Richey79

Didn't it make them 'fat' so that they blocked your view at one stage, when you had HDR on high and PP higher than 'very low'? I think it's fixed (although I tend to use very low PP still - just can't say I like the PP effects, especially with my aging graphics card), and I somehow tend to get better CrossFire performance with HDR set to 'very high.'

Love it - always thought this was your most fun weapons-pack. All working really nicely, and some good sounds included with the weapons this time, imo. The placing of the character's hands on the weapons are uniformly great. For me, the XM8 AR (both colour variants) has an image of a drum mag, but by default loads the 30 round G36 mag when taken from the ammo box, rather than than 100 round drum mag. Tiny, tiny, tiny niggle which is easily fixed manually by the player, I realise, and it's possible I've left some old config file in my mod folder that's leading to the problem.

!!!When I completed this mission, it took about 20 minutes. This wasn't down to my exceptional abilities - if I didn't complete a task, then usually one of my team mates would just do it instead. I got the impression I could have just hidden in a corner and let them get on with it. Makes you wonder just how much of the mission is randomised.

For me, this is quite an exciting add-on, and one I've wanted for some time, so thanks for your work. I won't get time to try it out for at least a few days, unfortunately, or I'd give some user feedback.

Looks like an interesting family entertainment (hard to know whether to call it a point and click adventure, an interactive story... a new kind of book for a new era). 'Nastěnku chci za ženu!' becomes 'I want Nastya to be my wife, uhuhuhh!!!' It makes Ivan sound like he perhaps lost part of his brain in translation. But, seriously, the end of this exclamation doesn't suggest any kind of expression in English. The Czech version sounds like it has some really good voice actors. Hope the English one will be just as nice, and you'll try hard to make sure the words and lyrics keep the 'musicality' of the original, rather than just being a literal translation of the language's meaning. Please don't use 'Cooper/Drake/Reynolds' as Ivan. :p

Played it enough. I would say in fairness it would have been worth £10ish if the multiplayer had have worked in any way, shape or form. I think people generally under-value video games in comparison to other media. You see worse budget-games on Steam, but they aren't supported by CM's advertising budget, so they seem more honest about their level of quality. The FTEs and editor were okay, but the main campaign was pants. Maybe somewhat less annoying than Bad Company 2's campaign. Nowhere near COD for entertainment, nowhere near Arma 1, 2 or expansions for mission design. It clearly wasn't finished, as there's no story-line to speak of, yet inexplicably, there's a single very professionally done animated scene at the beginning. That video of 'Debris Field' is a bit misleading. The guy played in a tactical, careful style, giving direction to the AI on the map. You can easily rambo that mission on any difficulty setting, since they're all the same. The worst thing about the game (apart from CM's approach to supporting it) for me was the player animations and viewpoint. The duck-waddle with the gun - supposedly mo-capped from ex-spec ops!? -, seeming to be only 3 feet tall, and the horrible, horrible recoil animation on the guns; the crappy fixed FOV... these made it a chore to play after a short time. Most of these problems can be seen entirely intact in the recent RR videos. CM do seem to be taking a step forward if there's going to be a proper story-line and characters in RR. This could potentially turn out to be a double-edged sword, though, leading to annoying characters and unrealistic scenarios. Of course, they're also taking several steps back by losing vehicles, an editor and any moddability. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I liked this Fiat 500. More recent ones, not so much.

MS have to be given some respect that some of their staff have come out and said noone will be in legal trouble for hacking Kinect. It's good tech, so it will be interesting to see how independent developers manage to apply it in robots, on the PC etc. As to leaning, proning, running around physically in Arma2: I think the problem with that is that most people play games to chill out, no to workout. I can't believe the complete dirth of any kind of games to interest actual gamers on the Kinect at release. A very odd strategy from MS.

BykerGrove.Takistan? 'Why aye PJ man, sorry to hear about them paintballs.' XM-25 airburst weapon in next DLC pls (I can dream).

