DualJoe

No it doesn't. Would be nice to know the working hours, this is the second evening in a row I'm in front of a closed store.

Got mine in one of those online 1-day offers for a pretty hefty discount. Still worth the money imo. I threw out my Creative Fatality piece of crap and my logitech gaming headset right away. Both were brand new and not the first pieces of crap headset I bought after reading countless raving reviews on the internet. In the end buying irritatingly bad and uncomfortable headsets has cost me a lot more than a single good one. Never had problems with the missing mic, because I have one of those usb-microphones with an inbuilt camera. Apart from the extreme convenience of not having to remember to take of your headset when you walk away, and being able to listen to music on my pc all around the house, most of my friends with headsets sound like they have their mics partways in their lungs and suffering from a mass astma-attack. You don't just hear their breathing it sounds like a frigging multiple huricane.

Well I've yet to encounter a good sounding headphone for an acceptible price for me, but I'd recommend the Sennheiser RS 170 or better. Very comfortable, wireless (I tend to move around a lot and having my head physically atached to my pc is bothersome to say the least), battery will easily outlast even very long gaming sessions, blocks out external noises completely. The most important part however, sound quality seems to be very good for a wireless headset beating everything I've tried up to the same pricepoint from all the popular brands apart from other wired Sennheisers. The only drawback is that you tend to start yelling with these things on, so you may have to lower the volume on your microphone for the sake of your voice-chat-buddies. Btw, I've never had problems pinpointing sound with a stereo headphone. Seeing how hard it is to find a somewhat decent sounding stereo headphone, I'd wager that the chances of finding a good sounding "surround" headset with 5/7 speakers are astronomically small.

What's up with those Blender-devs man! Their update speed is inhuman. Before picking up the buildings it seems I'll have to reeducate myself with the new Blender. I could keep working with an old version, but looking at the release docs and images, I don't think anyone should pass up on those updates, especially BMesh.

Sounds like you're working in perspective mode instead of orthogonal view. Try pressing numpad 5.

Little late, but I'm away from home at the moment. I don't mind if you add the map to the addon, but keep in mind that it's far from finished. The churchtower and railroad bridge are such big landmarks that I couldn't leave them out, but my focus is primarily on the frontlines. If someone wants to fill in the missing bits, saying I wouldn't mind would be an understatement. Looking at the webpage the focus of your mod seems to be more present day. Maybe I can figure out a way to make the map modular. My focus is trying to recreate the WOII situation as faithfull as possible. However if the map could be used for other scenarios, I'd be willing to put in some effort to make that a possibillity.

A 23'' IPS from LG. Needed the wide allround viewing angles, because the players need to be able to view it ...erm... all around. The smoked glass adds some very surprising effects to the already impressive screen. It seems to enhance the contrast and colors and makes some 3d games look almost real 3d. The whole things looks a lot better in real life than in the video. It can be dismantled, but you'd have to look really hard where to start, because you won't see screws and such from the outside.

Ah I'm back. So much to do and so little time to do it in. Sorry for the delay, but I had too many projects running simultanously. Off topic, but the main reason for my absence was that I was building this thing for my little nieces and nephew . Came out better looking than I had hoped when I came up with the idea and design. Anyway once I've regained some energy and no other projects interfere I should be able to get cracking on this thing again. @Iarsiano: Don't know if you're still watching, but no I don't have a beta yet. Wouldn't even call it an Alpha, without roads, trees and buildings as of yet. The iconic buildings I have to make are way outside of ArmaII-building-spec so I have to be very "creative" which takes a lot of time and experimentation. Just getting the things to look right is proving very challenging, let alone making them work right. As long as I'm working on this single handedly it may take a while before I get to beta stage.

