brightcandle
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Posts posted by brightcandle
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When firing from prone I find most of the movement of my sights is up and down with my breath. There is almost no horizontal sway in a stable firing position but instead firing is a large part about timing with my pause in breathing and lining that up. So while I partially agree the sway seems somewhat overdone there are mods to make it less apparent and somewhat more realistic and a little less gamey. That is the beauty of A3, if you want something different you just change it, the only stuff we care about from BI is the actual features not the values themselves. So long as we can disable game features or set realistic values it doesn't matter and in this case there are mods to fix it.
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If you want reality with Arma 3 you need a lot of mods. One of them is the 3x stamina mod, the stamina bar is kind of essential as well as there is no sound or other obvious effects that you are fatigued until you just start moving really slowly. I would recommend those as a minimum. Obviously you need a lot more to add back in realistic ballistics and damage models and armour and lots of other things to work around stuff BI broke since release.
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how does agm impact frame rate?It reduces it. Download it yourself and go and look just on an empty map with no other mods running. If your CPU limited (so getting 80 fps or so) it'll drop down to more like 50-60. Ie it costs about 3ms per frame or 20 fps when nothing is happening. During firefights that climbs a little, but its basically got a constant impact on frame rate in all circumstances. One of the few mods we have reliably determined does have an impact.
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AGM is one of those mods that has a high impact on frame rate. King of the hill would likely have to halve or less the number of people possible on the server. Nothing stopping you making such a server, just be aware the moment you add a single mod requirement it becomes much harder for people to join your server and the numbers will reflect that especially initially.
BI don't add realistic features. The marksman DLC looks to be coming with bipods and weapon resting but not weapon ballistic fixes or windage or elevation. I would have never predicted that they would skip all the things that matter for marksmanship in favour of something that is already done quite well in mods. It boggles the mind really what BI chooses to do.
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Thats news to me.As far as I can remember the Arma community despised the Wall peeking especially the mil sim unit communities that used to by and large make up most of the Arma community.
Either way I am sure the devs realize how detrimental the current camera is to gameplay and hopefully are looking at or have looked at ways to mitigate if not eliminate wall peeking/periscoping.
I would assume the other milsim communities do what we do, which is restrict to first person.
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I wonder how far away the day when some generic ad with "Premium Deluxe Elite Professional Limited-Edition Gold-Members-Access-Only" sticker placed over it will make people want to pay loads of money for being able to see it (and make them feel very proud and unique when they actually see it). :Dinb4 that day was, like, 30 centuries ago, slowpoke.
By that point the monkeys will have got used to advertising for a company for zero reward at all, so the moment the Super deluxe Millionaire edition for a mere $1 million comes out the free advertising on what a great deal it is will be all over everything gumming up the internet.
I just have a new perspective where all the traffic on the internet goes, its to rubbish like this. I don't even know why any of us replied, we are in a minority of people who realise how absurd it is that this sort of thing works. A little piece of my faith in humanity died, I now know 3000 people are BI advertising shrills for nothing but the reveal of some marketing pictures 2 days early. The devil must have it easy, souls must be going for $1.
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These all popped up like a month or so ago, too, and they are not at all good missions. I'm pretty sure he's using dupe accounts to cheat his ratings and make his crap more visible. I've reported it on Steam, but am unsure what will be done, if anything.Unfortunately its steam, they neither do anything quickly nor well when it comes to support.
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Can BIS do anything without someone posting a rant about it?...Its completely possible to do good things and not have a rant. But when you do things people don't like you'll see a rant.
I guarantee if they announced they had increased performance 100% and it turned out to be true there would only be requests for even more performance. Rants happen when you do something that isn't very nice to your customer base, and a lot of recent things have not been very nice. Like blaming mods and mission makers for all the performance problems, that wasn't very nice. Using your customers to advertise your DLC is a little bit shady and backhanded. If you play with the darkside you can guarantee people will call you out on it.
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I really hate this type of advertising and the companies that use it. I think its more acceptable than just plain spamming people because instead of the company doing it your friends do it for them to get trinkets. A few pictures of some guns that will probably be released in 2 weeks time? Come on why sell yourself to advertise for a company for a few measly jpegs?
I guess not everyone realises what these companies are asking them to do, that they are doing unpaid advertising via social media. Working for the man for nothing of any value at all.
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Extremely disappointing to see it once again confirmed that BI considers the entire performance problem is scenarios and mods, despite all the tests showing the opposite. I called it 3 months ago when they added the boolean into the game that would tell them if the game was vanilla or not and right here we can see their true intention was never to improve performance in the game (which has barely moved since Alpha) but instead to ultimately blame the mods. The engine IS NOT MULTITHREADED, I have a lot of pictures showing that this is utterly untrue, categorically false, a complete fabrication, a lie plain and simple. This interview cements once again that Dyslexi was used to calm the complaints from the customers so they could keep shovelling this rubbish in our direction and tell us we are the problem while never ever fixing the game.
