Herbal Influence

I asked this question here a month ago in a matching and frequented thread - no answer until now.

Anything new on the Linux/Steam OS-Front? At last partially freedom would again be achieved as a freedom from Microsoft.

Hi, if I update to 1.63 (which seems to be recommandable because a lot of bugs have been fixed) can I nevertheless ignore Steam completely and play with the website Bohemia created to find other gamers / show hosting servers? Or ... a. does online gaming it no more work without Steam then? b. If it does: Will Steam get "a ping" or in any other way automatically connected/informed about me playing Arma2 without them? Thanks a lot! Herbal Influence

Even I, having played + installed all of the OFP-Series until now, had problems reinstalling Arma2. And nevertheless I am so sad about BISs decision because its a further decrease and damage to the philosophy of BIS (see signature) and to the freedom in the software gaming market and kick in the ass for data privacy. Steam is dominating the market, BIS follows and agrees. Steam has power over publishers, more and more. BIS subordinates its whole company under it kicking freedom in the a .... They say they can easily withdraw from it and that might be technically true. But if they do it, they lose much more than what they had before they signed with Steam. Customers will stay with steam, because they lose all this "wonderful cosy comfy" environment babies need. And BIS will return to a desert they helped to create: The free gaming world will be lost forever. Because: Kids do no more know by then, (a) that it exists, (b) how to play games without the silky bed of steam and © because they don't ask no more for more, because steam games consume all their pocket money, brain und time. And later no one will hinder steam from introducing 'new technologies' like Microsoft plans with their xbox: Patent pending for a software for the xbox than checks exactly who is sitting in front of the obligatory camera and license fees on video streams etc. will take that into account. You know that face recognition is more precise than a fingerprint?

A movie portal closes down (German only) , customers lose all their movies. Same happened before with "in2movies", click here (german only). They are all hating their already payed DRM-movies now and wish they would have DVD/CDs .... Same will happen if Steam closes, I assume?

Will discussions in future also be done under steams control? I mean as far as I know they offer a forum for each game inside steam .... will this forum here die in the long run? A natural death? BI would lose control over customer base even more? And valve gainng it? Opinion control is wuite important ..

I can only tell for Arma2 and OA: huge increase of speed of everything ... Yesterday I saw a 120Gbyte-SSD in online shop for 79 € with 5 good customer opinions. I have bought, installed and used by now four 128 GBayte SSDs in three different PC/Notebooks from ASATA: fast, no problems since 8 months (on Linuxes, XP, W7, W8).

Maybe I am too nervous about privacy but in fact I assume: Your PC gets uniquly identified and this stored. Your playing time gets stored. Your scores get registered and stored. Your anonymous email-adress gets stored. Your nickname gets stored. All your IPs get stored. Your payment data get stored. The games you own get stored. The version of the games own get stored. The frequency you play each game and version gets stored. The online-gamer-steam-friends you have. Probably also all this data is transfered and stored: www.ip-check.info .. To be continued ... I don't know about your communication as I never used steam. But what about: - chat logs? - in-steam-communication? - ingame-communication? To be continued ... The so-called anonymous payment method is paypal? Insert paypal and "angry" into a search machine ... Another long list of what data paypal stores of personal data from you? I have NEVER seen a US company that - before energetic public protests arose - ceased to store personal information about everyone and everything. Whereas I have seen e.g. Google telling the world they deleted huge amounts of special illegally gained personal data and they didn't. They did a few years later. Sure they just forgot about that ... :rolleyes: :j: And I know that it's cheaper to collect and store data than to delete it. And I know that there are people that simply don't care about their data. And I know that there are people that simply don't have nothing to lose. Poor guys ... I know that there are a lot of young people who cannot imagine today that in ten years it's painful and scaring for them that somebody exactly knows what they did on July 7th, 2013 at 01:41:23 a.m.. Mostly it will in fact be unimportant. But those who don't end their life just in front of a gaming PC but act publicly, get influential, rich or important in any way - they will be frightened. And they will feel hindered to act against the interests of those who know. Too much. But I know "privacy" and "data protection" is hard to understand for many people. It's quite abstract. It doesn't hurt, smell, you cannot touch it. And there is no sound when they are grabbing your data and form a profile here and there. And later combine and aggregate it. But it destroys your future slowly. Like radioactivity. Only a few get really hurt but all get more ... silent. I understand BIS can earn - at last for some time - earn more money this way. And that I like. I love BIS games. For their freedom. For their european kind of treating privacy: No obligatory gaming paths, no obligatory online-connection, no data collection, no scanning your harddisk, free server software and support for own gaming servers ... Oh, I don't protest. I am just so sad. I loved to play BIS games since 2001 quite often. And only BIS games.

