Richey79

http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/homefront/1157240p1.html 4/5 of this review could have been written about RR. I really find it hard to credit that anyone would still be prepared to argue that DR's clumsy system of needing to attribute a group of AI as an 'entity' and then set up scripted warning zones for the artificial intelligence to actually react to anything represents an example of efficient game design. Likewise, this BS argument that the editor can be evaluated separately from the game itself: it would be similar to commenting that, 'yes, Cryostasis was a shit game, but its options menu for adjusting graphical settings was top notch.'

It wasn't so much that DR was 'crap' that annoyed me, but that it was so utterly, utterly generic. When a game makes you wish you were playing any one of the later dull-as-dishwater Tom Clancy games instead, you know it's completely lacking in character. Lenton talks about aiming for 'fun', but I'd rather even be playing R6 Vegas 2 than his brand of watered-down faux patriotic pap. Even BBFC2's token single-player campaign had a bit of humour and the gimmick of destruction to make it stand out somewhat from the crowd. COD BO's single-player may have been a warmed-over reserving of Doom 3, but it had a cracking storyline which wasn't afraid to revel in the absurd. Compare one of BO's numberous memorable sequences: attacking a cold-war nerve gas production factory with a prototype Enfield rifle with IR scope - a mission that you've just played, Rashomon style, from the perspective of another, delusional character. 'Operation Flashpoint' would instead give you the same generic weapons we've seen in every game thus far featuring the USMC - only taking out any interesting ones and modelling them all in the blandest fashion possible. Instead of Gary Oldman playing Reznov, you get four cookie-cutter versions of how a rather unimaginative English programmer imagines American soldiers to think and act. After the PR committee have taken out any vaguely interesting ideas that might risk offending some of the publisher's 'target demographics'... ...Lenton didn't even need to make his comments about Arma not being fun. Noone thinks these Operation Flashpoint games by ChodeMasters are in the same league as Bis' games. It's automatic to compare the new OpFlash (unfavoroubly) with unmemorable copy-cat games like Homefront and Frontlines:Fuels of War. The new OpFlash even fails to compare with these games, as they had functional multi-player. Anyone else notice the clearly-visible warping of players on some of the videos for Tampon Torrent's emasculated co-op modes?

Can anyone who's got it make a decent mirror available please? All the ones from multiupload have terrible speeds and the ones I have tried so far drop connection half way through.

On what planet is a three hour, heavily scripted campaign acceptable? If the devs wanted to create an MP-focused game, then they shouldn't waste resources on creating a lame token SP campaign that acts only as an on-line tutorial. They really need to grow a pair and go with their convictions, rather than chickening out and leaving all the decisions to a focus group. Thanks for the warning, BangTail.

I totally agree. I don't really need the improved specs for what I do on a tablet, I'm not really convinced about making it thinner and I don't like the new covers. I'll wait 'til they release one with a higher resolution screen and then compare it to the competition again, although the competition will have to be substantially better to make up for the advantage Apple's OS gives it. IMO, Android is still a much less pleasant experience to use, and my iPad hasn't crashed once. For my life-style, a lap-top doesn't cut it as a portable device: - I just never take mine out of the house with me, and never would. The form-factor, touch-screen and stripped-down OS all combine to be a pleasure to use. I waited a long time for a competing Android device to appear, and was disappointed for so long that I finally took the plunge a while back. Of course, if I hadn't fully intended to jailbreak, I don't think I would have considered an iPad. I think it's a bit unfair to compare their release cycle to that of Activision. They really need to churn them out regularly to stay current and keep generating excitement about their brand. Yes, i think that anyone who 'needs' to have the new model every year either has too much money or is a fool.

It will, however, have 'perks', to quote young Ben. Like stopping power, marathon and ninja pro. Yo, yo, what's up dog?! We got da B-mods in da house for da COD lovin' posse, woohoo! Unmemorable CM dev (devoid of personality and sense of humour, strangely robotic): 'Remember, in Hard Core you don't have any HUD at all, and no braking assists on the corners. You even have to choose which suspension system to use, although we didn't have time to implement a dynamic weather system. We expect gamers to use self-control and discretion. Even though the player-character can take ten hits without dying, we expect our hard-core players will press start and return to the menu screen after being hit once or twice: you couldn't get closer to being in a Marine's boots.'

