bonchie

SimHQ.com has a session on Saturday afternoons. Info in their Arma forum. 4EST. Probably too late for you, but just letting you know.

Love the mod and we still use it every week for our session. But I'll give one critique to the new release. The "leaves on the ground" texture used in Song Cu looks pretty bad and distracting IMO. When you are walking, it looks like you are skating over a bunch of neon colors. And it doesn't look natural with the surroundings when scanning for enemies. And where the texture ends into dirt, it looks like a sheet of ice. I much prefer the mix of Tanoa dirt/ground + plants seen in Da Krong.

Sure. The AI needs to feel more natural when you encounter them. As they are now, they are smart in many ways as far as detection goes, but they don't take cover well, if at all. They don't use buildings well. They are far too accurate in some situations. They often don't react in rational ways (staying still under fire, going prone and just sitting there, etc.). They don't work together well. It's not that they are bad, but the entire experience has gotten stale to me and it's very robotic. I know it's blasphemy to mention, but Dragon Rising's AI, even 8 years ago, had really good open world AI that many games could learn from. They'd take cover, they'd suppress, they'd move and bound with each other, they'd clear buildings, etc and they did so in a fluid, convincing way. Arma3's AI has improved greatly from past iterations, but it feels like a dead end to me at this point. No matter what tweaks they make, it always ends up lacking. If the AI is ever going to massively improve, it'll probably have to be a totally new system.

Until the AI gets a major rewrite or update that completely changes the nature of the gameplay, Arma3 will always have that feeling. I still play COOP once a week in a private session (we use addons, not the default future stuff), but it's mostly about the people I play, not Arma3 being awesome. And after every session, the number 1 thing that is most likely to of hurt our session is the AI.

One session is Unsung Charlie. The other is our own mod-pack that's a mix of a bunch of stuff.

What computers are some of you guys using? I get 40+ FPS on Tanoa. I make missions with 100+ AI assets routinely for our sessions and never have an issue. No one else ever complains either and I know some of them are using very budget GPUs. It looks pretty killer too, especially on a map like Tanoa that is done right. To me, the engine isn't an issue as much as lack of effort into content. We've been waiting for another long, well done campaign for more then a freaking decade now. I've resolved myself to the idea that it's just never going to come.

They are pretty good these days. We use some dispersion tweaks to make them less "iron sight sniper" at longer distances in our mod-pack. The low-skill syndakit units are too accurate IMO at stock and we find that with our tweaks, things are still balanced enough to be challenging. I do enjoy using ASR when we play Unsung though. The AI move and flank better and respond to sound in much more intelligent ways. Part of me wonders why the stock AI isn't closer to what some of these mods are doing. I see little downside in our mission play throughs. Having AI that you can't count on to sit still is another dimension of gameplay. The only thing that can be an issue is AI vacating a target area early by responding to distant gunfire.

So with Duong Island, are all the barren areas on the edges (which seemed to be 40% or so of the map) going to now be covered with the new foliage and more locations?

Nice video, but being part of a group that uses all those mod maps, none of them are on the level of Tanoa and many are butt ugly in comparison. BI really has raised the bar with Tanoa.

No. Had they went more sci-fi, it would of pissed even more people off. I personally think modern warfare is boring compared to the earlier eras. I'd rather have no scope and grainy NVGs then every last soldier having a scope and IR goggles. The fog of war is also less and less believable the further you push things into the future.

I think some of those sounds were placeholders and they are continuing to redo the weapons for Charlie.

Turn the view distance down. Unless you are flying, there's no reason to have it higher then 1500. That's been the easiest way to solve FPS for our group. Especially when playing on Tanoa or playing Unsung, a limited view distance makes no difference at all. As to Apex, none of us have observed lower FPS since it's release. Most have seen better FPS since 1.60.

See this thread: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/192490-no-entry-binconfigbincfgweaponssingle/ This was what was wrong with our missions. It has to do with BIS changing the weapon's config or something with apex. So mods that use custom weapons will give that error and kick you back to the lobby. BUT if you try to load the mission a 2nd time (do not stop the server, just re-select the mission and go), it'll work. We can confirm this workaround works. As for the revive system causing issues, that's likely as well, but our missions use AIS wounding system and we had already stripped out the BI revive language so that wasn't a variable for us.

