voodoochile123

[contains mild spoilers!] I forgot the name of the mission, I think it's called Razor Two or something like that. There are two prisoners who have escaped and the mission starts by sending you talk to a couple of army guys at a nearby camp. They mark 3 locations on the map of where they think the escaped prisoner may flee to. So I go to visit all 3 locations and there is no sight of anyone. One camp has friendly troops, the second camp is empty, and the third camp has some bad guys who I kill and then the character (Cooper) gives the all clear. So I have a save game at this point. The first time I played I wandered around aimlessly for about 20 minutes after this point, and then finally a message comes in of the guy being spotted heading north in a red car. Heading from Sharova or something, to Grov something. So I call a chopper and head north but I am too late and the mission ends. The second time I play, I come across some villagers who have been pinned down. I help them out and we kill several bad guys who were attacking. I then get the same message that the bad guy is spotted in a red car heading north between these two same towns. This time I was prepared! I had called in the chopper already and I had it waiting in a nearby field. I jumped in the chopper with my squad, and a minute later were at the northern town where the car was heading. I set up my squad and was prepared to attack the car as it came in to town, but it never showed... I waited probably an hour and it still didn't show. I then called in the chopper again and I started scouting in a pattern, sweeping left and right over the entire area. There was no sign of the bad guy or his car. After literally 2 hours of real time, the car still hadn't shown up and it didn't even give the mission failed message. So anyway, I would like to get past this mission, so I am hoping someone may be able to give me some hints? Thanks in advance :) p.s. Besides the performance and bug issues, this game is unbelievably amazing.

Chopper is great for me in the campaign. It struggles to land properly only about 1 in 10 times. What you do is open the map, then find where you want to land. I find that green areas on the map are actually trees so do not land there. You want the grey areas which are flat open places. Zoom in really far with the mouse wheel and try to look for power lines or trees or anything that could get in the way. If it looks ok, then hold your mouse steady in the spot you want to land at, then press space to bring up the communication menu. Then scroll through the menu to support and then transport and then when you click, it will set the location at wherever your mouse pointer is. Then you fly off :) The chopper will try to land where you told him to, but if it's not safe, he will usually try to find a better place. Like I said he does sometimes pick the wrong place and crashes the chopper, but it only does this about one in every ten flights I make, so it's pretty good. You can also save your game mid flight, and if it does crash, you can just reload and then pick a different destination while you are flying. For me, on the mission you are talking about, I used the chopper for every single journey I made. In fact, when he would drop me down and I took the squad out of the chopper, I would instantly call him right back and have him stop back at the same spot. I would then run off and do what I had to do, and I could just run back to that same spot and I knew that the chopper would already be there just waiting for me.

My first impressions: 1) The game itself is amazing! I am amazed at the scale of the maps and the number of units you can use. Planes, choppers, tanks, AND infantry? I wonder if you bit off more than you can chew, but hopefully you can get it all working well. 1.5) Although the map is enormous, I wonder if I will get tired because there are only really two locations. After a while, I know all the towns and locations like my own town, so it may all feel a bit too familiar and repetitive for me soon. I want to go on missions where I don't know the surroundings, but because I have been stuck on the campaign for so long, I now know the entire south east quarter of the campaign map like the back of my hand. When the mission finally went on to the next mission (Manahatten), I was mostly playing in locations that I already knew. Not a problem at the moment at all really, but I wonder if I will still enjoy it in a few months. 2) The performance is really terrible. I have C2D running at 3.4Ghz and an 8800GTX, winXP sp3, but it's very slow for me, even with everything set to medium, no post processing, no AA, and shadows set to off. That's at 1680x1050, lower resolutions don't help. View distance under 2000. Nothing running in the background. I hover around 25fps in the campaign. It's playable at that speed and it looks 'ok', but I really would hope for this to improve a lot so I can improve the graphics and get it running a bit faster. Just 10 more fps with a few options set to high and I would be happy. 3) There are some bad bugs. Choppers explode on the ground for no reason, game just ends straight back to desktop. Two complete sets of dialogue get triggered at the same time. Etc. Nothing that has really ruined the game for me though, although the Razor Two mission I think needs some tweaking because as I said in my other post, I explored the entire country side for several hours and never found what I was looking for and didn't even get a mission failed message. 4) Really need to get rid of mouse acceleration! 5) The objects popping up isn't very good. I get patches of grass and appearing right in front of me constantly, and trees right in front of me will go from thin to very thick all of a sudden. It looks really strange and it really takes away a lot of immersion. I also find that the textures on buildings struggle to load sometimes. Sometimes I will land in a town and as I run through the town, a few of the buildings will look like cardboard boxes. Then my frame rate goes to 1 and the game hitches and then the building textures load. 6) The campaign is really cool. I love how the mission have multiple objectives and they are interesting ones. 7) The armory is really fun. I love playing with whatever I want but most of all I love when the missions come in to evade and whatnot. The only thing is that it's a shame some of them are so short. For example you only have to evade for 3 minutes, I would love to be able to play a full mission where I have to evade and escape for a full 1 hour mission. Maybe these can be made though? 8) The difficulty balance is perfect. I love how it's quite realistic but it's not really tedious. So taking just one bullet will knock you down and make you bleed, but you at least have a chance if you can get a squad member to give you first aid. I love that. I love that you really have to travel, but I also love that they gave a 4x time speed boost so that it doesn't get boring. 9) Overall I love the game itself and the gameplay. I just hope there can be some polishing. Some bug fixes, get rid of mouse acceleration and the objects drawing right in front of me, and get a lot of performance improvement. I think with all of that, it would be the best game I've ever played.