Okay I'm stumped. I've tried copying the settings from Tonci87 as close as I could and I also get 46 fps on benchmark 08, but here's the weird part. I can disable/enable AA and set post processing from very low to normal/high and I still get 46 fps. As I said I'm not getting 100% load on any of my cores, so I tried different cpucount and exthreads settings, but going from cpucount 2 to 16 and exthreads 5 and 7 doesn't seem to do anything at all and I'm still getting 46 fps in benchmark 08. I've run all those tests windowed so I could check windows performance graphs and MSI Afterburner while running the test and no matter what cpucount-/exthread-value I use I always see the same thing. 4 cores are doing something, but at most 85% for a single core. Another strange thing is that I get the lowest CPU and GPU load on the wide open panning views but at the same time the framerate is low as well. With Tonci87 settings I get the highest framerates in the busy scenes with all the AI running/driving through the screen and panning the buildings. It almost looks like the Arma2 engine itself is artificially limiting the framerates. Btw viewdistance seems to be related to this, because dropping the viewdistance from just over4900 to about 4500 and I get a framerate of around 55. No idea how I can get the cpucount and exthreads settings working on my system. EDIT I'd like to know how much cpuload the core i2600k needs to get the exact same framerate in Arma2 as my fx8120 cpu. Considering only 35/38% of the available cpu power is used in my case even ArmA2 does not justify the more than 100 euro price difference for the cpu (I got mine for just over 170 euro including shipping while the cheapest i7 in my region at that time was 290 without shipping). I think you'd get a lot more if you spend that money on a better videocard or ssd or save it for a future upgrade.

Indeed Arma2 only seems to use 4 cores, barely, but it is not taxing any core close too 100% on my system. Which suggests even Arma2 is not bottlenecked by my cpu. As I was saying, people keep throwing around words like atrocious when describing performance of the fx8120, which sofar I have yet to experience firsthand. From what I've seen, I find it very hard to believe that changing only my cpu and motherboard for a 2600k setup would improve framerates in any way (because it seems my hdd and GPU are the current bottlenecks). Let alone offer noticeable increased performance. Running a dedicated server or alt-tabbing a no-pause multiplayer session doesn't produce any cpu-load worth mentioning, granted those weren't 128 player domination or warfare missions. Maybe this could be tested by overclocking your cpu and if your framerates increases with the same percentage as you're overclocking, that would seem to point to a cpu-bottleneck. I could try this when I find some time, but in the few quick benchmarks I did with stock 3.1 and 4Ghz clockrates I did not see a 25% difference. Doesn't help that it's very difficult to do consistent benchmarks with AI on Arma2, because it will never run the same way twice.

What's wrong with bulldozer? Have any of the people complaining about the bulldozers or recommending i7 chips as a notable improvement actually tried using them? Until A3 is released any recommendations for optimal performance is about as valid as today's weather-forecast for next week. I've recently bought a fx8120, because I run linux as my primary OS and benchmarks on linux showed it to be a lot more bang for the buck than the Intel-offerings. When using all cores the bulldozers seem to be significantly more powerful than the i5/7 chips, and yes I actually do stuff with it that maxes out all cores. So far I've not seen the problems with cpu everybody is complaining about. Granted performance takes a rather ridiculous hit when running windows 7, but I very much doubt that Intel doesn't suffer a similar hit when running windows. To bad I still need it to play the occasional game, like ArmA2, but still I don't see what all the ruckus is about. Sofar not one of my games has been limited by the cpu in any way. Take BF3 for example, everything ultra with a rock solid 60 fps and the cpu is even clocking down the few "active" cores. I've not seen even close to 100% usage of the cpu on windows 7 in any game I've tried, my harddisks and videocard are bottlenecks long before that becomes a problem. If anything I'd say my fx8120 is overkill for current (console)generation games. Why would you recommend spending so much more on a cpu like the i7? Particularly in the case of games only the videocard seems to matter. I'd recommend to watch out to not get drawn in by the upgrade-junkies and look very closely at what you're getting for the money. More often than not I see people recommending to spend orders of magnitude more to get a little percentage increase in performance.

I haven't found a way to export smoothgroups from Blender to O2, so I'm doing the next best thing. I'm remodeling the entire thing without smoothgroups, smoothshaded with faked beveled edge look. Especially redoing the uv-map is taking a lot of time, but the base is almost ready for export. You can see what it looks like in 3d here. If anybody knows how to import smoothgroups from blender into O2, I'd be happy to learn how.