If you want 3D real-time editing in Arma 2, I can think of at least two mods you can download that let you do just that. If the OpFail mission editor is more powerful, where are the fast-roping mods, the completely overhauled aircraft missile and chaff systems? Where are the masses of story-driven single-player and coop campaigns created by users? Where are the built-in modules that allow you to randomly generate a settlement using any buildings you choose, then specify how many of them will be damaged, how far apart they are and what proportion of street-furniture there is? Where are the realistic artillery modules - wherein the shells are actually launched by artillery pieces that can be destroyed by the enemy? Where are the user-made working nuclear warheads? Where is the NPC conversation system (don't link me to the crud that someone who doesn't yet need to shave knocked up on and released on their forum, for pity's sake)? Where is the dynamic weather? Where are the trees that actually fall-over when you roll a tank into them? Come back and whinge about the power of Bis' editor when you can provide links to at least one sophisticated campaign you've personally made that pushes it to its limits. There are members of this community (not me, for damn sure) who have stretched it as far as it will go - you don't hear them complaining about it, and not one of them has voiced a single positive sentiment about CM's editor.

I think Mr. Lenton and co. are very proud of their sky-boxes, bloom and digital video artifacts. The five regulars on their forums also seem to appreciate them. GFWL: OMFG!!1! Multi-player might almost reach the heady heights of quality it did when they used Quazal. *Red-River's 'Engaging Story' Revealed*: Act 1: "I sho' as shit don't know what I'm doin' here, muddafugga!" "Stow that shit, corporal. I remember when I was just a boy in Motor City, running with a bad crew. Life in the core gave me a second chance. Bore... drivel... platitude #327." Generic 'insurgents', copy-pasted from various other companies' games pop into existence 50 metres away from the player. They proceed to stand in the middle of the road until shot. With their backs turned. The sky-box looks like Eyjafjallajokull has been teleported to TakTajikistan. Act 2: "Oorah!" "Oscar Mike!" "How copy? Solid copy!" "Oscar Mike!" "How copy? Solid copy!" "Oorah!" "Shit - them's the PLA: the biggest army on the planet! I ain't paid for this! Zowee, I shore wish I was back in Wyomin'." "Son, you're a marine, now stow that shit!" The player has to shuffle between some cargo containers and play whack-a-mole with PLA soldiers who look suspiciously like exactly the same as the PLA clone army of the first game. The sky-box looks like a cross between a particularly luridly-coloured section of Rapture and the effluence that results from a night on the alcopops. Act 3: "America - Fuck yeah!" "I ever tell you about the time Keith tried to deep-fry a turkey?" The player now faces PLA 'spec-ops'. The player remembers vaguely that Lenton promised they would have uber-AI, but can't tell because fifty of them spawn around the corner with two tanks and their tactics consist of running directly at the player's fire-team. If you look closely at the sky-box for this act, you can see Frodo in the process of dropping the ring into Mount Doom.

Same goes for aliens (particularly ones uniformly wearing symmetrical robo-armour designed to be easy for the artists to render), sci-fi fetish suits, Johnny Allen from Eastenders' voice work (again) and single-player campaigns that are scripted from start to finish to include a shopping list of graphical effects. Same goes especially for single-player campaigns where the first two levels are twenty times better than the remaining eighty percent of the game.

Hate to be a boring bastard, but try watching a Crysis 2 trailer and then the Duke one. Makes DNF look like a game from 2004. Whole development and marketing process reminds me more than anything of this: Now, make a decent Evil Dead 3 game and I'll be all over it.

Logitech Extreme 3D Pro is about the cheapest you can spend to have a reasonable experience in a flight sim. You can probably pick one up for about £25. Less than that is a bit of a bargain. I remember buying the original IL2. I wasn't into flight sims at all back then and was determined to fly using keyboard and mouse. Without analogue input, I couldn't even get 2/3 of the planes to take off, let alone tail any enemies accurately enough to get into a position where I might be able to start killing anyone.

[/color] The lens was f1.8, but there's no way I could keep up with focus, so I just set it to f8 @ 5 metres and hoped for the best, lol. I like the challenge of shooting things that are moving quickly. I lived in Poland for a while (Gdansk) and thought the railways were cheaper compared to average income than in the UK. At least you pay by the kilometer, rather than the stupid privatised railway we have here. In any journey you might travel over railway owned by three different companies. It makes for very illogical pricing. To hear about the lack of reasonable-quality internet provision is quite saddening. For buying a first digital cam: unless you are going to buy a lens to replace the zoom that comes with it, image quality isn't going to be any better than a fixed lens cam. Sony nex-5 can be had relatively cheaply now, and that's interchangable lens and has a decent-sized sensor. Damn, I like pictures of cats so much it's embarrassing. Better post a masculine image of fast-moving military hardware, quick: Red Arrows Taken with a very boring fixed-lens Sony compact.