Swine. Hope RO2 has a bit more fluidity to the controls than the original. I've been rocking the Killing Floor Christmas event, and find I just can't face the turgid movement speed of RO anymore. Good post, Vilas, although this, is a bit too deep for me :p. The video's not as bad as it could have been. Those A10s are pretty, but you know they'll only be a skybox-type animation, like on Port Valdez in BC2.

Weird... I almost didn't bother trying this because of the comments / video of LOD problems. I have no LOD problem, don't seem to have the silly strobing HDR problem I've had forever with CrossFire and OA (game engine can't decide how bright the light should be, so I get 2 seconds of pure white-out vision), and this is the first beta in a couple of months that has significantly improved performance for me. I'm guessing the game's detecting my VRam correctly for the first time. Significant settings: HDR: very high object detail: normal terrain: normal PP: low VD: 5000 Tested with Takistan and Chernarus. Specs below, plus ATI 4870x2, Von modded 10.12 Cat drivers, .CFG not write-protected.

If you have capped data allowance each month, I wouldn't recommend Steam: for a number of games it will randomly decide to download the data for the entire game again when a patch is released. If it would annoy you to wait a day or more longer than everyone else to get patches, then I wouldn't recommend Steam. If neither of these issues bother you, then Steam may be the more convenient option.

Nice to see so many mirrors - very well organised release.

I'm not sure this is true, much as we might love it and get a huge amount out of it. In terms of reaching a wider audience, you have four problems (at least) straight away: -The command system. It works well for those who have the time to learn it, but is pretty daunting for those who haven't got the time or inclination. In reality, you only need to know a few commands, and the AI will take care of the rest if you want. This isn't clear to noobies, though. I fear it will require a total overhaul in future games in the series, and this may be painful for veterans. -Scalability to weaker systems. Arma 2 can be very scalable, as Ben has demonstrated. However, how much tweaking of his settings, his system, his own expectations and how much downloading of mods (CAA1 as an example, perhaps Kju's Proper fixes) has he had to do? Most 'normal' people don't have the time or inclination after having spent $30 or more on a game: they expect it to work. They have the right to not have to show initiative or intelligence to get it to work (discuss :p). -Enjoyability of single player out of the box. What proportion of players never download a mission or open up the editor? How much enjoyment did this kind of player get out of Harvest Red? -Enjoyability/longevity of multiplayer. There was a relatively short period after A2's release when you could find coop games playing missions with specific objectives and TvT games with plenty of players online (without being a member of a clan). After that, your only option was to join a clan or play Domination/Warfare. Everyone is aware of why it is undesirable to have a community that only plays Domi, but Warfare has a few problems of its own: it takes hours to finish a match, often the server slows down to a crawl during this time and the game mode is wide open to griefers. Obviously, it is hard to suggest that Bis control the MP community in some way, and perhaps this situation with the state of MP has no viable solution. When you look at how many otherwise sane and rational gamers had, before the release of DR, convinced themselves CM were going to release a game as good as the Arma series, that remedied its flaws, it would be daft to say 'there's nothing wrong with Arma - the problem is gamers today.' Arma 2 is great for us. As a marketable product, though, it has significant flaws. At least it generally gets the respect it deserves these days - PC players generally think of it as how a release can take proper advantage of the platform, even if they have never played it themselves.

The one thing I really wanted from the DLC and wasn't in it. :D I wonder whether such a sight will be included for the XM8 from vanilla A2. Knowing Bis, probably.

Well... at least he left it to die once he realised he and the other 'heroes' (read:lolcows) of DR had been led down the garden path. His playthrough on Justin.tv when the game was released was hilarious, too. He let everyone see how utterly rubbish the game was - for example by setting up a line of enemies in the editor and then walking down the line, knifing the unresponsive AI one by one. Some of the 'heroes' were extremely displeased that he didn't kid himself that the game was better than it was to save face. Redeemed him, to some extent. Unlike those who are still over there, veering crazily between criticising CM as they axe features, and saying 'it could still be a good game in the end - have faith.'

As has been said. If anyone wanted an example of how to make an awesome cinematic campaign with lots of scripted goodness and atmosphere, this is it. And humour... thank God for humour at last.

