rotkeps

I don't think there is much to be concerned about at this stage; it's alpha with very limited content. I know I have no plans to sink the hundreds of hours I put into the previous titles until the main island and more rounded collection vehicles is present, which will most likely be closer to release. But from what I've seen so far in the few hours I have played, It's amazing and I can't wait to get going on those hundreds of hours of playing ;)

Hey. Been playing with video settings for the last couple of hours looking at FPS in different areas and here are couple of my findings that some people looking to tweak may find useful: Prefacing this with my spec, which has a nice CPU but weak GPU setup. - i5 Quad @ 4GHz - 460 GTX 1GB VRAM Basic - I find 2:1 ratio on Overall:Object visibility provides the best performance to visual trade off. IE. If you have 2000 Overall, a 1000 Object. Rendering - If you're on an FPS budget but still want to combat jaggies then I'd try setting it to FXAA + 87% rendering resolution. It looks almost as good as SMAA + 100% rendering resolutions due to the sharpness filter included in the FXAA yet gives 1-5fps more depending on location. - Anisotropic filtering is essentially free, only maybe decreasing by 1-2fps on Ultra and gives a very nice image quality boost. At the very least I'd put this on High regardless of GPU. Quality - As usual texture quality has negligible impact on FPS, it's a case of available memory. Even with fairly poor CPU / GPU but with 4GB+ memory I'd keep this on at least High for a big boost to visuals at no FPS cost. - Object Quality I'd vouch for putting on High. Below High and you get a very noticeable reduction in image quality for not a huge increase in FPS. Going above high and you get a very minimal increase in image quality for a big decrease to FPS. - Terrain Quality is a very balanced option in relation to image quality and performance trade off. Going from standard down to low just makes it look pretty bad, however gives a pretty big hit to fps. I'm leaning towards taking the FPS his for standard but I guess if you could stomach it low would give you a very nice FPS jump. - Shadows are rendered on the CPU on the Low setting and GPU on Standard and above. Therefore if you're on an FPS budget your choice should be between Standard and Disabled. Hope it helps.

They certainly are, but I'd say the issue I've had with their drastically different performance hits is just a case of the level optimization present in the alpha, I'm looking forward to re-enabling them one day.

Yay, been looking forward to this for a long time! can't wait to hit the Warfare servers :)

