qwertz

What driver are you using? What is the amount of video memory detected in your Arma2.fcg ? Try playing around with your video memory settings in game.

I actually think that is a better simulation of how real life works than what most other games provide. Nothing wrong with the principle of it.

I think I start to understand why we have a different view on things. No right or wrong here I guess. But the reason I play is to have fun. Thats my personal reason I play ArmA2. That does include feeling immersed in a realistic looking environment, not dumbing all settings down so it looks like Half Life 1 just to sqeeze out some more frames when the simple solution is "get a decent video card". I love this game and the community, but sometimes I think why can't we just play the game as is rather that focusing on the negatives and whining about all the perceived "bugs"? The grass and vegetation in ArmA 2 is by far the best out of any games out there. The grass "bug" (since 1.5) is dealt with on a reasonable level. Is it perfect? No. Do I care ? Nope, its good enough and when I know that going prone in grass does not give me a magic cap than I deal with it by seeking different concealment or cover. You say smoke is an important element of the game? I agree, but guess what - smoke is client side so everyone sees it differently. Unfair ! Unplayable ! Can't we just enjoy it ? Its a game.... :cheers: cheers mate, qwertz

I have never recognized that, but you are right, there is a little sluggishness to the text movement it. Has not bothered me so far, though (but now that you mention it - damn! :)) The grass layer since 1.5 is doing a pretty good job IMHO - I can usually only see a little head/helmet sticking out of the ground at distance. In terms of gameplay, PvP is typically much less a sniper fest compared to some non-PvP modes, so it is not that big of an issue anyway. AAS is a rather dynamic mode with a lot of movement across the battle areas, so hiding on some hill to score some kills is a losing strategy anyway. On short distances below 30-40m, I think it is actually pretty realistic that you can see the guy crouching in thick grass much better than he can see you. I would call that a myth. I am not talking about BI forum polls, but concrete feedback from the people that play on our server every day. We had a handful of guys so far that would advocate turning off the grass at most. Point being - where does it stop? My frames drop considerably when a lot of smoke is in the air, and in urban areas such as Chernogorsk. Shall we switch off smoke and buildings now as well? ArmA 2 looks very old without the grass/foilage - in fact, the grass/foilage and nature simulation is one of the aspects of the engine that is truly great and outstanding. Everyone with a half way decent PC can just turn down the details on his video settings a tick and will have decent frame rates. On the other hand, forcing off grass means that everyone has to look at a game that looks like 2003 again. I sometimes play on my work PC which is a 2 year old office box, and it works fine with details down a tad. My gaming rig is no bleeding edge PC either and frames are great on high/very high. We actually do focus on coordination on our public server and usually more than half of the people on each team are communicating on Teamspeak, and we very much do coordinate our attacks. Hence, this is really a non issue, at least not for us. :bounce3: I see your point though, without jumping on TS and therfore lacking any coordination this might indeed be a problem, but that would apply to many more game modes as well... On a live and well run server or against bots/alone? In any case, your feedback is very appreciated, even if I don't necessarily agree with every single bit you said. We run the server strictly to serve the community and are therefore dependent upon feedback. :cheers: qwertz

I use the 10.3 drivers. What do you mean with "FSAA" - do you mean the in-game settings or driver settings in CCC ? Are you using a higher rendering resolution than screen resolution ? I am playing with vanilla CCC settings and "High" in-game AA settings. Try switching to "normal", does not make much of a difference. What view distance have you set ? That depends very much on the game and your settings. At least with ATI, Vsynch can't be disabled in ArmA which plays a role here. Typically the performance benefit of rendering frames ahead only works if Vsync is disabled. For many games, by allowing for a few frames to be rendered ahead, you increase the performance at the cost of some input lag (as you are always a few frames "behind"). For some games (Oblivion comes to mind and now Arma 2), disabling it actually increases performance, at least on my system with and ATI graphics card and an i7 on Windows 7. I had terrible stuttering on Windows 7 with ArmA 2 and rendering-ahead enabled. (Interestingly, it worked OK on my Win XP install on the same hardware). Disabling it solved the problem completely. :) qwertz

Thats OK - don't worry, I will not try to proselytize you mate :cheers: Just googled this, have not even watched it because I know the outcome - Caviar Black vs. (cheap) SSD: http://www.myce.com/article/ssd-vs-hdd-video-booting-everyday-tasks-26588/ :bounce3: Peace, qwertz

