ActionMan

RTFM The game manual explains that the burning tracer material is placed at the rear of the bullet so the person you're shooting at can't see it.

Yeah, I'd like to see some evidence for BI's assertion that "that's just how Steam works"... seeing my other games don't re-download their gigabyte data-files whenever they're updated.Other games do release proper patches through steam, but BI is blaming steam for this situation, which is obviously wrong...

No, it didn't work. Even though I cancelled the steam download only after a few MB, the 1.05->1.07 patch wont install - it says I've got a corrupted installation.So, I guess my only option is to let steam finish it's 7.4GB "patch"... Assuming I hit my max speed of 512kbits/s... 512/8 = 64KB/s.... 7.4*1024*1024/64 = 121241 seconds = 33 hours at minimum. More likely "a few days" in practice. Yeah... thanks Bohemia :rolleyes: Why on earth can't you guys talk to Valve to figure out this problem -- you already did it once before with the 4GB "patch", and now you're doing it again with a 7GB "patch". No, don't blame steam! This is not "how the steam works"! Steam does not force you to re-download whole files instead of patches. Other steam games make small changes to large files via small steam downloads, so why can't you Bohemia?

Steam automatically started downloading the 7.4GB update, and once it starts there's no way to cancel it! If I pause the steam download, and install the 88MB patch, will it work?

Yep, the patch notes for 1.05 say that all DRM was removed (and I guess this includes the steam DRM).As of 1.05 we're free of steam! :D

When you get shot at (from a distance), lie down and use Q/E to roll to the side a few times. This often makes the enemy lose track of you slightly so you can find some hard cover. N.B. This probably wont work against a human player with a scoped rifle! You'll be better off sprinting (zig zag) rather than lying down. Then you're making up your own "meta game" instead of learning to play the actual game (unless the actual server/mission has those features disabled, of course). There's nothing wrong with that, but it is called being a "scrub" in competitive circles:http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html ^^ That's not to say I don't agree that the crosshair, etc, are over-powered! Veteran difficulty servers rock

Why do you need to decode the key? If you've got a disk, didn't it come with the key on paper?

I was originally only pointing out that the 360 is capable of running the game. If you've got some idea that selling the game on consoles is going to harm your PC experience, then that's your problem?Did porting flaspoint to the original XBox harm the PC version (or did it bring new technology into the engine for Arma1)? You never know -- being forced to slim down and optimise things for a console might actually improve the engine / UI... I don't really care for this argument though because it's bound to devolve into some kind of "PC pwns Console" fanboi argument. Like I said, I just wanted to point out the facts about the hardware. Zomg, homework fail. :( As I posted earlier -- yes it can, especially in regards to math-heavy game software. The math performance of the Xenon is double that of a Q6600.

You're flat out saying that a 360 can't run Arma2? What evidence do you have? I'm a programmer for PC/360/PS3/Wii, and console hardware is a lot more powerful that you give it credit for. I never said they were equal! However, a 3.5 year old gaming PC can run Arma, and a 360 is more powerful than a 3.5 year PC... What's your argument against that? I know, but this kind of disparate figures (similar clock rates, simmilar cores but waaaay different FP performance) is an indicator that one machine was specifically designed to run game software while the other is a general purpose architecture costly tuned to run games. Yep, and besides the reasons you're thinking of, here's some other important ones:* Consoles are sold at a *loss* (it cost microsoft money for you to buy them!) * Consoles are mass-produced using the same parts which *greatly* reduces cost What's with this harsh language -- "keep dreaming", "delude yourself", etc?? Stop being so emotional and stick to the facts please!It's also made for parts specifically designed for games, which were years ahead of PC parts being sold at the same time. Yes it obviously doesn't match up to a brand-new $1500 PC, but it matches up to a min-spec Arma2 PC. Ok, the latest PC games are still coming out on consoles (even if they do only run at 30fps and aren't always max resolution), aren't they?Did I say Arma2 would run at 60hz 1080p? Who cares if it's not running on "max settings", I've already got a PC that runs Arma2 fine (and I'm guessing you guys do too), but I know plenty of people who would rather buy a subsidised, mass produced gaming machine than waste all their money on overpriced graphics cards, LCD screens and Track IRs like I do, and yes some of these people are old-school flashpoint players who'd buy Arma2 if it existed for their platform. I fail to see any kind of comparison here (like the gflops stats you quoted from me) -- what's your point?e.g. What's the fill rate of an 8800 doing 4x MSAA? How many shader ops can it do? How does the SSE performance of an x86 PC CPU stack up against the Xenon's VMX performance?

