Richey79
Member-
Content Count
591 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Medals
Everything posted by Richey79
-
I don't really understand the knee-jerk reaction against PvP in a thread like this. Sure, I prefer TvT, but the RV engine's suitable enough for some competitive fragging, particularly if Bis overhaul the animation system and add some physics. A game-mode like this benefits from some game-modes / maps being included with the vanilla game: it doesn't suit the community-made approach that co-op missions do. There were some interesting TvT modes included with the release of OA, but they were all so badly bugged at release that nobody played them. Noone's worked out what 'Arma 2: free' was in the Nvidia profiles yet (as far as I know). Perhaps Bis still have a surprise waiting for us.
-
WTF? Go and play Gears of War instead of Arma 3 - it'll be more to your taste. It would be good to see something like the community PVP animation system implemented, although I'm not a big fan of getting locked to a wall or blind fire.
-
The video didn't show very much of what the engine can do in action. The shaders and lighting were very nice, but something about it looked rather cartoonish. The animations were a bit 'weightless', like they were walking in low gravity. None of this matters if the engine can only handle the six units at a time that the video showed. No indication of what it looks like in first-person. I certainly wouldn't say that this looks like a more effective tool than VBS or Arma2, although I'm sure we'd all like to see Arma3's graphics take something of a step in this direction.
-
I think we can all agree... optimization
Richey79 replied to Fuzzy McDoodle's topic in ARMA 3 - GENERAL
You're not alone in finding how the HDR is handled extremely annoying. And yes, to whoever said that we now seem to be required to upgrade our rigs for less and less return, I most certainly agree with you. I'm not sure that I'm going to feel like building another gaming rig in the near future. It just doesn't seem worth it for the few genuinely worthwhile 'proper' PC games that come out these days. Either the next generation of consoles will give gaming in general a shot in the arm and boost PC gaming once again, or they'll be so capable that I'll finally make the switch to console. Mind you, with Sony's recent woes and the recession, I can't imagine the big companies have a burning desire to release new machines in the near future, so that they can go back to low returns per unit. What I would love in Arma 3 would be a dedicated low stress option. Now, we can currently turn the graphics settings way down, but in the end, the only result of turning down 'object quality' is that you get stutter when you zoom in to look at anything. Basically, turning the graphics settings down can actually damage your frame rate. My idea of a low stress option would be to make the game look like VBS2: reduce every possible stress on the GPU and CPU, but leaving the gameplay pretty much untouched. For example, rather than simply using lower LODs at closer distance, swap in buildings that don't have nearly as many polys. Maybe they could even include a simplified ballistic system and then prevent the mode from being used in multi-player. I'm sure there are a lot of players out there who, like me, don't care about eye candy, but just want to be able to play the game smoothly with lots of AI and a high view distance. I just don't think that Arma2 does scale terribly well on lower settings. I know that I get better performance with HDR and shadows set to 'very high', for example. And going back to Arma 1 doesn't particularly help, since it doesn't support multi-core CPUs efficiently. -
Yes to fighting women (although not necessarily in the armies of the East/West forces). No to children, for all the reasons that are stated every time someone starts a thread about it. They'd need a whole different set of animations, mo'-caps, AI behaviours etc. What's the point when no decently-designed mission is going to encourage you to shoot them? They'd be amusing to have in a zombie mod, true... .
-
CM Operation Flashpoint 3 announced | "Oops, they're doing it again..."
Richey79 replied to Undeceived's topic in OFFTOPIC
Good to see someone making up their own mind. The first Ghost Recon? - I cannot agree in any way. For me, earlier Tom Clancy games like GR1 and Raven Shield were so enjoyable because the equipment you were using felt 'heavy' and credible. The pace was slower, one shot was enough to kill and you felt the weight of your actions: the wrong decision might be the end of you at any time. The game reminded me very strongly of GRAW: 'look at the shiny shiny toys' and leading the player by the nose through the linear levels. Graphics were about on a par with GRAW 1, too. As for tactical opportunities, there are very few. For example, the mission where you are sent to flank the armoured vehicles and the only single way to do so is by crossing the river at a very narrow ford. Less GRAW2 than Doom 3. Other highlights include Chinese APCs which are scripted to be indestructible because the mission designers wouldn't allow you to approach the missions any other way than the way they designed. I'm presuming you mean mission 5, where you have to retreat three or four times. I thought that one was quite intense, and the difficulty level was about right. Shame the rest of the game was a total anti-climax and farcically easy. The mission also included a really annoying part near the start, where Sgt. Obknoxious tells you to be stealthy to stay hidden from the PLA, but the whole thing is utterly scripted, so, as with much of the game, it really doesn't matter if you run straight across the middle of the fields. Goodness only knows why they included prone in this game. The one thing that I'd like to see ported to Arma would be the CSAR FTEs. I know community members have made a million realistic CSAR missions, but the arcadey rush of CM's version is pretty fun. As soon as you retrieve the downed pilots, all hell breaks loose and the enemy spawn and try to cut you off from your extraction point. The game mode is massively buggy, though, because it's the only one in which there are are some dynamically generated elements and the player is free to choose how to approach the mission. -
I think it should be like Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets: the 'Queen's Gambit' / 'Cooper' / 'Reynolds' guy voices every single character. It would really show off the breadth of his superb voice talent, and would break the fourth wall in an ingenious fashion, providing a subtle but profound commentary on the nature of videogames as mere simulacra of life. On the other hand, Bis could try spending more than £50 and actually get some professional voice actors this time.