Hey Bangtail - any SSD will run circles around your Caviar Black (I have one as well and love it, don't get me wrong). Arma is I/O restricted, thats why a SSD helps a lot here. RAMdisk is even better of course. I know, I started the Ramdisk discussion. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388 http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88629 :cheers: qwertz

Bangtail, with all due respect, but you are wrong. Have you ever used a SSD? I am not talking synthetic benchmarks or buyer enthusiasm. Any modern SSD is orders of magnitude faster in the real-world-relevant small read/write I/O. I am not even looking at "sustained throughput" because this is indeed not relevant. I have bought, tested, used and analyzed SSDs for 3 years now (owned 5 different models so far, currently running 4), and before that I did quite a bit of research and testing on harddrive I/O performance, RAID and storage controllers. I hate wasting money and would not recommend and SSD if it was just bling. The most easy way to speed up any system in real life everyday use scenarios is buying a (even small) SSD for OS and programs. I would suggest storagereview.com or even anandtech.com for more competent drive/ssd reviews.

Yes your system should be fine for 30 fps average + (everything on max). I have an i7 920 @4GHZ and a HD5870 @ 1050/1300 and frames are around 40-50 on average. Have you tried the suggestion I made above? Also you can try a mild overclock on both CPU and GPU which is possible without any extra cooling and quite easy to do.

The WD Caviar Black 1TB is the fastest in terms of I/O amongst the TB drivers, you should consider that as well. That said: [Any HDD] <---light years---> [sSD] <---Light Years---> [Ramdisk] Your money would be best spent if you would get a small (30-40GB) SSD for around 100 bucks (e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025) as your system/ArmA drive and a cheap TB disk for storage. It is a world of difference in terms of speed, trust me.

Hey Whisper, can I use this to display a message immediately (!) after the client connects? I would like to advertise an add-on requirement for people that get kicked because they don't have that add-on. I have tried it but it would not show immediately. Any ideas ?

What Windows version ? Here's the magic trick for Win7 (and pot. Vista, not tested): In your ArmA2.cfg, set these values: GPU_MaxFramesAhead=0; GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0; Video Memory=default or very high Also, as already said, Hyperthreading should be OFF.

Hey Celery, here's the "official" AAS thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=96871 Just a few comments here: I am not sure what you mean. Are you sure you a playing the AAS made by coolbox ? (There's a few other AAS packs and derivatives out there). Have never seen or heard about that problem on our servers. But maybe I am blind and deaf :-) 70% want it, 30% don't. I would challenge the statement that it is unfair (everyone has to deal with it) and since 1.5 it got a lot better (ground layer texture at distance for prone players). We have a wide range of PCs from low to high end playing on the server and so far no one has complained about performance. My rig runs between 30 and 60 FPS dependent on mission/island at all times, 1920x1200, all very high (besides PP), with grass on - can't be THAT big of an issue. This is a standard feature of AAS, based upon the rule-set setting. 5 out of the 6 predefined rule-sets included in the AAS package have seperated weapons for each side. We currently use the CLASSIC rule set which allows all weapons for both sides, just because we are a 100% public server and weapon restrictions would lead to chronically imbalanced teams (or constant re-allocation of players), both of which is not practical for public play. I don't know why this argument always pops up again. It just does not happen in real gameplay. You CANT spawn at any point has that lost as little as 1% cap value. 90% of the time, the hot cap point is not fully owned by ANY side. The only scenario where you spawn at a hot zone is when the enemy launches a flawed attack attemp with less people than your defending team has at the particular cap point. In that case they usually die fast. In any case, you are completely free to choose to spawn at ANY other point your team ownes, if you don't feel safe spawning at the front, and choosing between those two options adds tactical depth to the gameplay. That would be bad mission design. Most missions are infantry focused and don't have any vehicles other than transport vehicles (I would guess 50 out of the 80 missions available). Me thinks you have not checked AAS out in a while :p. Feel free to hop on our server, your feedback would be appreciated. Cheers mate :cheers: qwertz

Glad that I could help. Happy Gaming !

What is the error message ?