That could change the pace of the game a bit. I think without that, it makes the game slower and more tactical. You simply don't leave your cover until you know you are safe. If people can go running out of their cover spraying bullets it might take away some of the thoughtfulness of the gameplay.

1) Option to turn off Mouse Acceleration! 2) Fix the worst of the campaign bugs. 3) Fix the poor graphics performance. 4) Fix the crash to desktop bugs. That's all I really care about for now. Although I also agree that objects popping up constantly is really not nice. It wouldn't be so bad if it was all in the distance, but I get patches of grass appearing just 10 foot in front of me... It really takes away a lot of the immersion in to the game world.

Wow that is impressive performance considering you have everything on very high and are running at such a high resolution! Is that the speed in multiplayer, or is it like that in the campaign too? I have an 8800GTX which isn't as strong, but my CPU is running at 3.4Ghz and I don't have any way near that kind of speed. I can only run on low/medium. Hmm. I would hate to upgrade for just 1 game lol, I am tempted though. I wonder maybe the front side bus speed helps or something. Or if maybe more RAM helps. I have 2gig which has always been fine for XP 32, but maybe I should get more. Either way, I am waiting for a patch to hopefully do something to help first.

I like to play with the armory and also I want to play through and complete the campaign which I really enjoy! I am quite far now. When I have done all that, I will venture online and hopefully I will be a better player by then.

I finally did it, kind of :) I started from an old save and again, travelled around the countryside aimlessly for ages. I searched every inch of the power plant and drove around all the roads and villages. Then in one village, a little white car drove at me really fast and nearly hit me! It's lucky I had sprint ready. I shot his tyres out, but then he reversed and I panicked that he was going to run us over so I shot him in the head. Turns out it was the guy's second in command and killing him was enough to end the mission. I was tempted to play through it yet again to try to find the main guy, but 7 times is a little obsessive :) So I decided to just move on the the next mission. And yes..... this next mission is AMAZING! It's like actually being a high ranking soldier (I'm assuming). I have this huge area to explore and fight in. I love how the missions aren't all just go and kill someone. There are twists and turns all over the place and I love how you have to find evidence on some missions. I have done a few objectives already and I just love it. It's much more fun in this mission because there are more tasks now so I am more focussed on doing stuff, rather than just aimlessly exploring the whole area hoping to bump in to the guy. This is so fun. I could play this game forever :)

Thanks! I adore this mission, it's amazing. I still haven't managed to finish it though. I've had the option to move on, but I am determined to kill the guy :) I explored the power plant but didn't find anyone. I also got the report again of the car moving north, but I scour all the roads and I can't find anyone. Sometimes when I do this, the mission doesn't end. I wonder if the guy's car gets stuck inside a building or something and he can't reach his destination and I can't find him. It's very strange. I've spent literally 3 hours of real time driving around all the roads and flying over all the roads scouting for him, but I can never find him. I'll try yet again later, and I'll go back from an earlier savegame and hopefully I will find him. Wow! Maybe that's what happened to it in my game. He is probably stuck in the forest somewhere :) Anyway I will try again soon. Thanks everyone for all the tips by the way. I'll get him in the end :)