Makes sense. We have a template we use that has a description.ext that predates apex. So that's probably it. We'll do some testing and see if it fixes our issues. I'll let you guys know.

Am I missing something with the campaign? When we play the first mission, there's no cutscene before, no explanation of who "keystone" is, etc. Should I be seeing something?

We make our own missions. But it's all made with just the Unsung Bravo mod-pack. Since Apex's release, our missions are kicking us back to the choose mission screen when we try to load them.

Any tips for how you got your mission to work? Right now, when we advance it kicks us back out after the loading screen on our user made missions. We are trying to decide whether to suspend our session until Charlie comes out or if there's something we can do with our missions in the meantime to at least keep things going somewhat.

Also, are the issues that have been created going to mean we have to re-make all our missions once Charlie is released? I know Alpha to Bravo broke missions because of new class names but are these issues something different that can be fixed without breaking Bravo created missions?

I can confirm our Bravo missions are not working. Some lack slots, some kick you out after loading. I've let my group know about the issues ahead of our session today. Hopefully you guys can get Charlie out soon. Thanks for the hard work.

We are still using the mod every Saturday. Will these redone versions of Da Krong and finishing of Duong Island be part of Charlie or will they be released sooner as a patch for Bravo? Better question would be how time consuming it is to replace the old vegetation assets? I make missions but I'm ignorant in that area.

I think they should take a cue from some other games and stop getting so caught up in DLCs having to be extra content and maps. Do something different next time. The next DLC should be a well done, SP/COOP campaign on Tanoa that they actually put some serious time into. I guarantee it would end up being their best selling DLC. To answer the OP's question. That was my expectation this go around. They missed it by a mile, at least as SP is concerned.

As a COOP effort, it's fine. I played with some guys from my group last night and we had fun doing the first mission. Snuck around, coordinated fire, planned our attacks, etc. But as a SP effort, it's terrible. No team to play with if you don't play online. The first mission doesn't even tell you what the hell you are doing. It just drops you in to the mission and says "find keystone." Ok, who's keystone? Why are we here? Who the heck are we? Who are the enemy? Frankly, I just don't get BI. For 10+ freaking years, people have been telling them exactly how to make a good campaign, yet they screw it up every time. OFP and Resistance were the benchmarks. How freaking hard is it to simply take that approach again when making new campaigns? Propose a good story, make somewhat open yet pointed narrative driven missions, mix in well done cutscenes, and just as importantly, make the player feel like he's part of a larger battlefield. They kind of did that with Arma3's campaign at first, but then screwed it up as it went along. Arma2's campaign started semi-well too, but again, they decided to screw it up at the end. But this was a total step back even further then those two. And I'll say what's been said a million times already. The future setting sucks. It kills so much immersion and takes you too much out of the atmosphere. Warfare was simply cooler back in the 70s and 80s. Even the 90s. Walking around with alien suits on and IR goggles is boring. They need to eventually get back to more historical eras where warfare was tougher, the fog of war was thicker, and the nostalgia factor plays a role in creating atmosphere. OFP did this perfectly. The "UNSUNG 3" mod does this perfectly (assuming you create good missions with it). When I play Tanoa with my MP groups mod-pack, using 80's US troops and assets, it just feels better. More realistic. You can't underestimate the amount of immersion that is added by nostalgic time periods and weapons. Landing in blackhawks and patrolling a jungle where everyone doesn't have scopes and magic goggles sucks you in more. I realize for the sake of Arma3, they've went with the future thing and aren't going to stop. But hopefully the next iterations will return to something more relatable.

There's also some saying the campaign sucks. I think they mean as a SP experience. In that case, that's true because you have no team. That was a bad decision. But as a COOP campaign, it's been good. My group has only done the first mission, but we enjoyed it.

Tanoa really has to be seen to be believed. If it were only the map, it'd be worth it (assuming you play with a MP group that would make use of the map in mission making).

You can join us on Saturdays at 4PM EST. Go to the ARMA3 sub forum at simhq.com. No prior training or commitment required. There are some clans that play it as well I think, but they require joining and such.