spandrel

Is there any way to enter the editor from an editor mission and edit the game as it currently stands, then continue playing the game with the changes you made in the editor?

I had poor performance in singleplayer. It wasn't my graphics card, it was my box-- 4 gigs RAM on an Intel cpu from 2007. Apologies if this is old news but I fixed it by putting up a dedicated server on another machine. The other machine is a Mac Mini running linux in a virtual machine (Virtualbox). I have to treat it as a multiplayer server but now my performance is more than adequate. Looks like my primary PC just had trouble running Arma3 and all the AI for Arma3 at once, so now with the AI offloaded it runs quite nicely. I'd recommend this for anybody with an older PC and a second box lying around. The fact that the server runs well in a virtual machine indicates that just about any PC running linux should work quite well as a personal AI server box.

I had an idea for an enhancement I would like to see for multi-monitor users, Eyefinity and Nvidia's equivalent. I would like to see an option for full resolution on the center monitor and vastly degraded resolution on the others. Probably you would do this through sampling, treating it as one large monitor as your 5040 multihead does, but with the middle third at full sampling and the outer two thirds at 50% sampling or even less. Since one is staring at the center monitor the vast majority of the time, with the side monitors primarily being used for situational awareness, there is no need for full resolution on the side monitors. This would allow people with three monitor setups to use them with much less loss of framerate. I don't know how many people are using three-monitor setups with Arma, but I would guess a higher percentage than in many other communities. I also don't know how difficult this would be to do but as a graphics programmer I have to think it wouldn't be terribly difficult.

The fact is that driver-level copy protection has been shown repeatedly to have bizarre and unpredictable side effects. Personally, I'm not OK with being treated like a criminal: this is probably news to you, but pirates aren't even slowed down by things like SecuRom. The only people inconvenienced by it are legitimate customers. Many peoples' systems do not like SecuRom AT ALL, to such an extent where many games won't even run. There has to be some kind of happy medium somewhere. Personally, I bought the game on Steam. If I had to deal with a SecuRom-protected DVD, they would have lost a sale.

Should you purchase it? I'd say so-- I'm absolutely blown away by it. It's not very polished but the scope of the game is flabbergasting.

Seems to me that complex math in the death animations is the last thing the devs need to worry about at this point. There are many more important areas that could do with polish. Personally I think if they bother with all that, the first thing they should do is make heavy weapon deaths more realistic. In a LAV I've seen my gunner shoot a soldier, then shoot him again and again as he flew up into the air. Funny but not the last word in realism-- it looked like an air combo out of Virtua Fighter. I've seen someone who got shot by a Bradley. I had no idea a person's spleen was that large.

This... really really needs to be improved. It's obvious that they're trying to simulate the commander-driver lag, but the way it's implemented is so incredibly awkward. It does seem to work if you hold down the forward or backward key and then steer in increments, but how is that different at all from standard WASD control scheme except dumber? Why not make it so you can drive with WASD and shoot with the mouse? Would that not be awkward enough or something? Isn't the commander able to do that in modern armored vehicles anyway? If the AI were better it might be somewhat different, but that's its own whole kettle of worms.

One point-- you'll have a very hard time controlling the helos in this game with mouse and keyboard. It took me an hour or so to get my dual analog logitech gamepad working but flying with it quickly became second nature-- I can't see that happening with the mouse and keyboard, unless you like rowing.

I don't understand why the performance is this terrible on a game that looks only OK. But to be fair, my system is only OK-- probably I will try an Nvidia 9800 before I complain more, it's been 2 years since I upgraded.

I've been trying to control ground vehicles from the commander seat and I've been having no luck-- so far they are basically undrivable. So far it appears that most interface decisions in this game were rational, but they aren't always intuitively obvious. What am I missing here?