I think that might be due to Mouse Acceleration. Basically the view moves further the faster you move your mouse, which is not nice in gaming. So if you move the mouse slowly, you have to move the mouse a much further distance. If you move the mouse quickly, you only have to move the mouse a very short distance (like an inch) to turn a whole 180 degrees. This is a "feature" that some people find very useful, mainly when using MS Windows for example. But I think most people really dislike it in games. Usually it is not enable in games. And if it is, there is usually a way to disable it. You can't seem to disable it in Arma2, either from in the game or by changing the mouse settings in Windows control panel. I think being able to turn that off might fix a lot of problems. Usually in games where the mouse movement is uniform (so no acceleration), if my frame rate is a bit low, I can just increase the mouse sensitivity and that makes the frame rate seem faster. That's how it worked in Crysis for example. My frame rate was only about 25fps but if I increase the sensitivity it makes it feel more like 35+fps. In Arma2, I can't really increase the sensitivity because combined with the mouse acceleration, it just makes it far too fast. With high sensitivity AND the mouse acceleration, if you are running forwards and you quickly twitch the mouse just an inch, you can end up running all the way in the opposite direction. :p I really hope they can disable this, or at least add an option to turn it on/off.

Lol! :) I'll get him next time :)

Hmm, that's strange. For me I jump in and I right click to close the navigation menu. Because first of all, (after the pilot finishes talking), I have to press space and order all my squad in to the chopper. Then I flip to external view to watch and make sure all my squad get on board safely. Then when everyone is on, I open the map and I find the exact location I want to go to and I zoom in all the way so I can see where to land. I look for grey areas because the flat green areas are actually trees. Then I press space, scroll down to communication, and support, and then click where I want to go. And off we fly! :) If that doesn't work, come back and hopefully someone can help. It may just be some kind of bug and maybe when you close and reload your game it will work properly.

Thank you for the welcome :) And thanks for the link! That looks great.

Lol! :) I am totally going to go back and play this game in a moment :) I will succeed! To be honest it's one of the best games I've ever played. I adore it. It's truly epic... I really look forward to some patches though to tweak these minor irritations. I actually have very few complaints about it. It's really not that tough, so far anyway. But it's funny because the game is SO good, these few issues really stick out like a sore thumb. If they were to fix them, I'd feel like standing on a rooftop proclaiming my love for Arma2 to the world. At the moment though, it's a bit like being in love with a beautiful and intelligent girl, but who has really bad breath and she keeps punching me in the face.

To me, the best moment of this game was buying it and realising what it was... I was going to wait a while until I posted this but I may as well do it here and now. BIS or whatever you call yourselves, you are my heroes! I have never played OFP or Arma 1. I knew very little about them other than they are big FPS with online play. I never owned them because for the past 10 years I've been preoccupied playing other games, and I have never had a good PC or internet connection. Now though, I do. So I saw a trailer of this game and decided to just buy it. I didn't really know what to expect. I have just been playing around in the armoury and the campaign so far, but there have been a few great moments. The first was when I first installed the game. I went to the armoury and played with the rocket launcher. A mission came in where I had to evade being killed for 3 minutes. I hid on a hill behind some rocks and kept down, it was tense. Then my worst fear came true! (:p) Some kind of truck with massive gun on the top came driving over towards me. It stopped close to me and turned side on. I figured if I waited it would just shoot me, so I quickly jumped up fired my rocket launcher. The truck burst in to flames with a huge explosion! It looked amazing. The second cool moment was when I was playing through the campaign and I reached the mission I am now eternally stuck on. (I'll get past it later... grr). Anyway, it dawned on me that you can get in the chopper and tell him exactly where you want to go. It was like my own personal chopper. The game area is HUGE, like an entire country. So I had the chopper fly me quite far north in search of someone. I had him touch down in a flat field and then I ran with my squad through the trees. As we approached an enemy camp, another thing dawned on me... you can switch to other team members and use their weapons! So I switched to the sniper and picked people off from afar, and then switched back to the leader to gun down the rest of them. Then I ran back through the forest to the big field where I had the chopper wait for me. It was at this point that I realised, this is pretty much the game of my dreams, something I always new would be made some day but I've waited decades to play it. As a kid I used to play a game over and over, called "Midwinter" for MS DOS. Arma 2 is basically a modern version of that game and to me it is gaming heaven. I absolutely LOVE this kind of game. I also am mainly interested in the squad based action, the fact that you can actually fly choppers and planes and drive tanks... is just icing on the cake. But that's a hell of a lot of icing! It's a MAJOR bonus. All in all, I am amazed by this game. It's incredible. I just hope they can get a patch out soon to improve some of the issues which are currently tarnishing the otherwise epic experience.