1. Introduction Am I the only one? Am I the lone scaredy cat afraid of a few harshly presented menus, who whilst owning both the downright groundbreaking Operation Flashpoint and it’s slightly underwhelming sibling Armed Assault have managed to completely and utterly avoid any form of interaction with those loyalist of minions? Of course I am referring to those lovable reprobates that are my very own AI squad mates. So there I was, firing up Armed Assault 2, not without some apprehension I might add, its predecessor had been quite the disappointment. I was hooked. Finally I had found the game that could deem itself the successor to the now low-res throne of OFP. It wasn’t long into this reawakening that I discovered my current gaming romance. CRCTI. But I was in a quandary. The epically scoped game mode, in a fairly annoying fashion, seemed to revolve solely around my ability to control my aforementioned nemesis. It was time. Time for me to face my fears and begin a duel with the baffling array of menus I had hid from for all these years, only to discover I was quite hopeless. I had been entertaining myself with the ‘move’ command for a while, but I knew deep down there was a better way of controlling the CPU bound dullards. Much like anyone with an information shaped hole in my mindbox, I hit the interwebs. Whilst I could find a few details out about the complexities of the gaggle of menus, any grander overview or context to their use eluded me. So in the true spirit of someone with too much time on their hands I fired up the editor and began experimenting. As I went on learning new things about my ever adored gang of AI, I also went on playing CRCTI for unholy lengths of time. It was becoming pretty clear that quite a few others playing on the servers weren’t getting the most out of their binary fed underlings. This guide is a result of that excess time mixed with the hope to reduce the confusing slap across the chops CRCTI often gives new comers. In a disclaimer-ish take on this, I should point out that I am neither an expert on this, nor are all the features of commanding the AI covered. Some I didn’t feel truly pertinent for battle-to-battle control, others I will get around to adding eventually when I can figure out how they fit in the overall scheme of things and a couple are just downright broken. Enough of my gibbering, on with the guide! 2. Your Squad So you have a acquired a group of the blighters. What now? I would begin by accustoming yourself to one of the cleaner facets of ArmA2’s UI. If you have squad members, this should be in the bottom-left of your screen. Those portraits are your window to status of your bit-induced buddies. The colour as well as any icons attached represent each soldiers condition, armaments and what action they’re currently undertaking. You may also notice that each of them is handily numbered, which is used in their selection. This is a pretty straight forward process which can be performed in a number of ways. Pressing (spacebar) to open the Quick-Command menu will select all of your squad. Selecting individual soldiers can either be done by aiming at them and left clicking whilst in the Quick-Command menu or by pressing the F-key that corresponds to the numbers found on the portrait. Should you have more than ten members in your squad you will be able to scroll through 'pages' using the F11 and F12 keys, which makes creating sub-groups important. They can be chosen by tapping your way through the appropriate F-keys, but you can create preset groups that can be selected easier. This will be covered later on in the guide. 3. Command Menus There are several menus that fill with options depending upon what you have selected. They offer a wide range of conditions that allow you to configure how you wish your squad to behave in and out of combat Each menu is assigned to your number keys ‘1 – 9’. It should be noted that some menus alter depending the type of unit selected as well as based upon the context of what you’re currently aiming at. The following are covered in this guide: Quick Command (spacebar) Engagement (3) Combat Mode (7) Formation (8) Team Assignment (9) 4. Quick Command Your bread and butter of the menus on offer. It features a couple of unique options as well as some of the more important ones from within other menus. Most importantly it will by default display a context sensitive option based upon what you’re currently aiming at. Aim at nil Gives the option to move the selected squad members to that location Aim at own squad member Gives the option to individually select that squad member Aim at friendly vehicle Gives the option for selected squad members to either board or disembark from the vehicle Aim at enemy unit Gives the options to Engage the target (see: 5. Engagement) You also have the option to order your selected squad members to regroup or stop based upon their current status. Regroup will have them return to formation, whilst stop will have them remain in their current position until ordered to do otherwise. The other options are covered within the other sections of this guide. 5. Engagement Here you get to control how your squad members will behave when in range of or under attack from the enemy. Hold-Fire Your squad will attack any enemy it deems to be an immediate threat, usually either very close range targets or those that are firing in your direction Open-Fire default Your squad will attack any enemy it can see and is within range Engage Your squad will remain in formation whilst in combat, any squad members given specific targets will break that formation to attack Engage at Will Your squad members will break formation in combat to attack their self acquired targets Disengage default Your squad will maintain formation under any circumstance 6. Combat Mode This menu configures the behaviour of your squad members whilst on the move. Also, you have the option to determine which stance they should try and keep. Safe Your squad moves very quickly. Ignores cover whilst moving often opting to take roads and paths and will not be on the lookout for enemy units Aware default Your squad moves quickly. Will stick loosely to cover sometimes taking roads and paths and will be looking out for enemy units Stealth Your squad moves very slowly. Moving strictly from cover to cover in a bounding fashion, one group will stop to cover whilst one group advances, the squad should spend a lot of time in the prone position Danger Your squad moves slowly. Moving strictly from cover to cover in a bounding fashion, one group will stop to cover whilst one group advances Stand Up Your squad will stay stood up. Useful for traversing long distances on foot Stay Crouched Your squad will remain in the crouched position. Useful for close quarters combat, featuring plenty of cover Go Prone Your squad will stick to the prone position. Useful for quiet movement or long range and low cover engagements Keep Low Your squad matches your current stance 7. Formation Simple enough, your squad forms the shape you select in the menu. However it shouldn’t be overlooked so hastily as the chosen formation can play a role in the survivability of your squad members whilst in combat. You should try to think of the formation as a plug to an enemy position, picking the shape that best fits their position. This of course relies heavily on your intelligence on the enemy positions but for the most part that can be extrapolated from the immediate terrain. Wedge is the default and is a very solid all round formation. It offers a good forward base of fire whilst giving adequate flank protection on either side. But applying the above rule of ‘round peg; round hole’ you can see a couple of other formations in the below examples that may better suit a combat situation over another. Here you can see an attack on a small defended village, since no matter which angle you approach you will often find yourself taking it head-on, a line formation will provide a better base of fire than the wedge. This one shows slightly bigger village. Here your line formation is nowhere near suitable enough to give the appropriate base of fire across the breadth of the village and will leave your flanks exposed. So opting for an echelon formation with the face towards the main body of the town will give enough a compromise between the forward base of fire and protection of the flank.

Have this to, Windows 7 using Retail. Battle Eye is not working at all since patching - Have tried reinstalling it etc to no avail.

Can't wait to go deafen myself + scare the neighbours!

