ta.maximus

Shees, you guys are on the ball today! Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it. :)

Thanks Thr0tt, I'm just wondering whether it's going to try and force your screen to run on that refresh rate?

I think many people bought the game because of the glamorous videos and screen shots. I'm sorry you have wasted your money buying it, but I think that it was made clear enough everywhere that this is mostly a simulator and not a game. Ask yourself this: have you ever played IL2, the Silent Hunter series, R-Factor, Papyrus Nascar 2003, America's Army, Live for Speed, Grand Prix Legends, etc.? Have you ever spend 4 hours+ trying to adjust your suspension on your virtual car to try and get that illusive extra 150ms out of a lap? Have you ever wondered what you should set you air to fuel mixture ratio at 4500 feet to get that extra bit of oomph out of a very specific WWII plane? Have you ever participated in an online skirmish for 1 or 2 hours against enemy AI where not one of your online squad members die? If not, welcome to the world of simulation my friend. These games teach you a lot about things you may never get into contact with in real life. It teaches you the virtues of patience, technical abilities of the equipment you are using, teamwork in combat situations, etc., etc. You have to push everything you know about the average game aside and start from scratch in these simulators. You have yet to find the essence of what this specific simulator game is all about, and trust me, the campaign is not part of the essence. And arguably, neither is all the servers running evolution and domination. The great thing is that you can still play your other games too. I still play Prototype, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Fallout 3, etc. ArmA II is not my one and only game, and it doesn't have to be. But when I do play it I can easily waste away a day and get completely emerged in it's greatness. Just my 2c's.

A good way to check the enemies capabilities is to setup a combat situation between enemy soldiers in the editor and then spawn yourself as a rabbit. Then follow one of the AI around (especially snipers) and see how the perform. I've seen some pretty impressive maneuvers that way.

LOL at the bigfoot video, especially the suspenseful running away part. :D :D

I haven't seen anyone mentioning this but if possible make sure that you run at decent frame rate (i.e. around 25-30FPS+). Having a bad frame rate will really screw around with your chopper piloting abilities as it tends to "lag" your inputs. I have pretty much mastered piloting choppers and plains in ArmA with my Logitech joystick so you don't have to fly with a keyboard to get good.

I wonder when people will realize that enemy AI and friendly AI uses exactly the same AI and one isn't more somehow higher "evolved" than the other. It all comes down to: 1) Is the enemy AI stationary and is your squad moving? If so, they have a better chance of killing your squad. 2) Are they situated in a better location than you? They often are because the mission designer may have placed them in a good defensive position while you are happily strolling across an open field. 3) Do they have better weapons than your squad? 4) Is the enemy AI squad set to a higher skill level than yours? I bet I can take out a 50-100 enemy AI soldiers together with 10 friendly AI's depending on the situation - without cheating or using known flaws in the engine.

I haven't read the full thread yet but it seems that those wanting improvements to vehicle damage would at least want different front, side, back and top armor strength properties on the various armored vehicles. I feel that if Red Orchestra, the WWII sim based on the Unreal Engine can achieve this, then so can Arma II. I don't pretend to know the Arma II engine but surely the various projectiles have different damage ratings, and that combined with the armor strength on the different sides of a vehicle should be easy to calculate. Even if it is very simplistic (i.e. not taking the penetration/hit angle into account) it would still be better than a simple 0-->X hitpoint system?

That is excellent news Placebo! Thanks for the update. :D

Yeah, my Steam folder is huge already (+/- 60GB), soon I'm going to have to get a dedicated HDD for Steam :) If that is the case then I guess we don't have much choice but to go for the Steam version.

Your launcher is looking good Blakord. As far as I'm aware each Steam ID is assigned to a specific game and is unique to that particular game. In other words the same Steam ID will work on every computer and you don't have to worry about different Steam ID's for Arma II. If ArmA's steam ID turns out to be 4321, then it will be 4321 on every single computer. *edit* You can find the Steam AppID's for various games and demo's here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3729-WFJZ-4175#games But as expected Arma II is not on that list yet.

Hehe, if I have to wait that long one of two things are going to happen: A) I'm going to slice my wrists because I won't be able to handle the suspense any longer. B) I'll waste all of my internet cap on watching ArmA II videos all day long and that means I might as well just download it from Steam in the first place. I think you are right, BT Games might just be the guys to talk to. Incredible Corruption only seem to be selling XBox360 games these days anyway, sometimes you find the odd PC game stashed away in some remote corner of the shop where no one ever goes. So I definitely wouldn't rely on them.

It's actually really simple and I'm sure ArmA II is going to work this way: Simply execute steam.exe with the following command line parameters: steam.exe -applaunch %id %c Where %id represents the application ID Steam will assign to Arma II (you will have to wait for ArmA II to be released on Steam before you will be able to get hold of it) %c represents any command line parameters you want to pass on to ArmA itself.

Thanks for your response Placebo, I will take a look at those companies you mentioned. Usually I won't buy something directly from overseas distributors as our customs/ airport officials can easily grab hold of specific items and then release it whenever they feel like it, which sometimes means never. Those risks together with import taxes pushes the price of imported items up too high. That is the reason we have local distributors, they get paid for going through the trouble of getting the stuff here and safely into the hands of store owners. They often negotiate with the main publishers to get a price suited for the particular country, which is why you can often get games at less than what the exchange rates indicates. Anyways, that is my current understanding how the system works and I could be wrong of course.

Hi everyone, I live in the country South Africa and although it's a small country we have a very active ArmA/OPF community and devoted fanbase (look here: http://www.armedassault.info/_hosted/bushwars/index.html). At this point in time and as far as I'm aware there is only one (online) distribution company that is going to import this game into South Africa (Take2) but they will be importing it from a reseller in the UK, essentially making the game much too expensive for your average earning gamer (Too many middlemen and poor Rand vs Pound exchange rates) and which also means the game will never be on display in any stores as it will only be sold online. Apart from Steam distribution, I am really hoping that BI Studio's or one of their distributors can make arrangements with one of our local distribution companies to officially import this game to be sold in our stores. It is the only way Arma II will get the exposure it deserves. Can anyone from BI perhaps just give some feedback on this issue, it would be greatly appreciated!