overly bloody stuck up so remove the stick sooner rather than later please). Stealth kills such as snipers taking out a patrol each with his/her own target and not alerting the world (enemies that reach for radios to call reinforcements etc by default rather than scripts and addons would be nice) This could be expanded with terrain and radio towers etc although that could be done via addons/scripts. Working power grids much like the addons for arma1/2 would be nice as well. But the one thing that bugs me would be the amount of people on the PC platform that somehow think they are better than console gamers. You are not, you enjoy the same hobby so get over yourself and be more accepting. Stop with the COD bashing as well for crying out loud. It's actually a decent series if you buy every OTHER game, otherwise it is just the same ol' same ol' year in year out. AND! At least they have most of the bugs sorted out! Still waiting for some Arma2/OA bugs to be fixed lol although Arma is a superior game for me as I enjoy it more. /Rant over Also I like the suggestion of less-than-lethal mixed with zipties. Hostage taking in Multiplayer sounds kinda fun for CTI/Wasteland etc if they can produce a Persistent World within Wasteland so people have a character to lose rather than a minor inconvenience.

Perhaps post it as a suggestion rather than a gripe. May get more of a following. Like I said, as long as it avoids the clumsy dodgy feel of vector based crosshair movement I'm happy with whatever they do lol I mean I personally think lowering the weapon if the weapon is above X size for a moment whilst fast turning would be just as effective as simulating human physics to that degree especially with the CPU bottleneck we currently experience in this alpha build. Last thing the CPU needs is something else to bottleneck it, I for one value framerate and detest people that say "it's a simulation it doesn't need more than 25fps"... I'm sorry I don't see real life as a slideshow thus poorly running simulations = unrealistic haha But yeah I still think that perhaps put a needle in turning speed with weapon drawn rather than physics may act just as well in this situation.

Fair enough, maybe an idea would be to have the weapon automatically lower for a split second to offset the mouse turning speed rather than vectors? It's a quick and dirty fix but a fix still. Also, you seem to be complaining about how "mainstream" it is yet whilst I understand your concerns as a gamer looking for a tactical challenge, perhaps you should look into the modding community to fix it once the game is released. After all the modding community IS used to fixing the things that BI left out/out right BROKE. Look at ACE for example. Just bare in mind this is still alpha and may still change yet.

When turning a trained person can turn without too much effect from inertia from weapon movement. Simple way to test this. 1) Grab a piece of wood rifle sized, if you are OCD grab a prop rifle, real rifle if legal in your country or an airsoft rifle. 2) Practice lowering your weapon turning 180' then raising and aiming again. This is incredibly easy when using a sidearm and is a legitimate exercise of practice for many armed forces around the world. The truth is if you are a soldier and you suffer with an inability to aim due to weapon inertia/weight whilst turning you are either new to weapons and skipped training or you didn't listen. Any MOUT or Urban Courses should teach you to move and aim without all this crap being an issue. If you want it to be uber realistic then leave it how it is or enable your own vector aiming. As far as I'm concerned a professional soldier should not have an issue turning and aiming, I'll see if I can upload a video of myself showing exactly what I mean as I am NOT a trained soldier yet I can perform simple stuff like this. And at close range I can still hit a target human size without too much of an issue especially with something as mobile as a sidearm and honestly I am no rambo nor am I Jason Bourne, James Bond, Chuck Norris. Just a simple fella that enjoys a bit of target practice. EDIT: Although perhaps when aiming down sights a little more vector deadzone would be an idea yet when moving keep it locked. Nothing worse in a game than having issues moving due to OFP style vectoring crosshairs. Despite its apparent realism ultimately this is still a GAME and vector based crosshairs while moving are bloody annoying. Keep it realistic in areas like no jump button, realistic ballistics, physics, weapons (Don't wanna see no rayguns except in mods) but this isn't VR yet so the annoying loose control scheme you talk of would be detrimental to most peoples enjoyment. Maybe when The Oculus Rift is out then yeah that'll be an ideal time. And before I get blown up for saying "it's still a game" yes I too have been playing since OFP back in 2001. This is just my opinion and please if you don't like it, just ignore it.

Actually, a game that doesn't use the full power of a CPU which in turn then causes a bottle neck on the GPU like a choke hold makes the software/game very CPU dependent. Hence why overclocking CPU's generally provides the best performance increase with the ARMA series. So in summary; If it doesn't use the full power of the CPU which in turn chokes the rest of the hardware you have to ramp up the CPU power in which to alleviate the bottle neck creating a dependence on that piece of hardware. The CPU.