I hope a competitor realises the market potential of these types of games and releases a decently performing alternative, because I would switch game in a heartbeat.
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You could at least test the theory that its the server by just using Amazon's EC2 service and then setting up an arma 3 dedicated server with your mods. It allows you to only commit to a few hours of build time and then you can run it just for the time you need. The storage of the image will set you back about $5 a month. Then you can start and stop the image as you need it and if you play weekly it'll add up to another $5 or so a month. Works out pretty cheap for a small community and you can get a decent machine within minutes. Get a C3.large or a C4.large and it will be about as powerful as you can get in terms of servers for Arma 3 and it will allow you to test your theory for not a lot of outlay.
However I will say this - we have the same problem even with this server. Despite what BI is telling everyone (its all about network traffic) we have been profiling the clients and determined that the game is simply bogged down on the CPU in its single threaded simulation part and in the urban world the overhead around the rending process explodes in time. The end result is that the problem is with BI's code for rendering and simulation and nothing to do with the server performance. Indeed if your admin runs #monitor 10 (just type it in chat) you'll see the servers frame rate and if its above 30 all is well. The maximum is 48 and that is where ours spends all its time.
I don't think a new server is likely to help you, which is why I recommend a temporary server which has minimal outlay and no ongoing contract. That way when it turns out you have the same problem as everyone else (the game just runs poorly with buildings and trees and....) then you haven't wasted money on a month or more worth of server time you don't need.
PS - We have found AGM has quite a performance impact. It knocks about 20 fps off without much happening (frame cost of 3ms) but as the game goes on this climbs. We think AGM is responsible for a lot of peoples problems and we are trying to test it thoroughly before we release full results but if you run that be aware we think its got performance issues and you might want to test with it on and off and see if it makes a difference.
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In Arma 2 and the Arma 3 alpha I found that using Alternate frame rendering 2 performed quite a bit better than the default. However at some point in beta I think Nvidia released a new driver and I didn't find it made much difference after that. I haven't particular found any profile adjustments really making much difference, SLI works in the sense you can get it running reasonably with it but most of the time you'll find SLI isn't going to help performance all that much as the game is so CPU limited.
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I see, I never quite understood the reason why everything fell apart. Nobody gave a reason, so I just floated about after that like a lone wolf, never straying into a permanent group anymore.Not sure if the whole torrid story is really appropriate for general discussion but as far as I know none of the admins that formed t1o and hence the falling of 6thsense play anymore. Some of the membership do and now run CFO. I don't know of any other community that tracks its lineage back to 6thsense anyway, not that still survives. There was one near the end of Arma 2 days but it wasn't very big and fizzled out some years back and the name isn't coming to me. Depending on what you are looking for we might be able to help you. Our gameplay is definitely an evolution of 6thsense and Sonsalt's training methods refined over the years. If you are looking to get in contact with a particular player I might have an email address or other contact details. Just let me know.
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On one hand, you don't really need to create such a system with the way current concepts in gaming industry are used - if what we do sells, why bother? On the other hand, such a huge task could have not been done on previous generation of hardware (on consoles). Now, since GPGPU is a thing with the new consoles, such a road most likely will be used in future games (AI on the GPU).AI on the GPU is unlikely to work well. GPUs are very good at one task, that is computing very wide maths. Got a list of vectors you need dot producting then its great, got a tonne of floating point maths in general that can be run in massively parallel way then the GPU is great. What its not good at is branching, decision based logic. GPUs work by using waves of already highly parallel (think millions) of work units and spreading them across a substantial (2000-3000) number of cores which perform great so long as all the data they need to work on the bit of data they just received is available. AI just doesn't work that way, its normally a decision tree based on events like did a shot just whizz past my head or can I see the enemy and what is my current state etc etc. Its a State machine and state machine transitions can involve a reasonable amount of maths (like an A* search to find a path to where the AI wants to go) but typically its highly branching code, do this or that or that or that or that etc. GPU cores are incredibly poor at this activity due to the architecture.
So I think its unlikely any company would get any useful amount of power out of a GPU for the purposes of AI. It might be able to support certain algorithms perhaps but most of what AI does will perform significantly better on the CPU due to its cache architecture and design for supporting highly branching code. GPUs only solve a particular niche of programming problems, they do not have the ability to perform well on all problems.
Console level hardware is 100% irrelevant to a PC only game like Arma, its not a game that could ever be played on a console nor would it care about them. The controller simply wouldn't have enough inputs to even start to support a game of this complexity, nor does it fit the the games ethos of being open to modding, a core tenant of the game because it has little actual content of its own.