Same here, unfortunately there's still a lot of stuff I need to work out. I'm still working on the interior, which is harder than you'd think, especially since I don't have any reference photo's to go by. or if you prefer an online 3d-version It's becoming a pretty complex 3d puzzle. I'd like this to be a fun building for multiplayer as well so I'd like to keep performance at a respectable level if possible. For now polycount is still pretty decent, around 40k tris for the entire thing, most of which I have yet to clean up (but I expect the addition of the interior will eat up that difference and then some). At the same time I'm trying to use as many proxies as possible, mostly for partial destruction, but also in the hope it'll enable me to use the building as one whole instead of 3 separate ones. This also means I need to plan ahead where I want destruction and how I'll be able to handle it via proxies. Ideally I'd like to make one base damaged model and add the undamaged parts onto that in the form of proxies. Don't know yet if that will kill framerates too much. As you can see from the previous screenshots I don't have any problems with framerates yet on my empty 2m resolution terrain with 8K satmap, hopefully I'll be able to keep it that way.

Not as long as it will take me to hand paint the one I need for my map-project. Two other ways I can think of is to select the black area's, and alpha-blend those areas with a slightly offset copy. And/or doing a couple of directional blurs on the selection from different angles.

Don't know if there's something like it in photoshop, but in gimp you could select the dark area's via treshold or color select and the like and then do something like .

After a bit of a struggle with config-files I got something to show up ingame. Still needs a lot of work converting everything to O2. I've got a number of unexpected issues with flipped face-normals, somewhat random mirroring and no smoothgroups at all. At least I managed to get the scaling about right. (@ more perceptive people) Yes I know the top part is rotated. I'm still working out all the quirks I get when converting to O2.

Finally! I have a working pc! And I also got the bistudio tools and such up and running again. Better late then never. I'm slowly picking up this project again. For now mostly little tweaks, like trying to get rid off the land climbing shining waterlayer. Frustratingly I have yet to find a way to get rid of that irritating sea-water feature. I'm also doing some experiments with the satmap-texture resolution. I'll try to get a nice balance between image quality and memory footprint. 16k resolution is out, causes way too much harddisk thrashing even with low viewdistances. I'm trying to home in on a sweet spot which I guess is somewhere between 8k and 4k. For the buildings I'll have to figure out how to snap objects together to form one seamless structure. Also now that I've got a working O2 and buldozer, I can finally start putting the Cuneratower ingame. That's the plan anyway, for now I'm mostly playing with my new toy and trying to figure out ways to maximize performance.

Keep in mind that Intel has way more money to spend on creative marketing tricks so they can afford to be more economic with the truth. One of the most creative is the trick Intel puts in their compiler, as long as the resulting executable is run on a "Genuine Intel" it will use all the cpu's functions, without the factories brand it won't use all those functions even if they are present. In other words if you don't know which compiler was used on the executable I wouldn't put too much faith in those benchmarks. Quite the opposite, pretty impressive that the bulldozers ONLY lag 20%, which would suggest that they are a whole lot faster than Intel. I've seen benchmarks and tests on websites and forums on other operating systems like linux where the tables are turned completely and the 2600k gets it's ass handed to it by the 1100t let alone the bulldozers. In some of those tests we're not talking about a measly 10%/20% either. Besides why should anybody give a shit about a minuscule difference of 20%. To me that means that if the AMD won't run it, the Intel won't either. I sure as hell won't be 20% less irritated in that case. One plus for AMD is that you don't necessarily have to upgrade everything for a single generation jump. I'm currently playing BF3 on ultra with an old e8500 core2duo on 1920x1200 with an occasional dip to about 45fps. I've got arma2co running at an almost constant 60fps on reasonably high settings. Running the Heaven benchmark I get the exact same score as core i7 rigs with the same nvidia GTX560Ti. In short who cares about cpu's when talking about gaming performance, save your money for a videocard-upgrade.