Is your overclock stable? The game can really push your processor so if you overclocked too far, then that can cause a crash. Also, you might want to use driver cleaner to get rid of your old drivers and then reinstall new drivers for the new card. Also I doubt it has anything to do with your power or your new card. It's most likely drivers, your overclock, or a temperature problem. Have you monitored the temperature of your CPU when it is under load?

I got the setting working now. It was originally on 3, and I changed it to 8. It made 0 difference to my fps :( Also the high better than medium thing was not true for me. Although I found that AF makes no difference to performance at all, so whether it's completely off or on Very High, the performance is identical. I also found that the difference between shadows off and shadows low was none existent, maybe 1fps. So I leave them on low for now. I currently am enjoying the game at about 25-30FPS with medium settings and a shadows on low. It looks nice and it's smooth enough to play. This is in the campaign on busy missions so other areas are better. I really am anxiously waiting for a patch though because I want to have more than 30fps and I want to be able to raise the settings a bit. I have an 8800GTX and a C2D running at 3.33Ghz, so having everything set to low/medium isn't good.

Please don't attack me.... but.... I personally find it hard to believe that this is a bug and not just a performance problem. Believe me, I really WISH it was a bug because that way a patch could fix it and I could play it nice and smooth! But I just don't believe that it is a bug. I think it's a performance problem due to the game being: a) Very graphically demanding b) Very CPU intensive c) Very hard drive i/o intensive d) Very unrefined - in terms of performance tweaking. For example, Crysis ran far better for me after the big patch they did, than when it was first released. The refinement they do during patches can make a big difference to performance. But I waited months for that Crysis patch... Arma2 hasn't really had any major performance tweak patches yet. So, personally I think it is a performance problem, and I think the fix will be if/when they improve the game's performance with patches, and it will depend on how well they do with this. I had a top of the line PC when I bought it, and every game I would crank to absolute maximum settings, but some games are just very demanding and wouldn't run well no matter what you buy. Microsoft Flight Simulator X for example, would not run well on ANY PC when it was released. I suspect that this game is the same to some extent (unless you have an insanely powerful and expensive PC). If I crank all the settings in Arma2, it is unplayable and it's because of this what you call "Mouse lag". But I've seen that before in other games too when I crank the settings too high and add full AA and AF. The way around it is simply to lower the settings. If I lower everything to "Normal" and turn AA and Post Processing off, and shadows to low, then there is very minimal mouse lag for me and I can play the game just fine. If I put everything on low, then it's basically as quick as Duke Nukem 3d. So in my opinion, if you have mouse lag, you just need to lower the settings and admit the fact that the game is too demanding on your PC. But also understand that the majority of the blame of the blame is with the fact that this game is just so big and so complex. This is not Crysis, the AI in this game is far more advanced, the world is FAR larger, and there are civilians and vehicles and sheep and all kinds of things happening in the back ground. All of this uses up your PC's speed. In my opinion, we just need to wait for them to release a patch that fixes a bunch of things and refines the code and the performance of the game. I've seen games go from 19fps on my PC, to 35fps in the exact same location, all thanks to a patch. I hope that this game can have that kind of improvement too. If I'm wrong and it really is a mouse bug then I'm sorry but this is just my opinion anyway. Take it or leave it. p.s. I watched the YouTube movie. If you had a high frame rate during that lag then maybe it could be a mouse lag bug, but I suspect if you looked at the frame rate when you were showing off the lag, it would have been very low indeed. When you changed the settings and the mouse lag went, it's because the frame rate went far higher because you lowered the quality.

Argh my god this game makes itself so hard to love... I'm so annoyed. I replayed this mission yet again from the start. This time I searched all 3 locations, then I found the bunch of civilians who had been pinned down. I helped them. This time though, I went back to see them after I killed all the bad guys. The guy gives me directions to where he thinks the bad guys will be. He said to go to the power plant way down south. Just as I am getting the chopper to fly down there, I get the same old message about the guys being spotted heading north. I figure that this might be bugged, so I continue to the power plant. I then talk to the guy at the power plant and he suggests a little village on the coast to the north east. As I am flying there, the message comes in that the bad guys have crossed the border! The mission ends, and I lose my save game!!! :( So I am now on the next mission but I tried to see if I could load my previous save game to continue from when I was getting in the chopper... BIG MISTAKE. It reverted back to that mission and lost the new mission. So I now can't continue with the next mission, and I can't even continue my other mission without having to do it all over again from scratch, for the FOURTH time. I need to find the motivation to do that now but as much as I love this game, this kind of thing infuriates me and completely drains my enjoyment.