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6th Sense fell apart and much of the remnants of it went on to form tier1ops.eu although as that evolved various pieces of that community drifted apart during the A2 days. When Arma 3 came out Tier1ops grew enormously and was overrun with a different culture, so nowadays you won't find any there as far as I know. We have a few at Charlie Foxtrot certainly but I know quite a few have drifted away from playing the game after what happened at Tier 1 ops, that marked the end for them. We still have 3 actively playing and are in contact with another 4 or 5.
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Having seen how it works I like the fact that unlike other resting mods there isn't a key to press. That is great. However what I feel it is missing is an indication of when the weapon is actually resting. AGM resting gives this nice audible and visual note that you have the weapon rested and this is quite important because you don't want to find out the detection isn't working or you have moved just a little too far when you start firing. Otherwise I am pleased its going into the vanilla game, the less mods we have to run the better as they add quite a bit of load time, tend to degrade performance and as a whole tend to be pretty buggy.
I suspect what will probably happen however is it will miss the mark for most milsim communities and a spate of mods will come out to fix it anyway. Its not like either of these features is new, its incorporating something we have used for over a year. I hope the marksman DLC as a whole is great and we use it, but based on the previous changes there is every chance we'll still mod it, especially if weapon sway is anything to go by.
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This is why there are so many private communities playing Arma 3. The trolls stay on the public servers, never get into communities and ultimately roll around messing up the public games and servers without mods banning them. Even if they do get banned there are enough servers to be doing daft stuff for a long time. A rating system based on the bans from servers might be more interesting, someone that has banned from two different servers for example we probably don't want, whereas 1 ban is probably too low a threshold. Have bans time out over a short period of time. Now its not quite so player driven but its based on more evidence and server impact.
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I did a lot of testing of this in Alpha before I selected the hardware for Tier1Ops.eu. I tested across a variety of CPUs from AMD and Intel and the end result was you want the fastest Intel CPU you can get your hands on. The game doesn't care for cores at all, a basic 2 core chip is just as good as a 4 core or more at the moment. Something like a top clock Haswell i5 will bring you the best performance. RAM wise the dedicated server doesn't use much, it can usually run within 1-2GB. The extra RAM helps cache the drive but IO isn't a big concern normally for arma servers.
Don't worry about I7's or Xeon's or dual CPU servers or any of that jazz, if you want to run one game then a dual core i3 or a quad core i5 with the highest clock speed you can afford to run within your power constraints of the environment its in. This is the post I made back in April 2013 about what I built http://tier1ops.eu/servers.
Years ago the limits we found were even on that hardware we couldn't really go past 40 players with 150 AI to maintain a server FPS above 40. Things presumably have improved a little since then with all the optimisation being done but most communities I know are having serious problems with frame rate with these big games anyway (we have problems with small games!). Not sure what the absolute limits are now.
Even today with Charlie Foxtrot Ops I keep a good eye on the CPU usage of the server and its still sub 2 cores. We get much better performance on Intel than AMD and it loves clock speed. If another community was considering temporary Amazon virtual servers like we use (lots of performance not a lot of cost for just game time) then you want at least a C3.large, but you wont see any benefit from a C3.xlarge unless you run a headless client as well where the xlarge becomes useful. Bigger than that is really only for multiple servers and then you are into IO constraints and impact between servers so its better to run servers on different machines. The C4.large is presumably a bit faster due to the Haswell CPUs in it verses the Sandy/Ivy bridge of the c3.large, but the impact as far as I can tell is only moderate. Don't try and use anything else, you want the CPU compute optimised machines for Arma 3 dedicated servers.
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wouldnt the way Bohemia incorporates dlc prevent that ?The player joining those communities without the DLC would join just fine just not have access to the dlc content.
While that is a reasonable strategy for a public server on the surface its not really good for a community. Lets say the Marksman DLC sells the weapons and we choose to run that as our marksman rifle, its no longer optional within our community. You can't play any role that would require it, nor would you be able to pick it up and use it if needed. Its not really practical to not buy it if a community chooses to use the content. Even with the helicopter where we can be sure the pilots have bought it the rest of us don't really want the nag message when we get in. Its simple enough to just make the mission maker choose a different helicopter, then if things do go wrong (pilot crashes to desktop) one of us can jump in and fly it rather than crash into the ground because no one bought the DLC!
But even on a public server if you put a helicopter down if you use a DLC one then very few people are going to actually be able to fly it. That means the game is broken until someone with that DLC turns up. So as a mission maker for public missions you aren't going to use DLC content.
Its a system where we get to play with the content partially and BI gets to sell. But the actual game situation is to avoid using DLC content and if its present it can't be the only way to do things. Private communities don't mandate stuff that isn't worth the outlay either. Overall its a recipe for not having the DLC content used. Whereas when expansions for Arma 2 arrived everyone moved over, because it was a package of worthwhile things that everyone could find something they wanted in it. The fact it was a different exe/standalone wasn't really what drove that, it was that it was big enough to be worthwhile and thus didn't cause community fragmentation. The DLCs aren't currently causing fragmentation really either, but those who buy them probably aren't finding these items in games very much because of the impact.