-
Anyone else is afraid what ArmA III is going to do to the addons scene?
Richey79 replied to Altimeter's topic in ARMA 3 - GENERAL
It would be really interesting to see the proportion of the following: - Modders who started on OFP and stayed with the series. - Modders who started on OFP and have dropped out because of life changes / increasing complexity of Bis' series. - Modders who started on Armed Assault and stayed with the series. - Modders who started on Armed Assault and have dropped out because of life changes / increasing complexity of Bis' series ... you get the picture. What I'm trying to get at is - how healthy is the modding community? Are people starting to mod OA (and making progress quickly enough to keep them at it) in great enough numbers to make up for those long-time modders who have dropped out, and those who will drop out when Arma 3 hits. Mind you, this isn't really either Bis' concern or something they can do anything (much) about. -
Would be good to have a slider for weapon condition in the editor, as we currently have 'ammo', 'fuel' etc. Modelling of weapon jamming would be fine. An animation for clearing the jam would be even better, but might make it harder to mod new weapons into the game. Would be a poor approach to merely make OPFOR's weapons more likely to jam than the Western ones.
-
Disagree. Yes, it'llbe nice to have all the best stuff moving forward, but the amount of work to even do a straight port and bug-kill is massive. If it's done by the community, then noone minds bugs, slipping release dates, etc. If Bis did it, everyone would jump on every little fault and bug, complain that all the units should be released with three different sets of camo and so on. The end result produced by the community is usually to an even higher standard than Bis would have been able to achieve. As long as Bis release good modding tools, the future will be fine.
-
My sentiments exactly! Many thanks for the continued work, Konrad.
-
Absolutely. Some of the audio mods out there make the game so much more enjoyable to play. I don't really understand why the audio in Arma is so wimpy: they clearly go to lots of effort to capture the sounds and get the right technology in place. In the end, I don't care in the least about how many audio channels there are / what the sampling rate is etc., or even whether the sounds are 'Hollywoodesque'. The A10 Gau needs to sound satisfying. I want to be crapping my pants as an infantryman if I hear a 30mm cannon firing 300 metres away. RWS achieves this. Battlefield Bad Company 2 gets closer to it than Arma 2 vanilla - simply because more immersion is created.
-
To my eye, those animations don't look nearly as fluid as those we already have in Arma 2 (except for the death animations). It's odd - I really like TWI's products, but there's something about the company that makes me think their games would still smell of low-budget, no matter how much money they spent developing them. Some things are done poorly in the video: the upper-half of the characters don't move fluidly to complement the movement of the lower-halves of their bodies. Also, when the machine-gun kills the Germans who are running, they take a step backwards clutching their chests. What's impressive about Euphoria is that the momentum of their bodies would have carried them forwards realistically. It will be nice to have improved death animations in Arma 3, anyway. The devs will have to be very careful to make the right compromises, though: Why spend CPU cycles on physics calculations for an enemy who is dying 'off screen' for the player? However, what pose will the corpse be in when the player comes across it, and what will happen if the player turns to look at the dying character half-way through the death animation? It's all eye-candy that won't make much difference to gameplay, but might to immersion. Arma 2 will still be there if Arma 3 takes some wrong turns, anyway.
-
When I upgrade card, I certainly won't be taking into account how many developers Nvidia have bribed to use their proprietory gimmick. The choice will be based on which manufacturer makes the most powerful card that runs the coolest at the best value for money. That may be an Nvidia card by the time 2012 comes around, and I have nothing against the company apart from the cynical ploy that is Physx: - can't make fast cards at the same price point as the competition? Let's buy off dev teams to hobble the performance of our competitor's cards. On the other hand, it may be ATI, in which case I'll have to wait and read the forums to see whether Arma 3 performs well enough on the card to justify a buy.