I refuse to do your only 1 game :p I want to do my top three seeing as I'm here... 1) Performance. I class this as a bug because I have a very powerful PC and the game is verging on unplayable. Please give us the performance patch loving asap. 2) The insane HDR light/dark issue. 3) Campaign bugs Fix those three and I'll be a very happy player :)

Thanks guys. When I went back in to the game today, I loaded a saved game and the squad was back to normal anyway. I have been in and out of choppers several times since then and the bug doesn't seem to have come back. So I'm all set now anyway, thanks :)

I'm playing through the campaign at the moment, and I'm on a tough mission. I got a few rides in a chopper and I noticed that upon leaving the chopper, I did something wrong and my squad of 4, all controlled by 1 leader, ended up with 2 leaders. So it was now a squad of 3 with 1 guy by himself. I got back in the chopper again hoping to fix it, but it made it worse. I now have a squad of 2, and then two other guys both by themselves. They are all classed as the squad leader. What I want is to get all the guys back under the control of Sergeant Cooper. Is there a way I can do this? Thanks in advance :) p.s. This game is incredible... :O I am amazed.

Sounds like performance problems to me. There is an issue that the game seems to force "mouse acceleration" to be on whether you want it or not. So if you move the mouse quickly, the mouse will move faster and further than if you moved the mouse the same distance but at a slower speed. Besides that though, the view is very smooth, and if it's sticky, that's because your settings are too high for the performance of the PC. The game is a major performance drag, even on my recently high end PC (8800GTX and C2D @ 3.4Ghz) the game is extremely slow. I can barely run it at normal settings, and high settings make it unplayable. I dread to think what you would need to play it with very high settings. To me it sounds like your problem is that, a performance problem. If I lower the settings sufficiently, it runs smooth on my PC, although it doesn't look as good.

Arma2 is perfect to me. It depends on the game really. In LOMAC I accepted far more realism and difficulty with flying the planes because that was the only focus. In a game like Arma 2 though, there are so many things to do that I wouldn't like it if all the planes were super realistic. I also like having more fuel than you might have in real life. Another thing is the travel, I love how they gave a 4x game acceleration because there are times when I am running long distances and it's nice to be able to speed those up. As for the combat damage, I like not instantly dying when I'm shot. It's perhaps not as realistic, but it's far more FUN when you lose a man and you have to drag them to safety and then patch them up. It adds tension and excitement and it keeps the game going. If I screw up and get one of my guys shot, just having him fall down bleeding to death is enough to make me feel bad and regret not doing it better. I don't need to have him die or have the game end just because of one little mistake. Although the difficulty in game helps fine tune this too. For me though, I'm playing through the campaign at the moment on normal difficulty, and it's absolutely great. It's realistic enough to be tense and exciting and I'm careful about what I do, but it's simplified enough so that it's not tedious, boring, and too time consuming. The only thing I would change so far, is to have a more flexible save game system. I really love this game.

The maps are huge but I don't know much about the editor. This game is very tactical. If you run anywhere guns blazing, Rambo style, you'll just get shot. It's all about working as a team and approaching enemies with extreme caution and getting behind rocks or trees or buildings and shooting at them with controlled bursts. Then you provide covering fire while your squad mates try to inch forwards carefully and get better positions. You can stand up, you can crouch and shoot, and you can lie down completely flat in the grass. Some times you have to lie down and inch forwards through the grass to sneak up to a position. It can be slow sometimes but there is plenty of fast paced action too. Even the slow moments though are great, because the whole thing is so intense, I never get bored for even a second. It's incredible. As for the other stuff, there are no health packs or anything like that, but they did give you at least a chance. So if a squad mate gets shot, they may survive depending on the wound, but usually they will fall to the ground and the screen will go red. You then need to have another squad mate go over to them and heal/revive them. I think you only have a minute or so to do this before they bleed to death. If someone reaches them and does first aid though, they are back on their feet again and good as new pretty much. So it does make life a bit easy on you. There are difficulty levels which changes all this too, so I suppose you could have it on a very easy mode which would go far easier on you. Whether I would recommend it to you, I'm not sure. I've played lots of different types of shooters and this is nothing like the action shooters like Quake or Unreal Tournament. But it's still exciting and it's something I love just as much as the other types of games. Maybe you would too? I don't know. Perhaps you could try the demo out too, to get a better idea.