Why are you using 4xAA with FXAA? Just curious but doesn't FXAA apply a blur filter on detected edges and actually degrade visuals? and isn't it negated when used in conjunction with actual AA? On topic, I'm giving up for the night my heads killing me and I need a post midnight snack before I do anything else. I'll continue in the morning. (PS- You are right about the post process frame rate hit. Personally I have it at low to get rid of the worst of the blur anyway, depth of field is an unrealistic feature that makes me repeat one phrase... "Shoulda gone to specsavers soldier!".)

My point was that I am still getting iffy cpu usage lol I would honestly advise anyone not to overclock this much myself. I OC'ed my Phenom x4 940 and that's what killed it in the end. I only overclocked this because I can keep the temps <60c with a Corsair H50. Right I just played the Heli Showcase and my GPU usage was below 35% yet I was stuck at 30FPS. This alpha does indeed have the same problem that Arma2 had. Which is a little unsettling to be honest as this does NOT bode well for Arma3 as they never truly fixed Arma2 in that respect. I'm sure as hell not oc'ing any higher for Arma, it cost me a CPU in the past haha

right, i lowered back down to <99% GPU usage and was stuck at 57fps at night in town. I checked CPU and it gave me an 80%-50%-30%-50% core usage. This would suggest CPU bottlenecking (In editor) Whilst usage could be much better it's still better than Arma2's at the moment.

Right, -cpuCount=4 didn't crash my game. Infact, it may be a placebo effect but I seem to be running better.... this is the exact problem I had with AMD CPU back on Arma2, I'd put it down to the fact that it's an alpha but I'm still testing. Stupid suggestion incoming apologies in advance. Restart your computer. I know it sounds stupid but many, MANY people have said it helped them. Also get the DirectX runtimes from MS website if you can and manually update. Windows 7 is a bitch for DX on format. (sorry if these are bad suggestions just going by what have helped people) At the moment I'd say our hardware is pretty much equal in everything but CPU and I just ramped my game up to 2720x1530 and got 60fps in editor with settings ramped to high after "-cpuCount=4" however I'm about to test in mission. ...The editor lies to us...

I've never seen arma use more than 60% of CPU hence why ridiculously high overclocks have always been required. Brute speed enables that 60% to be a little faster. Graphics gets bottlenecked by CPU hence why neither is being used above 60%. Set shadows to high so the GPU processes them it may release the cpu a bit more. ---------- Post added at 11:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 PM ---------- K3lt, I'll return shortly I'ma see if I can think of anything that may help. I'm just going to go play with some launch parameters to see how they change things in game if I find anything that seems to help I'll post asap

Quad Core optimization on this seems to be a bit skitty. No game has done quad optimization like Far Cry 2 (Hence why it is STILL used in benchmarks today) they need to take a leaf out of FC2's book. OP: How was your Arma2 fps out of curiosity?

Ahhh, you have fairly decent hardware so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I will say when I was using a AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 4ghz-ish (Can't remember exact ghz) I had issues running even Arma2. I'm not saying an upgrade is in order but the intel chip made a night/day difference to my gaming. Only thing I can suggest otherwise is put literally everything on minimum and see which setting is causing issue. Hmmm, if you can't work something out maybe a ts3 session to bounce some ideas about may be in order to see if we can get you gaming.

I don't think a tweaks thread during alpha would be much use. Maybe during the beta when it's closer to being released but with the amount of coding that could change it may be detrimental towards users to use any major tweaking. I do believe that grass distance/amount is locked to prevent unfair advantage in multiplayer games, however play with the terrain quality setting. Does that make any difference for you? Also what is your average FPS in SP and MP? What hardware are you using?

You know, I feel dumb for not thinking about that myself. After all the tweaking I've done with Arma2 over the years suddenly this has been released and I feel like I've had a memory wipe XD

A bit of a random suggestion but please try it. Disable vsync if it is enabled. It uses a buffer which when it drops below 60fps it caps it low. I was stuck at <30 when I disabled vs it ramped up to 50's. Then I lowered some settings now I see a solid daytime 60fps. Also post your specs there may be a hardware specific thing I can suggest.