One thing to point out is that when you're handling a real rifle, there are all kinds of cues that you have available that you don't have when you're sitting in front of a screen. The main thing is probably proprioception-- the sense of knowing where your limbs are, and by extension the weapon that your limbs are holding. Proprioception is the reason there are marksmen who are incredibly accurate when firing from the hip. At one time I was a mean shot with a carbine and I was surprisingly accurate firing from the hip. It was starting to feel like I could hit anything I shot at from any position. There's simply no possible way to model that with a mouse and I've always thought that having some kind of crosshair does a fairly good job. Goes rather too far though, yes, but maybe people should stop bitching about things that can be switched off in the options.

The really huge pity here is that you're being physically forced to read the strategy guide with the sorely-- nay, WOUNDINGLY-- misleading blurb from the publishers of the game. But seriously-- if I could offer one criticism of an otherwise amazing guide, it would be that there could be much more material on actual tactics, especially within MOUT. There's enough there to write numerous books on, as a matter of fact. Also armor ambushes within cities and outside, laager tactics, etc. You must have put about a hundred hours of work into it-- all in all an amazing effort.

Long missions involving travel and force preservation of a small mechanized group (5 vehicles, a few soldiers) through hostile territory held by small militias whose numbers in total far exceed BLUFOR numbers. These missions would be like mini-campaigns in that there would be numerous possible paths to get to the destination. There would be people you could talk to along the way who would give you information regarding conditions further along the road. All of this would take place within a context of a larger war including limited nuclear exchange in both Eastern and Western europe, possibly exacerbated by a transnational faction (probably Islamic extremists or the like...) The Arma2 engine has the potential to allow long seamless gameplay on individual missions. Each single mission could represent points of interest in longer chains of events. Another idea might be called Ethnic Cleansing. UN troops trying to stop attempted "racial sanitation actions" by neonazis on ethnics. Multiplayer would be possible, and very interesting: one side would be the UN and the other would be racialist forces who would have goals related to killing as many non-player civilians as possible and escaping, as well as guerrilla actions against BLUFOR. Further complicating the mix could be guerrillas aligned with the civilians but opposed to the other belligerent groups: again, Islamic extremists would fit that role well. They would be tasked with attriting BLUFOR when possible as well as reprisal actions against the nationalist militias, but ideally their goals and methods would be different somehow, perhaps in terms of force composition: they would have poorer vehicles but perhaps greater numbers, while NatFor would contain more conventional military elements including LAVs, light artillery and perhaps even decrepit helicopters. In a large map with three factions and multiple, varied goals per faction, this type of multiplayer scenario would go a long way toward modeling the complexity inherent in any sort of war in Eastern Europe. We haven't seen the last Bosnia or Beslan.

It would be nice to see chemical warfare in the form of gas/vapor mortar shells. MOPP suits and masks would counter it at the cost of visibility and fatigue in hot climates. Anyone else like a little mustard with their meat?

This game is absolutely excellent. It has a few rough edges-- I think the Red Harvest campaign probably shouldn't have been released as-is-- but the single scenarios grab hold and won't let go. It's funny because many things here could have been done a number of years ago, like the large map. But nobody had the ambition to do so, I guess. I'm looking forward to setting up scenarios like those in Twilight 2000 et cetera where you have a few armored vehicles and a number of soldiers and you need to get from point A to point B through numerous small towns and insurgent ambushes. First game of this kind that really does guerrilla warfare justice. I'd really like to see an Afghanistan map. Maybe someone will make one. Lots of rough edges as far as performance goes. The "Lobodov" mission in Red Harvest is particularly terrible-- well-nigh unplayable actually, and I have a rig that exceeds the minimum requirements in most respects. And the graphics aren't all THAT great, considering. Why should an urban map like that get 5-10 FPS? That said, it's still totally awesome. The editor and all the game options are just insanely nice and it makes you wonder why other companies don't do that. Maybe they didn't need to until now. I can really see Bohemia eating a lot of larger studios' lunches with this game-- products like this always have a niche and it's an increasingly large one as the COD gamers get a little older.