-
And the last AAA release to make use of PhysX was... ?
-
I agree with Sethos about his reasons for disliking the choice of PhysX. Many games use Physx for unimportant things, just to add a bit of eyecandy (Arkham Asylum, you get Batman's cape moving in the breeze, Cryostasis, you get some water effects). If elements like environmental destructibility, vehicle handling or ballistics make use of Physx, on the other-hand, half Bis' customer base are shafted, as game performance will suffer massively. Either there's a tick-box option that means we can switch off those elements of the game, or they're handled on the CPU and we lose 15 FPS whatever our system specs. Sure, it's understandable Bis will use a tech they can recycle from another project. However, I'd like to know which elements of the game will rely on PhysX. If there are too many, I'll simply be sticking with Arma 2. Alienating half your customer base is not a sound commercial decision. I hope I'm overreacting, and PhysX will only be used for a simple graphical effect. We'll see as more about the game is revealed.
-
Dx10, yay! physx, boo! Not sure yet how I feel about fictional futuristic weapons. They might grow on me if the new animation system is good enough.
-
Personally, I think people who are hoping for a port to the Outtera engine are wanting huge scale just for the sake of it. Look at FSX: you've got the whole world modelled (very poorly), whereas in Wings of Prey you have a small area, perfect for engagements, modelled with virtual photorealism. I'd prefer it if the next development of Arma scaled back the size of the maps a bit and introduced a much more realistic terrain mesh and full physics model (calculated on the graphics card using an engine that is not proprietory to either Ati or Nvidia). What would we lose? - Jets would be far less fun to fly and we wouldn't have big, laggy MP games of Warfare that last 5 hours and crash the server before either side can win. I'm sure there are plenty who'd wail and gnash their teeth, but I'd be really happy if Bis decided to focus on slightly smaller-scale conflicts if it meant they could focus their attention on a higher quality infantry and tanking experience. This would stand a good chance of getting new customers to buy an Arma game. If the announcement really is going to be Arma 3, then Bis really need to make sure the animation system is fully overhauled. Hope the devs have been paying close attention to the community PvP animations that have been released recently. CQB and throwing grenades badly need to be improved.
-
Bis paid a lot of money for the best helo pilots in Russia to fly a Mi-28 in front of a KA-50 at precisely the same speed and precisely the same angle-of-attack. At the exact moment when they were in alignment, their photographer took this image, just to piss the community off and create dozens of pages of disagreement.
-
'Another ancient example is that of Histiaeus, who shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattooed a message on it. After his hair had grown the message was hidden. The purpose was to instigate a revolt against the Persians.'
-
Shape of tail looks like Mi-28n, but obviously it's got twin rotors. The aircraft entered service in 2006. A total of 24 Mi-28s were in service with the Russian Air Force as of February 2011 (frum Wiki...).
-
Well, it usually involved the publishers dropping the game and forcing the customers to pay through the nose for DLC after one patch, these days at least - think I prefer this model. They did append the words 'WARNING - Highly experimental beta: install only if you are okay with that' to this beta. Sadly, I'm still not in a position where I can help with testing this. So, it's great to hear texture loading at distance is improved: how about the real step forward that would be AI warping at distance in MP - improved, as the change notes state?
-
CM Operation Flashpoint 3 announced | "Oops, they're doing it again..."
Richey79 replied to Undeceived's topic in OFFTOPIC
Yes, Zipper, I mostly agree. It's not like there's any ballistic calculations going on in game, or as though the graphics are particularly spiffy. They really ought to have just admitted that a quad-core was needed to play the game, especially since they made you use Steam, who aren't exactly famous for giving refunds on non-functioning games. I thought I remembered you upgrading your rig some time back and getting an i7 or something similarly beefy? Coincidentally, Kotaku have the entire story-line of Modern Warfare 3 leaked on their website today: it's total pants. Zero action in this thread or on CM's own forum about this game a month after release. Wonder what the sales figures have been like and whether there'll be more than one set of DLC released. -
A guerrilla war in Spain was portrayed by Goya's "The Disasters of War" series of paintings. The Spanish geurrillas fought against Napolean's campaigns of 1807-13. Franscisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828).
-
CM Operation Flashpoint 3 announced | "Oops, they're doing it again..."
Richey79 replied to Undeceived's topic in OFFTOPIC
I had zero performance issues with BLOPS on Win 7 x64 from the first patch. Unlike Arma2 which still gives ridiculous artifacts with ATI cards. I suppose it goes to show that different configurations of PC get different results, but I do wish Bis would test their software on some team red cards once in a while.