arewenotmen

This is genius. Impossible, but genius all the same.

Yes, that's the one, although it seems that boats and the SDV don't have any carry capacity. My problem, however, was back on land and finding a vehicle for the 6km trek back to base. I found a couple of SUVs in a nearby town eventually.I also found a recurring bug where you can't swim (can't move in any direction except the vertical) once you get out of the boat, possibly because I was carrying the underwater gun. I've never been able to actually fire that underwater.

I'm trying to get some of the weapons off the island, but it's a bit frustrating. I loaded them all into an Ifrit on the dock, but of course you can't drive it! I've tried the nearby towns for vehicles, but come up empty handed. Any tips? Also, you can shoot out mines, although not the tripwire type it seems.

Did you pay for a proper copy of the game? Apologies for raising it if so, but if not, that might well be your answer.

I expected to be a bit disappointed with this campaign, but it panned out quite well. The story and storytelling, especially acting, was on a par with the better moments of past OFP and Armas, and I'll probably remember some of these missions for a while, which is a credit to them. To try and constructively criticise, however, it could have been even more immersive. There's a lot of life and death stuff in there, and maybe our main character is a thorough professional, but the whole thing felt like it should have been littered with 'oh fuck' attitudes. There should be no comparison in any other way, but early CoD games were very good at this, albeit made easier by the fact that they're on rails. It was a bit short, but hard to know what's coming next, and what's a fair comparison in terms of other games. I suspect it stands up OK. Stability/reliability was where I was most impressed; I had one bug (no in-mission story continuation) that was resolved by loading a prior save, and that was it. Great progress compared to earlier efforts.

Some more testing and observations. Changing the threading made no difference. It did reveal that some things, in particular creating an enemy vehicle, are very very slow. Instead of iterating through all the CfgVehicles classes each time you want a vehicle, it's better to store the list of classes as a global variable, populated once in INIT.SQF, and select from that. I made this work - let me know if you want it. It's not a group limit. On the typical 20x 1000-1500m zone map, there are about 180 enemy groups (patrols, teams, WP teams, fortification groups). Add vehicles, which are not in groups, and you have about 675 units. I put in a group limit of 140 (i.e. stop creating more after that point) and it still failed. I'm also not convinced it's a unit numbers thing. In one test, out of 20 zones, 14 were fortified, and the vehicles were present too, about 40 of them in total. Apart from that, nothing - no other patrols. The fortified units still failed to engage me. I'm afraid I think I'm going to give up as I can't narrow it down to a single issue to tackle.

Yet more AI testing. I made all the 'create...' calls wait-based, and it didn't do anything on its own, except speed up the HQ menus significantly, though that may be my other work too. I also noticed that the calls to createzone are multithreaded, which I'll look at at some point. Anyway, this was interesting: 4x patrols = success 4x patrols, 1x team = fail 1x team = success 1x patrol, 1x team = fail Starting to look like it's not just sheer numbers alone. I don't know which units I 'met', and it's too empirical to be useful yet, but something to go on. Got to leave it now, maybe some more this weekend.

I did some more testing with the contents itself, and for now I have one observation, and two questions. Observation: if I cut down the number of created units in createzone.sqf, i.e. comment out about half the calls to stuff like execvm "createopteam.sqf", then I can have 20 zones and still get regularly shot to bits. That seems a fair indication it's a unit numbers problem, but it might also be one of the different scripts. More work to be done. Question 1: in that same script, there are lots of sleeps. Why? Question 2: Additionally, when calling the vehicle creation script for the 1500m zone, you wait for it to return (below), but this isn't done when creating patrols/teams, or for the smaller zones. Why? if (_size <= 1500) exitWith { _vehcreate = ["OPF_F","armored",_trigger,_size] execVM "random_veh.sqf"; waitUntil {scriptDone _vehcreate}; sleep 10;

Just having a look at the feasibility of me doing anything code-wise, and wanted to check - the cleanup script is MP only, i.e. only works on a server, right?