The state of the 3D editor at the moment is a saddening thing. This is the single thing that could most enhance the game, and it's worth assigning a good deal of time and resources to have it up and running. All that would be needed is to enable the player to have control over what units/objects/waypoints he wants to place - being able to set height as well as 2D position - then having a stable and reliable way to export this detail into the 2D editor.

Any error messages coming up when you load the map in the editor? Running any mods?

For those requesting more FPS for Christmas: http://www.downloadmoreram.com/ Just download 4 GB ( 2 x 2 GB ) * 240-pin DIMM * DDR2 800 MHz ( PC2-6400 ) for free! (5,943 people like it on Facebook - how can it be a scam?) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A proper, working 3D editor would be great, but they've got to get over this issue they have with making people pay for content. Look at how many were upset about the PMC campaign and everyone having the lite stuff. Lots of people saying 'hmmm, don't think I'll buy this - not enough content.' They already got given it, basically. I think it's time to say, 'we want the opportunity to add some new features to the game engine, but we're afraid you'll have to pay for them if you want them.' Sure, a few people will say 'this isn't the same company who made OFP - screw you, Bis!' They'd be shouted down, though, and they'd come round if the extra content was worth it. Because, like RAM, work on content doesn't come free (If we're paying for it, it should come relatively bug-free though) !

I would buy ATI again (probably), but this is so true. I have wasted so much time trying to sort out issues, many of them caused by trying to strip out remnants of drivers just in order to update. You would think it would work that way, at least for the big games companies. I would expect every AAA title to have CrossFire / SLI profiles sorted well before release. But the problems go much deeper, and we have block-buster games released that have artefacting, strobing, terrible stuttering, obscenely long loading times... and then wait months for a fix (in the case of ATI). It just makes no sense from a PR perspective. You'd think ATI would break their asses to support the most recent cards (not talking about mine) and have them working to the best of the hardware's ability, both with and without a multi-card setup. This happens so often that the blame cannot be laid at the feet of the software developers - all of whom I'm sure want their games to work the best they can with the widest range of hardware. Let's be honest, ATI and Nvidia just see PC gamers as walking pockets who are there to prop up their R&D departments. They're only really interested in developing the hardware so that their cards will be chosen for the next generation of consoles and they won't have to foot the bill for R&D all at once or on their own.

Make sure you've got vsync set to off. I really recommend using the Von mod version of 10.10e ATI drivers with a CrossFire setup: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=332395 They work without using CrossFire profiles, and I've seen the load on my GPUs and their temperatures increase by about a third using them (4870x2 + 4870). They definitely render things in a different way - I get a bit of weird tearing if I look up or down at a ridiculously steep angle using TrackIR that didn't happen before (this is not an issue in normal A2 play). I feel that this is how the game should have run on my system for 12 months previous, to be honest - before using a single card was better in some A2 situations than the multi. Caveat: I tend to use lower VDs - around 2000 unless I'm flying. If you're one of those people who demands 5000 VD, you may not see the same improvement. Just make sure to follow the included instructions on how to clear out all the old ATI drivers if you try these. I'd love to hear whether they work for someone else as well as they have for me. Many swear by them for BLOPs, and I'm not aware that they screw up any other game.

Once again, look at the comments section to the PC Gamer preview. Even if 50% of those commenting were from this forum (which I doubt), it shows just how badly CM have shafted their reputation on the PC platform in general, but with the 'Flashpoint' IP specifically. If I were a PC Gamer editor, I'd be thinking about whether keeping CM happy is worth taking the damage to the e-zine's reputation.

I have found this annoying too. Good post, it is indeed a Major Hassle.

Very, very impressive. The feel, the range of kit available, the number of maps and the good-quality campaign make this an excellent 'Nam mod. The SMLE (Enfield bolt action, kit for VTE civilian rebels) has a rate of fire that's as fast as the SKS at the moment, btw.

Definitely a day 1... I buy games for the MP (TvT, ideally), and any SP/co-op stuff I just see as a bonus. If the devs are helping mod teams with the SDK well before release, I just have to buy it to send a message of support. That's the way you handle development. Ironically, Arma 2 is the exception to this, and I much prefer its SP. But that's a special case because of the editor.