Uh, yes really :j:The Xenon (360 CPU) has a theoretical peak of about 115 gflops, whereas the Q6600 is ~54 gflops. That's double the floating point (math processing) power. The Xenos (360 graphics card) is slightly more powerful than a GeForce 8800 Ultra, plus it can do dome things like 4xAA and alpha-blending with no performance penalty and has access to the main system RAM (faster CPU-GPU communication). Seeing a Q6600 + GeForce8800 run Arma2 fine, It follows that the 360 is more than capable.

As has been said earlier, the XBox360's CPU is still twice as fast as an Intel Quad Core Q6600 desktop PC CPU (which runs Arma2 fine), the PS3's CPU is even faster than the 360's... Outdated, eh?

The Xenon CPU kicks the pants of current PC CPUs, you know. Both the 360 and PS3 are insane at doing the kind of math that games need compared to our OOO PC CPUs...Xenon can do more than *twice* the number of math-operations per second that my Q6600 can do! You'd have to have a top-of-the-line CPU, overclocked, to match a Xenon... Operation Flashpoint: Elite worked, didn't it? You know, perhaps figuring out how to make it work on a game-pad would actually be a good thing for the PC -- maybe they'd come up with some better menu systems ;P This quote wasn't aimed at me, but I do program for the 360 ;)As I said above, it's CPU is twice as good as PC CPUs. Also it's graphics cards can do plenty of things that PC graphics cards still can't do, plus it can enable features that are slow on PC without any extra slow-down. E.g. transparent particle systems (smoke, fire, etc) chew up a *lot* of fill-rate on a PC, but much, much less on the 360 due to the type of RAM accessed by the raster-operation unit...

Yes, but that will only get you the visuals of the "crater".If you simply cut away some triangles to make a hole in the (visual) ground, the collision system doesn't know there's a hole in the (physical) ground, so you won't be able to fall into it! The physical representation of terrain is usually quite different internally to the visual representation. So while it may be trivial to cut a hole in the visuals, it may not be trivial to cut a hole in the physics.

I know exactly what you mean!There was a mod for Half-Life1, which was made by Op Flashpoint fans. They copied the "floating zone" straight out of OpF, but people complained about the "harsh edge" of the box. So, they added an option to have a smooth edge to it - when your cursor approaches the edge of the box, your view starts to turn slightly, then by the time your cursor actually hits the edge of the box, your view is turning at full speed. There's no hard transition from one mode to the other, they blend together. Here's some videos with the smoothing turned up to maximum:

This texturing technique was first used in Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, the idea behind it actually dates all the way back to 1996 at Silicon Graphics Incorporated =D ID Software / John Carmack (the Quake people) call it "MegaTexturing". Academics call it "Sparse Virtual Texturing" More info on google: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sparse+virtual+textures What it does is let you use ridiculously high-resolution textures, and stream them from your hard-drive as they are needed (kind of like what Arma does already!). IMO, Arma2 does enough streaming as is ;)

CPU usage (as measured by the task manager) is actually a pretty useless metric, it's borderline meaningless to a programmer. If a core is stalling (doing nothing, but waiting for another core), that shows up as used CPU time on these graphs. So if you've got an inefficient program where two threads are constantly waiting for each other (but not getting any work done), it will show up as 100% CPU usage. You can have an application that uses 100% CPU and one that uses 10% CPU, but both get the same amount of work done in the same time. For all we know, these graphs could be demonstrating that the Arma2 threading system becomes *more efficient* as you add more AI! (i.e. there is less stalling/overheads with more AI characters). The OGN server is coming back!? Oh how I've missed it :DGuess I should actually join/read the OGN forums... :o

Simply removing a face from the graphical component of the scene doesn't fix the problems associated with ray-casting, physics, collision, visibility testing and all the other non-graphical subsystems which may or may not rely on the the terrain being static and never changing.