No worries, not as if 0.9 is so terrible :D

Seemed to good to be true when seen in the patch notes so it was the first thing I jumped in on to test, not having any joy with it so far. Maybe I'm just not understanding its actual usage here, but ordering my men to use suppressive fire is resulting in the same inaction as in previous version. I tried: - Ordering them to suppress anything, a house / empty car / open ground - nothing. - I made a mission with an enemy soldier in my line of sight but way out of the light of sight of a squad mate... ordering him to suppress the known enemy location, he does nothing. - Same mission this time with the enemy soldier in line of sight but far away - knowing the presence the AI wouldn't shoot anyway, using suppression.. still nothing. - Dead enemy targets in line of sight also gets nothing. So am I missing something glaringly obvious here? If its a case of only being able to be used upon living enemy targets that are also in line of sight, then they are being shot at anyway so why is suppression required? or am I simply bugged in some way and this is working in the above scenarios for everyone else? Thanks. ---------- Post added at 06:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:36 PM ---------- Right I am picking up on pretty big problems here which I would like for someone else to confirm / deny. The AI soldiers seem to be having two very major issues, the 2nd might be related to the first: 1) Their aiming speed is painfully slow, talking here of the AI having to aim a few degrees either direction to have the shot and taking a very long time to do so, that mixed with a slight delayed reaction on firing is seem quite bad. Even on the highest skill setting this behaviour prevails. 2) When grouped on me, seem to prioritize remaining in formation / movement over killing enemy targets regardless of combat mode ... this means that during the agonizingly slow aiming most of the time they give up altogether to move 2 steps to the side then repeat the process, leaving them entirely unreliable. As a further update: - This isn't effecting all soldier classes, those using rifles seem mostly unaffected by the turn speed but still seem quite fidgity leading to (2) still being an issue - Those using heavier weapons, in particular machinegunners, are useless, something definitly wrong here - rifleman instantly react, aim and shoot at the known enemy, machinegunners take around 5-10 seconds just to react, let alone start to aim, when they do start to aim it is subject to (1). - Snipers also seem somewhat subject to this, I noticed that when spotted the snipers would stop, instantly react and shoot. Yay? If they miss they start acting exactly as machinegunners, they now start moving around alot not firing and when they do they show very poor reaction time and aiming speed.

Seen this happen for sure, but not in a reproduce-able way. Have you noticed that it extends to move orders as well? Seemed to me like in combat mode every so often my squad would just switch off.

If it were any other game I would say you could expect atleast 20fps more, but this isn't exactly the smoothest running on the market and is notoriously CPU hungry, what is the rest of your system like?

Still not got anything suppressive fire related to work, I'm just going to roll with it still being broken. Trying to concoct some bizarre scenario that would simply never occur just doesn't seem like a valuable endeavour. Nothing gained nothing lost though, better luck in 1.06 I suppose.

How are you using your suppressive fire command may I ask? even if ordered to suppress a random position they fire?

Having issues getting suppressive fire command to do anything / having the AI completely bug out on me rendering them way to unreliable to play the game with: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=92248

Been a while since I logged on the forums / played ArmA2, how relevant is this guide to the current patch? any help would be appreciated to updating it.

I think it has been an amazing improvement, however has anyone noticed when giving AI move orders through towns whilst they're in combat / stealth stance occasionally atleast one member will become completely stuck for no reason and never be able to move from that position regardless of the order given ? It is something I rarely noticed in 1.02, but in 1.03 it seems much more common.

Upon installing, instantly removed the ghastly head bobbing and disjointed floating zone. I then opted for a touch of the headbobitis in an effort to add a touch of ambiance to the shader jested affair. Now I have both back around 50%, the circle, completeth. Seems to simply be a transition of coming from other FPS games and being presented with change, the most terrifying voyage of any creature of habbit. However the more time you devote to ArmA2 the more you realise how much those two features add to the experience. I am just glad they provide a slider to allow you to be intravenously wrenched from your more accustomed Quake3 on ice shooters.

As much work on the AI as time can afford.

** Updated ** - Killerwatt kindly offered to host the PDF version on his RS premium account.

This thread isn't really about the editor... but I think what you want to do is when placing them you will see an option with "in-formation" chosen, change that to none and they should just be where ever you placed them.

** Updated ** - Added the requested PDF version

Just incase anyone hasn't seen the latest developer diary: http://www.arma2.com/arma-2-developeras-diary-no3-team-command_en.html Well worth checking out.

It was suggested I submit it to the BIS wiki, which I will do when it is more complete. Shouldn't really matter then if it gets stickied or not. But a user to user guide subforum outside of editing might be nice to :D

Thanks for the feedback so far all! AKD42: I'll drop the fire team / assault team thing... blame Brothers in Arms for that one ;) Some Kind of Guy: I don't know, I have looked for this but have thus far not found it, if I do I will be sure to add it. Stridergg: I updated that section a bit, will add the stuff about the mousewheel in a bit. InFireBaptize: Sure I will make a PDF of it, still changing it a bit so when that is done I will create it. **Updated** - Changed pretty much all of the text in the guide, hopefully to make it a little bit more consistent and clear from section to section. - Updated the graphics to hopefully be a little more clear. - Replaced the "9. Putting it all together" with a more indepth video version... being uploaded now and should be ready in a couple of hours.