Arma2/OA has been dual core optimized not quad core optimized. This basically means that when running on a quad core it'll use all four cores but to limited amounts. This has been an issue I've had since release and would be why everyone suggest over clocking as a solution. A faster dual core cpu will out perform a quad core 90% of the time with dual core optimized games thus pure brute force ghz will win the race. What I would suggest is if you cannot overclock lower the settings until you can get a solid 30FPS then get DXTORY (google it) and cap your fps on arma2/oa to 30. This was the only way I could get a playable frame rate even with my rig. And also I disagree with what the developers/other players say about Arma2/oa being playable at 15FPS or greater. 30FPS will always be an absolute minimum and I rarely settle for anything other than 60FPS as smoothness is a major factor in accuracy especially in close quarters battles. Hope this sheds some light on the situation and provides some help in some form. Zedfragg

Even nowdays soldiers lack armor on the sides, a knife to the left side going upwards through the ribcage would actually kill quite swiftly. Also militia tend to not have MASSIVE amounts of armor around. Although you do hold a decent point. I think you may have missed ours however. Wether it's viable or not in a certain situation is irrelevant. The option to use it in certain situations ISN'T irrelevant. If you all want realism then this is a decent start to some aspect of special operations or survival. I mean don't get me wrong I wouldn't want a onetapkill Farcry 3 style or anything but knives are still a part of BASIC warfare wether people want to admit it or not. Although I did chuckle at that what you said XD

Holy hell...I had almost forgotten how elitist most of you people are here. And I'm an Operation Flashpoint: CWC player I've been coming here years. Just because a console game uses a certain idea doesn't mean you should bloody black list it. If you wanted a REALISTIC game in true form then the possiblity for knife kills would be a must! What sort of idiot starts screaming "OH NOES ITLL BE CODZ ALL OVERS"... You must be a complete nitwit if you believe that knives are unused in warfare. Years of solvent abuse...Takes away a lot of IQ points and I can see many here that have been sniffing the bostik... If they implement a decent object destruction system are you all going to scream "OH NOES ITLL BE BFBC2 ALL OVERS"? No...You'll claim that it's fantastic...Which it would be as it's REALISTIC... If you people really want a realistic simulation then yes, knife kills are a must. But they would have to be done properly. No QTE bollocks and the animation would have to be interruptable if shot etc rather than just continue on the animation like most Arma animations happen. Basically it would have to be done just right otherwise it would be very annoying. Plus it would need to be scripted purely for SP/Coop I think as it really would have no use within most MP scenarios. Unless it's an Attack & Defend situ but that'd be sketchy. Thinking about it, this is probably something the modding community could do for Arma 2/OA isn't it? Maybe it's time to break out the tools again /wanders off on a random tangent

Truth is that Arma2 is much like Cryostatis, it is not multi-core optimized. If you see your game using 50% of a dual core cpu and 25% of each core on a quad core then you are looking at a non-optimized game. It really is that simple otherwise you'd see a variable rate more often. People WILL disagree and probably flame a little but thats how simple it is. Like it or lump it, and check out a few other optimized games and you'll see.

This is a large shot in the dark mate but have you tried flashing your GPU bios? I had a simular problem back in the GF6 days and I flashed the cards bios and it actually fixed the problem. PM me if you are interested and I'll send you the links and help you out with all the information I know :o

lol Sorry mate but I did say I'm no expert :P Although any muppet can see there is a major problem there even without reverse engineering. I mean...40% of CPU being used on my computer with Arma 2 and I've undercocked my graphics card as LOW as it can go via NVCP yet...FPS doesn't change?? Right....If there isn't a problem involving the thread count and CPU/Ram usage then the game is just purely badly made lol Like I say I'm no expert (Oddly I'm just going through CPU thread usage in my book) I'm a hobbist but even I can see the problems here dude. I mean lets look at this from the Logical point of view. If it was badly optimized code apparent in low thread count causing a bottleneck then overclocking would generate a higher increased performance than any other upgrade/OC This game has shown considerable performance increases due to overclocking yet only shown 40% CPU usage on Intel Core 2 Duo's to i7's. Now think about this carefully, but if they had a way to better optimize thread usage and counts that would decrease the bottleneck thus allow a more streamlined flow of data through (in laymans terms lol) Trust me, if you reverse engineer Arma 2's code you'd have a nightmare and I'd bet my left testicle on it. I know I'm no expert but there is no way anyone-even BIS staff can tell me they didn't screw something up somewhere in the coding.4 ***EDIT*** Give me til Tuesday and I'll come back to you with some evidence or myself saying sorry. Thats right, I'm going to learn all this crap by Tuesday and then I will be a bloody know it all that can prove my point. Personally I couldn't care if I was right or wrong I just wish BIS would pull their fingers out their arses stop fucking about with an EXP pack and fix the goddamn engine lol

Heh, niceeeee. I'll admit I've been playing OFPDR almost completed it but I still can't shake the fact that I want to play Arma 2 more. News guys, Windows Vista x86 (32-Bit) same average thread count as last posted also FPS stuck at 27 with 40% CPU usage. Ahhhh well....Back to 64-Bit.....