In RL, if I'm holding a gun or a pointing device (not looking down a sight), I can think "I want to point this at that target over there" and move my arms in a best-guess effort to carry out that action. This is what the crosshair represents!By putting the crosshair over a bad guy, I'm telling the game "I'd like you to move my virtual arms so that my gun is somewhat pointing at him". This method of communicating with the game itself isn't a problem -- it's only a problem if it's 100% accurate. In RL if I do this without using a sight I'll likely be off by quite a few degrees. In Arma2, the crosshair system seems to be a lot more accurate than in Op Flashpoint. In flashpoint, putting the crosshair on someone (without using your sight) really did feel like you were trying to aim, but only doing as best you can without a sight. In Arma2 the gun actually hits where the crosshair is pointing, whether you're using a sight or not. I see no problem with being able to tell the game what I'm trying to point at, it's only unrealistic if "try and point at this" means "point at this exactly" (which, it seems it does in Arma2) :p But as has been said a million times already, go into the difficulty screen and disable them if it makes the game too easy for you!!!

No, you didn't use common sense. He said he installed a particular set of drivers and got a FPS boost, a bit of common sense lets you assume he's talking about FPS in Arma2, not some other game.Don't try and justify being an asshat :p

Here's the details of how it works: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch14.htmlIt's at least 2 weeks of R&D to get this tech working (just the programming). Let's see... 10 days x 8 hours/day x $20/hour = $1,600 to develop the code to make the skin look translucent. Now, add in the time it takes for the artists to re-develop all of their textures to work with this new technology... Yeah, I'm guessing that money is better off spent elsewhere :p

Lets hope so :D Sorry if I sounded a bit scathing.Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is looking really good with all the deformation and destruction... but nobody makes war simulators like BI does. I want the best of both worlds!

Look at how far BI's engine has come over the years by simply adding/improving already existing code: You talk as if this is not what BI does!? Expanding the game engine (and actually making games on it) is all BI does do! As for dynamic terrain... Game engines work on the dichotomy of static and dynamic content. Some engines, like DICE's Frostbite engine (BF:BC2) is moving more and more things into the "dynamic" category, but to do so they've had to re-invent everything! There's no way they could have achieved this simply by expanding their existing engines. They were able to afford to do this re-write of their engine, because they're in EA's pocket, and EA has the big bucks ;) Game engines rely on static content, because static content can be computed "off-line", that is, computations for visibility culling, line-of-sight optimisation, collision-detection optimisations, potentially-audible-sets, and most importantly -- level of detail, can all be run by the developers over a period of seconds/minutes/hours and the results pre-computed and packaged into the game data files. Dynamic data on the other hand, has to do all this at runtime, in the 16 to 33 thousands of a second it takes to draw each frame. That's a much, much bigger challenge, which involves throwing out everything you know about writing a game engine and starting again with an architecture designed specifically for this kind of dynamic content. If you want to see Arma reach this level, tell your friends to go buy it and the expansion pack so that BI has the $$$ to afford such a massive investment! :D

[1] What?? Every game has a minimum and a recommended spec. If your PC meets the spec the game will run. If your PC doesn't, then that's your problem! [2] Who says the game performs badly? Why are you asking these stupid loaded questions? Here's one: "If you're intent on asking silly questions, why don't you go away?" [3] Newsflash: Most games run faster on XP than Vista or Win7!! Go complain to Microsoft, not game developers. [4] How come it's dependent on processor power? It processes things!! What??? [5] Your CPU is a bit slow. You could probably play on decent settings as long as you don't increase the visibility distance too much.

Read some more posts. You can turn it off... If you stop playing on the easy difficulty levels it will be off by default!

If anyone is trying to decide whether FreeTrack is worth getting, I made a little comparison video to show you what it does as an Arma2 soldier. This vid was actually done with a TIR5, but TIR/FT both do the same thing anyway, just one is expensive and shinier ;)