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The only real concern I have right now is that the complexity of requirements for communities will get more complex. Right now its probably just a copy of Arma 3. But in the future you might have communities with Arma 3 + marksman + expansion 1 and a host of others as well. If the marksman content turns out to be good then people will buy it on mass, if it isn't then they wont. The same is true of the expansion. BF4 has this sort of splintering in its communities and its not too bad, at least with Arma 3 we are looking at mostly being able to play when missing the DLC. It doesn't break things even if its not ideal.
I am not convinced small updates are worth while, they add unnecessary complexity and dependency issues. Its better IMO you go with bigger bulks of content together that an entire community will buy, because karts and a few helicopters aren't.
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I can guarantee you even a cheap graphics card will be able to process data faster than any $2000 Intel chip... ArmA should focus more on GPU, perhaps even AI calculations and physics engine.Just be aware that the time per frame for AI and physX is pretty minimal, less than 1ms. AGM currently think the 3ms cost they add to each frame is nothing so you aren't going to find many people care about 5% of the frame time at 60 fps. Most of the time is not spent in these periphery activities in a multiplayer game.
I know its hard to read the information I have provided, its designed for developers and this being the first profiler output you may have seen its tricky to understand it, so in the absence of understanding you'll have to trust my word for it when I say this isn't the issue.
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...snip BF4 and Arma comparison on mesh quality....
As you can see, Mantle is faster than dx11.1 even at ultra mesh compared to low mesh on dx and perhaps even more important – smoother!
A 27-28% increase I’d say is quite nice, but it can be even more from what I’ve tested, depending on the scene and of course, guys with lower end CPUs will see even bigger improvements.
The difference between the two games is quite dramatic in how they use resources. So in the case of BF4 this is what their GPUView looks like over a couple of frames:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3638175/BF4GpuView.jpg (790 kB)
Quite clearly its use of DX11.1 is both quite parallel (lots of jobs queued up) and its use of the GPU is high achieving basically 100% usage. This is a game that is limited by the GPU and its spending quite a bit of time on the CPU waiting for the GPU.
Compare this to Arma 3:
Here we can see GPU usage is low, and its not queuing up on the CPU. Arma's problems lay outside of the API and the GPU, its not being dominated by the CPU overhead of directX or we would see it in the CPU graphs and its not being dominated by the GPU time either.
Arma has a different problem to most games, it has a lot of work done outside of rendering as we can see from this game profile.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3638175/Capture%20Palagia.jpg (612 kB)
This work outside of DirectX is the cause of Arma's performance issues. I presume much of it is in the scripting engine but its really hard to get to the bottom of knowing anything else other than - its BI's code for the game simulation and the code they surround the DirectX code with. Only they are the experts in that.
So how much impact could DirectX 12 have? Well at a maximum it impacts about 30% of the frame time as the rest of it appears to be outside of anything to do with graphics. That would mean 30 fps gets converted to 40 fps if DX12 was perfect and had literally zero overhead and the port to the API was done brilliantly. In the real world of course that isn't going to be the case because some of that rendr code is definitely BI's and nothing to do with DX overhead. Maybe we should expect a few percentage points improvement, maybe 10% but its not going to solve the underlying issues which are all elsewhere.
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I tested altis in the middle of the primary city, so this is about the most object heavy you can get without adding units. I did a similar test in open ground and saw similar results. This graph is typicaly of all the scenarios I saw. As you increase the in game units the usage of the GPU decreases and this graph changes as you would expect, bigger and bigger gaps on the CPU and GPU side of things.
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Performance wise how is Bornholm doing now? I had heard with the previous version it wasn't good.We started using end of December and removed it after one night of gaming on it because performance was regularly below 30 fps. I don't know if versions since then have fixed it but I would say performance is exceptionally poor in my experience.
Weapon Sway Inaccurate
in ARMA 3 - GENERAL
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I have never once had a productive conversation with BI to get them to change anything to be more realistic. I have had a lot of conversations where they did their thing regardless of what happened in real life (suppressors for example), so they are more interested in building a game than a simulation. I think the problem arma has is its close enough that this little niggles irritate people, they seem unnecessarily arbitrary compared to the other things being more authentic. But the sim always falls apart in places where a simulation really wouldn't, like having 30 rounds after a partial reload instead of 30+1, the sway, the way the scopes behave generally, there is wind in game but no adjustment for windage, there is elevation drop in the game but the elevation adjustment is based on metres, etc etc etc. You can go on and on about the missing features and the choices BI made that are often not very true to life but its not their goal. Its why IMO the game is really best played in a community with decent mods, because without it the game has all these pointless niggles.