I only now saw that for purchasing Arma3 I need to get a Steam membership, delivering your real identity, handing over credit card data, accepting all their smallprint and their DRM and the more holding me like a child on a leash ... I played and bought BIS games intensely since 2001. And, yes, I had problems with reinstalling Arma2 several times because of possibly old DVDs and the quite stupid re-recombination of patches and versions and games - but I would have never wanted to give up FREEDOM for that. FREEDOM was a keyword and a BIS philosophy and they've given up on that now. I am sad as can be. US companies collecting and commercializing everything, even the most intimate details (emails - Google, facebook) and I am quite sure that Steam will check on you when you played what, when you chatted about what and how and will store it forever "to embetter the service and to give you the most fulfilling experience and advertising". Soon they will ask you not to cover your webcam because they really can embetter their services if they can observe your reactions to certain advertisings and your emotions before displaying them. This is a nuke on what I thought BIS stood for: FREEDOM. See my very old signature. But lack of privacy is only ONE aspect .... lemme go an vomit for some time. Maybe I come back, maybe never. BRAVE NEW WORLD. We really need a Vendetta ... ? Its not only bashing the FREEDOM of the users. BIS itself is no more a company now that can decide on its own course .... if Valve says "Uhmmm..?" they gotta answer. Sad, sad ...

LOL ... yeah, I answer myself after only 8 months? .... you gotta press control and space to get into commander mode. I am still interested in getting more special infos for this mission: How to change the functionality of the towns ... I know you can set their qualities like defense or income ... but how?

Does anybody know whether the pre-installation of OA makes it impossible to later install Arma2 and update it ? If've had huge problems to install Arma2 on Win8, gave up and installed and updated OA. Now I finally managed to install Arma2. But I am not able to update it, because it says: Your OA/Arma2 is already updated. No update needed.

Its the first thing written on the screen when you start the Computer. And maybe you also see it under "system" or when you right-click on the desktop. Exactly I don't know I use more than six different operation systems and Microsoft is the worst ... I didn't learn it by heart and at the moment I am not at an Microsoft Computer. But with that specific question you should use the search button in the forum. Be optimistic: Having found the right question is a jota distance from the answer ... One more thing: You must not post things repeatedly. So it was the second time that you posted your CPUs specs.

No, that's the CPU. Whereas we are looking for your GPU.

BamItsCon - can you stop repeating your same question over and over without answering the questions of the very helpful and caring Mod? You might enerve people with that a lot. If you don't know what a GPU is, why don't you check wikipedia or yahoo.com? Because, no, what you posted is NOT the GPU. GPU stands for graphical unit. It's hardware. It has a cpu of its own like it has RAM of its own. And its quite probable that one of these is underdimensioned on your device. But to find out the Mod needs the specs. In my signature you find an example for an quite old (but wonderfully working) GPU: "NVidia 9600 GT" with 1024 MByte GRAM. Here you find examples/descriptions of other models .....

Thank you. Anybody knows how to overcome the Problem, that turns up, when you installed OA before Arma2? I mean, it says now: No update because newer version already installed. But I am stuck wit Arma2, vers. 1.10 and newest OA vers. 1.62.