I will no longer touch this game, unless I can get hold of the Russian version. Perhaps there will be a digital download option to buy direct from 1C. I'm enough of a realist to realise that the game might not have been released for another couple of years if they hadn't simply gone with UBI, but that doesn't change my opinion. A shame, because I'm part of the ideal target market for the game: I'm a huge Oleg fan and bought all of the IL2 games seperately as they came out. I even love WOP, for all its limitations - and I have to say that COD (lol - shit name, by the way, UBI) looks considerably worse than WOP in some respects. All very well and good Oleg saying 'trust me - I'm a professional photog, these images haven't had the final colour adjustments yet,' but the game still won't look much better than IL2 when you're flying at speed. Yes, I'm sure the flight models will be superb and yes, that is the most important aspect of the game. I can happily stick with IL2 and the million superbly modelled planes from 1946 and the community, along with WOP - which is frankly the best optimised game I've seen on PC - if they're going with UBI. I realise that WOP had that terrible activations system and YUPlay, but for me, UBI are even worse. I remember when lots of people who had bought 1946 couldn't get it to run because Starforce didn't recognise their DVD drives. UBI didn't care. And now they're worse, with their appalling system of needing a constant internet connection. Why won't the morons drop it, when it's already been cracked!? 'We want our customers to be inconvenienced and the pirates to play unhindered.' *Does the herp-a-derp*

She looks a bit like my cat, Atticus. Perhaps she has some Turkish Angora in her? Taken with Panny GF1 and the 20mm prime that comes with it. I can't shoot over ISO800 with the m2/3 sensor, but I have steady hands (once I've had a couple of drinks, anyway). I can live without full-frame digi, as long as someone somewhere is still making film that will go in my M6. I wouldn't use digital at all if RAW files didn't exist. Without being able to capture the larger amount of exposure information they offer, digital just doesn't offer enough exposure latitude to be usable - frankly, the jpegs the camera automatically produces are more exposure-fussy than slide-film ever was. I would never export to Jpeg, if I had the option. I once tried to produce an image of some perfectly straight-lines in Jpeg format and was horrified at how much the compression algorithm corrupts your image. I always use Nikon's Raw presharpener to give a little more 'oomph' to my shots, although it's rare for me to set it higher than 25%. Duchess is a Turkish Angora, too. Sadly, however amorous Atticus is feeling, the family jewels were taken from him some time ago :butbut:. Speaking of animals moving too fast to have their picture taken: I had to take this at ISO800 on Canon 400D with Sigma wideangle, even though it was a bright sunny day. It's of Millie, a border-terrier puppy, who had boundless energy. She was trying to attack the camera strap in this shot. Best to go for 'machinegun mode' or automatic, if your camera has it, for this type of shot. Have you been visiting Krakow again, Vilas? - Don't tell me you're lucky enough to live there?

Microsoft closed their Flight Simulator team in early 2009, sacking all but 6 devs, so I don't think it can have been massively profitable, at least on a scale that Microsoft understood as being so. I don't think MS got any cut at all of the payware addons created by small indie teams that you could buy for Flight Sim. MS have since restarted a new internal studio to develop 'MS flight.' They claim this has key personnel from the Aces studio (responsible for FSX etc.), but most of these had already started their own independent studio, so this seems to be stretching the truth a bit. Their stated aim with Flight is to keep the simulator aspects of Flight Sim, whilst making the series accessible to noobies. This would seem to indicate that it is tough for a larger company to make profit on the scale it wants by selling a 'pure sim.' Some in the flight sim community suspect that MS want to create an addon market for the game that pays MS directly, or else a subscription-based online model for the game with a very limited off-line mode.

If you think physics anything like this can be calculated server-side with current tech in MP, just take a look at BFBC2, with much more restrained physics than this: with any more than 24 players, the server can't handle the amount of info being sent both ways and the hit detection is ruined. The causes of this may be partly that it was a console 'port' (although Cryengine whatever version is being developed on the consoles in parallel) and it may be that the official server provider is running too much on each of their boxes. Personally, I think Arma 2's destructible environments are pushing the limits of what is possible with current public network and server capability. The Real Time Immersive stuff looks very exciting (although Crytek's engines have never concentrated on rendering larger geographical areas), and the Cryengine itself has some very promising features. I find it a bit sad that, while we're all worked up about the engine and another what another dev team's doing with it, Crysis 2 itself looks dull as ditchwater. How do they manage to design such a boring alien race? Another totally unmemorable tech-demo campaign, with a story-line that's been woven around a few key set-pieces the engine-designers came up with long before work began on the levels. Let me guess, there'll be a tornado, an AC130, an underwater section and a part where some caves are collapsing around the player (I know these are'nt from work by Crytek, but you get the picture)?