What the hell is going on? I've always had rotten luck with pc's, but I've never had this much problems just getting the parts. Not a single shop had the items I need in stock. Finally found a company who said they could ship within 3 days and they did. Too bad the delivery took their sweet time and then just marked me absent without even bothering to drive up my street. I had to argue with the postal-company before they friggin bothered to try to deliver my stuff. So two weeks have passed before I could even start installing my pc. Then I get loads of weird errors, crashes and glitches, but no error messages and memory checked ok. Took me another couple of days before I managed to even get a cpu-test to run and it immediately found errors in 2 cores. Looks like it will take another couple of weeks before I have a pc, let alone getting some work done. In the old days delivery took days at most. Even with broken hardware and no stock it would take a week max to get a system up and running in a worst case scenario. But with all the recent improvements and internetshopping it seems we've progressed to needing months.

@Kindling: Don't look down on the old core2duo, my current e8500 pc has no problem running Arma2CO with all the graphical goodies at well over 30 fps. Nevertheless I was surprised about 3d working in a virtual machine as well, without vga-passthrough. He seemed to be pretty confused with all the similarly named titles, from what I gathered he hasn't tried ArmaIIOA yet, but had started with ArmedAssault (not cold war crisis). I asked him to run fraps and he was getting around 18 fps while (accidentally) running 2 instances of Armed Assault. Running a single instance was completely playable according to him. I'll start experimenting once my new pc is delivered. I made sure that it has IOMMU so I could experiment with vga-passthrough, because I'm sick and tired of having to reboot just to run windows. @Dice: ArmaIICO is the only reason I still have a windows partition. If you don't mind the occasional tinkering playing windows games on linux doesn't seem to be as big of a problem as it used to be, even for beginners. Just make sure you have a NVIDIA-videocard. playonlinux looks promising for non-tinkerers. Freedom is the most important thing for me. And the way Microsoft and Apple try to limit me frustrates me to no end. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe that's why I like bistudio games so much, if only they'd release their games for linux as well.

Wow, didn't know someone actually pulled it off. This is great, thank you very much. I've been trying to get Armed Assault and Arma2 to work in wine for years now. Sofar I had only managed to get the GOTY edition of Operation Flashpoint working, but couldn't get past the rawinput-issue with the newer installments. Even better if the bistudio tools work under wine as well, that would save me an enormous amount of time. I just can't get used to working in windows anymore. Oh by the way, my brother in law recently bought ArmaX and apparently he had no problems playing the games with vmware player on ubuntu with a core2duo and a nvidia 9600GT.

Haha, thanks for the encouragements. Won't have any updates for a while, because I'm building myself a new pc. My parents pc has died and I needed to do a complete reinstall on mine anyway, so I figured I'd just give them my current one and build myself a replacement. Wasn't planning on this and I suspect I need a bit of time to get things setup again. Doesn't help that I couldn't find a store that had everything in stock. First time for me to have to wait a couple of days for the pc I've already paid for.

That's about it for the basic-model, well the exterior at least. Still needs some work on the interior like some extra floors and stairs, but I'll focus on getting this working ingame first. Considering the current low polycount and quick procedural texture, I think it'll look convincing enough ingame once I've done a proper unwrap and texture job. Once I have this thing working I'll try the railroad-bridge, which is the one I'm most worried about. Haven't got a clue how bridges work in the arma-engine.

Little update, getting close to solving this 3d puzzle, almost at the top now. Won't be able to test it ingame for a while, because my windows 7 installation seems to have developed an error after a crash and I'm not yet prepared for a complete reinstall.

Indeed, having more people work on this would speed things up immensely, especially since I'm completely new to most of this. Bushlurker already helped me out on a couple of issues. One problem I see (apart from me not wanting to bother other people) is that my workflow seems to be a bit different from the others. I think I'll post a link to the google docs directory where I keep a backup of my current WIP once I've got most 3d-stuff somewhat operational. Something like opensource development for the more adventurous. Won't be pretty at first, but I wouldn't mind getting some feedback. Talking about 3d, I've made a little progress with the landmark churchtower. I've made the spiral-staircases all the way to the top including windows(you can see them on the right side of the tower). They look close enough to the real thing AND should be traversable by arma AI (fingers crossed). Needs a little more work before I have the bare minimum to start testing if this works ingame. Well the outside at least, don't have a clue yet what I'll do for the inside of the tower.