No, it is never closed, 100% public. Just make sure you have the addons - we are playing (besides Chernorus & Utes) on Panthera (with Little Birds addon), Quesh-Kibrul and Namalsk. You can get the maps at Armaholic.com or - if you are lazy - just download the map pack at www.armacalypse.com. We have compiled an all-in one, hassle-free download. And don't worry, we are not changing the addons around like crazy, once you have the pack, you are good to go for some months. :cheers: qwertz

You are helped: www.armacalypse.com AAS every evening Hop on TS for the teamwork. :cheers: qwertz

Just wanted to add that while we still play all the Chernorus and Utes based missions, we have added 3 new islands and over 20 new missions to the server roster (Panthera 2, Quesh-Kibrul, Namalsk). In order to play these on ArmAcalypse, you need the following add-ons before you join: -Namalsk 1.0 -Namalsk 1.02 patch -Quesh-Kibrul 2.0 -Panthera2 2.6 -Little Birds 2.2 If you want to save yourself some time and make it simple, we have put all 5 required add-ons into a all-in-one pack (download, unzip, add target line - DONE). You can grab the ArmAcalypse pack here: Download the ArmAcalypse Map Pack :cheers: qwertz

Not my graph - its from sickboy's post above: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1608959&postcount=21 I just added the US time frame

Pretty sad state of play (npi) for the US players it seems if the stats are correct: Thats pretty close what you see in the in-game server browser. Evening hours in the US peak around 350 on a good day during the week and then drop to 100-150. On ALL severs. Only marginally better on the weekends (peak = around 500). Sucks to live in the US (for ArmA play, that is). About "US = low IQ" or [insert random eurocentric cliché here]: If you complain about lack of ArmA marketing in Europe, think again - its non-existent here. Plus, the US has never been a strong PC gaming market. Also, I wonder why some ArmA players always consider themselves "elite" over other games's players - I mean we are talking computer games here, at the end all we do is pushing mouses and clicking buttons...

I guess we are splitting hairs here. Outside the ArmA universe, what people usually mean with PvP is that you are playing against human players exclusively, which then enables competitive gameplay. If there is a chance that I shoot at/get shot by some computer algorithm, its not really PvP IMHO. But hey, nothing gained or lost if you have a different definition. :cheers:

Guess we have a different definition what PvP is. In my book, PvP means no AI, competitive gameplay, e.g AAS, CTF,DM,TDM,C&H, etc.

It just requires coordination - it only takes time if you don't coordinate as a team and people drip in one by one. This would not happen in a real life attack, would it ? . In alomst 100% of the cases the team using this "tactic" loses, and that very quickly. It might be a problem of poor map design also, newer maps spawn in protected areas mostly. That is actually an interesting idea, notwithstanding the above. In any case, there's lots to like about AAS and many people do, and the goal of this thread was just to make sure people know that there are great PvP modes out there that are actively being played, in order to help people that can't seem to find PvP gamplay in public ArmA. I would suggest that we use the main AAS thread (http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=96871) to continue discussing the ins-and outs of AAS and ideas how to improve. At the end, the great thing about ArmA (and sometimes the worst thing at the same time) is that everyone can choose and pick their own game mode, the choice is endless. :bounce3: qwertz

Hey galzohar, I still don't quite understand the problem you see. Any spawn point is only at the spot of the fighting for a small time of the battle, and that for a reason. The scenario you describe is only possible if you (as the attacking team) are entering the capture point with too few men. In which case you make a mistake and get punished. Think about this as "breaking the supply lines" in RL. This element actually encourages TEAMWORK, because you have to coordinate with your team members to make sure your attack "breaks the spawn point". For the rest of the ongoing fight over that point (which is usually 80% + of the time), once you have broken it with a PROPER attack, nobody can spawn there until the attack was 100% successful and you have fully re-camped the zone, in which case you are now the defending team and the above applies again. Also, please have in mind that most recent missions include neutral zones in the middle that can't be spawned at by either team until fully captured by either. Are you suggesting that it should be enough for 1 lone enemy to sneak into your well defended zone to break it so you can't spawn there anymore, completely wiping out your advantage as defenders ? That would remove any requirement for a planned attack, would make any planned defense useless and would completely destroy the tactial element imho. I think you are talking about a problem that does not exist with the later AAS versions. Or do I just misunderstand you ?

I have virtually the same specs you have and struggled with the same "dips" problem. This is what did the job for me: In your ArmA2.cfg, set these values to zero: GPU_MaxFramesAhead=0; GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0; Also, as already said, Hyperthreading should be OFF and Video Memory=default or very high.