Another voice that the problems listed in this thread manifest themselves on any server I choose to play on (usually under 60 ping, no lost packets reported). If it's a case of the servers not being properly set up, then somebody's keeping these perfect servers very well hidden behind passwords for some reason... . And that's before we start on the game-modes being played on 95% of public servers. I have had my fill of Domination and Warfare for a lifetime. I'm guessing that PR will include almost zero AI units as a way of totally avoiding these warping and latency compensation problems.

Sadly, something like a Battlefield or COD game has low value in its single-player component: if you want any longevity, you have to buy for the MP. Simulators have the twin problems that they offer hour-upon-hour of single player content and that they are competing for a limited amount of the players' free time. As an example, I really love the IL2 series, but have only been on-line with it once. I suppose this is one of the reasons the makers of sims tend to make a much greater effort to engage with their user-communities: they are more likely to develop the games in a way their audience like, and the 'customers' will be reminded that devs exist (the game doesn't just drop out of the ether) and deserve some financial support. For most genres, I'd say that the PC=piracy argument is complete rubbish, but for the sim genre, it's a real threat to the continued development of the games. Particularly because it's such a niche market populated by smaller publishers - every sale matters to them.

:ok: All working well, thanks for the hard work! What I like about this is that you've got all those cool features right at your fingertips on the fly. All those times you've set up a mission and realised - too late - that arty support or a supply drop would have made it even more fun... now you can just add it on the go. I'm sure there are other addons that can do this, but this one's very user friendly.

Glad to hear: was driving me potty! As you suggest, this doesn't affect your own faction when you spawn them. One other small issue I noticed: British units are classified under (East) side. I didn't check whether this was the BAF units or the UKF ones, though. Waiting in for the plumber to fix the damage done to our boiler system by the cold weather, so it's kept me busy fiddling with this :p. Looking forward to the update.

Thanks for the response, Spirit. I've tried to isolate what's causing the instant-surrender, but haven't had any success. I've got rid of ZeusAI and GL4, which leaves no AI-altering mods as far as I know. I'm using the last stable build of ACE and CBA. If anyone else has this problem and works out what mod is causing it, please report in this thread, cheers.

First impressions are that it is very, very good. Spectacularly-good user interface. A couple of compatibility issues: - It didn't recognise that many units from addons for me (may be user error). Okay, just needs patience for the LAN server to calculate things. Works within 15 seconds usually with any addon, which is actually pretty impressive. - Most of the enemies I spawned would surrender for some reason within seconds (compatibility problem with Group Link 4?). Chernarus does seem to be missing from the MP files.

If you like this style of play, you'd be better off playing Minecraft. That, or something by Zynga.

All Those Installs I'm probably preaching to the converted, but this works every time for me, even when my ATI drivers were completely corrupted: Open an administrator command prompt: 1. Start (windows button) 2. Type "cmd" (or click Run and type "cmd") then right click and choose "Run as Administrator" (or just run if you are on XP) To uninstall existing drivers: 3. Type "cd C:\Program Files\ATI\CIM\Bin64" or "cd C:\Program Files\ATI\CIM\Bin" (you are either 32 or 64 bit) 4. Type "ATISetup.exe -Uninstall" 5. Use Driver Sweeper or a similar program to clear out all traces of ATI software. Probably safest to reboot before doing this. Certainly, you should reboot after this step. To install new drivers: 6. Download them from ati. 7. Extract them somewhere. 8. Type "cd ZZZZZZZZZZZZ\Bin64" or "cd ZZZZZZZZZZZZ\Bin" (you are either 32 or 64 bit) and ZZZZZZZZZZZZ is the folder you extracted. 9. Type "ATISetup.exe -Install -output screen." 10. Shouldn't be any need to reboot. Incidentally, no white dots with Von Modded 10.12 drivers and AA on. I won't say any more, for fear of sounding like a stuck record. Know the feeling. You'll do it anyway, no doubt :p --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With HD4870x2 (2 x 1GB RAM), the game still sets local VRAM to 2GB by default for me, too. I get improved performance by switching it to 1GB manually and write-protecting the .cfg file.