Hi guys, decided to do another test today! Last night I formatted my hard drives and today I put Vista x86 back on it. Lets see if this helps at all. (I'll report back shortly)

Basically, with such as small amount of open CPU threads (They aren't channels they are threads :D) your bottlenecking your own system. Thats why so many people saw a benifit from overclocking, with overclocking those threads are clearing data at a faster rate. It's a double edged blade with having more threads it can be good or bad dependant on the skill of programming. I mean firstly you need to program what data goes through which thread so you never bottleneck yourself (The problem with Arma 2) secondly you need to have as many threads as logical. I mean you wouldn't have a thread for every single instruction but you would for couples. Physical collision would be possibly spread over a few threads to prevent slow down during action scenes with heavy collision data being processed. Or multiple threads for A.I in a game such as Arma would be fantastic. The way to think of it is like this. A thread is an instruction line to the CPU that gets queued but if you have too many instructions on a single thread you'll suffer with program stablity and slow down due to bottlenecks (ala framerates and crashes) However, if you open up a few extra threads to allow that data to streamline a bit more you create less queing and thus better CPU optimized software. Think of a square and a thin line going through it, only so much can travel through that line. But if you make the line thicker it'll allow more to travel through. It's like narrowband to broadband. Don't get me wrong I'm no expert but I'm getting more into programming everyday and thats my current understanding of the situation. After all there are many multithread optimized programs out there that run perfect on a single core. The programs we take for granted every day! Like Firefox! at the moment firefox has 17 threads open, I've seen firefox with 38 threads open. With firefox doing nothing more than web browsing shouldn't a game that is 1000 times more complex be using a few more open cpu cycles? I mean I've never played Arma2 and had my CPU with more than 40% being used ever yet my framerate is stuck at 27 no matter what. My CPU ain't great but a AMD Phenom II x4 940 Black Edition clocked at 3.52ghz is pretty effing mean ain't it? (I downclocked since my sig was written thanks to a teeny weeny overheat :P) And for your last question. Yes it does show that Arma and Arma 2 was overhauled and/or (apparently) optimized. But ask yourself this, how can you "overhaul" and engine that's from 2001 and keep it working with todays hardware? Unless it's the quake 3 engine it won't happen. The truth is OFP wasn't a fantastically made game, but back then we didn't care about framerates, we accepted it as the gameplay rocked. I was on a Geforce 440 MX 128mb AGP graphics card with an AMD Athlon 1800+ playing that game and I was happy with my high framerate, but soon as I upgraded to a Geforce 6200 I was pretty much unable to play the game (NO matter how you look at it GF6200>>>>GF440MX) and that was with a CPU upgrade. My worry is that the engine has retained it's problems with scaling with new hardware even though it's a new game it does seem to have this problem this could be due to a number of reasons, it could be the CPU thread count or it could be the lack of optimized use of RAM or lack of pagefile use or simply the game just hates gamers! But it would be interesting if the developers would drop us a message with details on how these threads are used, just so the community can take a look at how they are used and we could give them some tips on how to optimize. Don't get me wrong I'm no games developer and BIS have done a reletivly good job over the years, maybe not on game releases (Arma 1 was...just...oh dear) but in general they do make the best Milisims out there however they are going to have to fix this otherwise lets face it. The genre will die lol because I can't afford an i7 chip and sadly I'd have to refuse to upgrade even if I could which from various forum posts I'd say the i7 can have a tough time with this game as well. Well I've typed so much that me coffee's wearing off but heres a hint guys! Don't drink coffee at 23:30hr's....I'm WIRED!!!!!

Also Herbal I'd like to explain about CPU Threads. I don't know if you already know this but I get the impression you don't sorry if you do though. CPU Threads are basically channels as you know opened from Program X to CPU. These are not CORE dependant at all. You can have a program with 500 Threads on 1 core it wouldn't do anything but bottleneck inside your system but it's possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_%28computer_science%29 Explains it much better than I can if your into computer sciences. Basically CPU Hyperthreading and Process Multithreading are not "Exactly" the same thing and shouldn't be confused. So, basically 14 Threads for a game is extremely low considering it apparently calculates A.I, Physical Object Collision, Triggers and such Variables BIS have basically cocked up the logic behind the core program. Now this could be fixed with some reconstruction but I'm sure BIS are not too worried about it at the second (Sadly). Hope that cleared some stuff up mate.