Just thinking out loud here.The aim is to not have units sitting around that noone important will see. In the case of the enemy, those important people include not just the player but also the friendly AI that's trying to take over the map. You could check every unit's distance from other units using a radius trigger. However it soon turns into a fairly big computational problem, and presumably has to be periodically run, a la the cleanup script. I wonder if there's a cheaper way. Suppose we have existing zone A, currently in the hands of OPFOR. Then we create a larger radius trigger around A, and call this B. When there are no BLUFOR or players in B that aren't also in A, the OPFOR content of A is deleted. Restore it when BLUFOR enters B. Reverse the sides in this equation when the zone control changes hands. This makes some assumptions: that OPFOR units at the enemy base are all at home, rather than in transit (can they be labelled?). Additionally if B intersects with another zone, this rule will either stop working, or work on the two combined.

No problem. Let me know if there's anything I can do; this will still be an interesting mission once the campaign is released, so happy to help. I'm also a professional software engineer.

OK, so some more testing. I can't reproduce this outside the scenario. It's not complex enough, as in the triggers don't have any behaviours and there are no waypoints, but I produced this: http://crap.wapoc.com/armatest.jpg (232 kB) That's 10-15 groups per zone, 8 or so units per group, 12 populated zones and then some, so conservatively maybe a thousand units. The game chugs along at 5fps or so but I still get consistently shot at. Next, to test the opposite of that, I knocked the quality settings and resolution down, and tried DUWS. It runs much more smoothly, but the AI still don't engage me with 20 zones. Yet again, I observed that saving (via the ordinary game menu) would cause them to engage me. Still with reduced settings, in further tests with 14 and 15 zones, they did attack me, albeit after a bit of a delay - I could land the helicopter on top of them. Yesterday, 14 zones was a failure. Not sure what to make of this.

That's funny, because the inbuilt editor complains if you add over 144 groups to one side (e.g. BLUFOR). It's easy to check with a copy and paste of multiple groups. Perhaps it's just a hangover from older games - there were people mentioning it on here in 2010.

AMD X4 9558GB RAM GeForce GTX 560 Ti Win7 x64 Running Arma at 1920x1200, medium/high settings. It's a bit slower (menus in particular) at higher zone numbers. You may be right. Off to bed now.

I did create my own scenario (nothing to do with DUWS) with the maximum number of groups for one faction, 144 enemy patrols I think, and a whole bunch of radius zones. I still got shot at. I'll keep meddling with the DUWS options and see what I get, but it'll be tomorrow night at the earliest. I just ran one with the default 8 zones and they shot down my helicopter. Do the number of groups or zones change over time? The army powers grow so I guess so. Edit: so just to add that in the last hour, I ran these, all defaults except the zones as below and the starting CP was 60 so I could have a helo. No squad and I went directly to the enemy. 20: Fail 20: Fail 8: Pass 20: Fail 14: Fail 8: Pass 11: Pass

I raised this: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=15559 and did reference said bug, but it was closed straight away. I can see why but it doesn't help. I actually can't reproduce the fog issue in my own editor testing; the AI shoots me every time. I'll keep looking into it. ---------- Post added at 19:04 ---------- Previous post was at 17:46 ---------- Right, two things. One, it's a scaling issue. One enemy base and they seem to behave. Twenty and it's pretty much guaranteed that they'll not engage. Two, here's a video I made of it happening to me. I simply start a campaign with 20 enemy zones, and go out in a helicopter to one. (give it a while)I've done a few of these runs now and here are my observations. When I turn up in the helo, they don't engage me, nor on foot. If I'd bothered to take a friendly AI team member, I would be calling out all the enemies I saw When I save the game, then once the game is done saving, this is often a trigger for them to attack me. If I fire at the ground around them, sometimes this triggers them into firing. It definitely has something to do with proximity. It doesn't always work though. Even when they're shooting at me, I can often run off and escape. Sometimes they shoot at something else! I think in the video, one fires a grenade, it blows up and then they shoot at the explosion? I've seen this plenty of times. Another example is if I use the MG mounted on a pickup (not in this vid), and fire at them, they sometimes shoot for some time at the vehicle, but never at me. It's almost like they're really, really unskilled, but I tried various levels in the editor and they all returned fire without incident. I can't see how this can be your fault, but I also don't hold out much hope for isolating the problem as it stands.

I attempted to flag up the disinterested AI problem to BIS, but got the expected standard line of 'we can't fix/debug third party content'. What can we do? Currently we're at something of an impasse. Depending on the complexity, I'm happy to put some effort into debugging this and producing a reproducible scenario stripped of everything else, but I'd need help.

I also have the 'AI not engaging' issue. The enemy won't engage me, and my team won't engage them. This happens from starting a mission. Bizarrely if I use a helicopter (e.g. the Pawnee) to shoot at them, sometimes they return fire. I can provide as much information on this as you like. I know this may be a general Arma bug, but I can't find anything on the tracker. If you know of one, point me at it. Otherwise apart from it being a bit like shooting fish in a barrel as a result of the above, great mission. Suggestions wise, I'd first like to see more capabilities at the FOB - when using ground vehicles, it's a huge pain to have to go back to base for a refit, along with all the other main base only tasks. Integrating the vehicle lift for heavy helicopters would help there too. I'd like to see a way to edit the initial mission parameters mid-mission too; e.g. make the enemy tougher, give them new bases, etc to prolong the mission once underway.

I always thought that was deliberate, but I'm glad they changed it. I think.

What ought to happen is they engage with the gun whenever they like, but it doesn't affect the weapon you chose. This is badly written and sometimes it even means you can't select a given weapon at all.

This is the same thing as taking 15 secs for the death animation to appear. Everything menu-related gets slow after playing for a while, probably a memory leak.I raised a bug report with 1.02 but haven't had chance to test with 1.03 yet. Have you? Have you restarted the mission under 1.03?

Hi, Should I be able to buy helicopters in Dogs of War? I can't buy them at my HQ because it thinks there's no factories to build them with, despite there being two. I blew them up too but the only things I can construct are defences. Also any time I go into Construction, Buy Units etc it takes about 20 seconds to go into effect. Any ideas? Cheers, Rob

With the SU-25 and the FAB-250, it's easy. Anywhere near the target, even without the lock symbol, and just drop them. I think you can hit targets being lased too, but you don't get a marker so it's not obvious. Anyone know what the deal is with that?

It seemed in ArmA, and now it's confirmed for me, that it's largely about selling the engine as a sandbox tool, almost like a home VBS2. However I suspect you can't openly do that and still be met with critical success, so it has to be accompanied by this part-baked game. That's fine in a way and I'd buy it several times over for the editor alone, but it does disappoint me at the same time. The thing that made OFP so good was not just the immersion but the breadth and scope of the campaign. Apart from playing as the enemy, pretty much everything that the game could do was showcased by the SP missions. Equally, the story made sense and was carried through to its conclusion. ArmA changed that in some ways, because the story - even after the QG expansion - was so lacking, but it still had a little of everything. ArmA 2 is different again, thanks to Warfare & some of its RTS elements, but by the same measurements it's much worse. The ArmA 2 story works OK but ends about a third of the way in, and there's little or no use of most of the new units and capabilities. There's barely any armoured missions and potentially no air combat in the campaign at all, which is deeply disappointing since it starts off with such promise. It might have been designed this way from the off, but it looks a bit like a lot of hard work was put in until someone called 'stop!' and it had to be released. Maybe we've been spoilt before, but I'd love to see future games come bundled with a little more emphasis on the campaign. Even episodic content would be fine, as done quite successfully with Half Life's Episode n, and maybe that is what we'll get. I know I'll upset people with this last bit, but never mind: QA issues can and probably will be fixed, but noone is going to go back and sort out the story. That's the main thing I'd like to see change.

The sequence for completing this works something like this: