helo

Make sure that you defrag your HDD, since a fragmentated HDD can cause some stuttering/lag while playing since a lot of stuff is loaded from the HDD into the memory.

Like EdCase, I also wondered where the option for PvP/Semi Pvp aka Warfare is. As someoen who plays a lots of PvP (that includes Warfare fro the rest of the post) in Public and on Cfarma2.com, I noticed such statements what Soar recited here, where people get labeled as noobs. Mostly peopel get labeled as noobs on PvP servers, like Valhalla when they do something totally against the usual hapits liek stealing other peoples vehicles, teamkilling etc. which isn´t really hard since Valhalla is purely Team Deathmatch. Before I come to my point, I would like to prepare it and refer to Warfare Public matches to point out something very striking. I play most of the timey ( sicne Armed Assault) on the XR hotshots Warfare server and during the recent months we on the HS server realized people playing (they have the right to play since it is bloody public, I don´t wanna deny that) who show mostly certain characteristic traits: They need a long time to buy their inventory, try to snipe tonw defending Ai far from the outside of the actual town without making any attempt to capture a camp, are slow in the advance to catpure towns ..... All in all that kind of players just show little insight (even after you advise them) in the gameplay mechanics which don´t really favor a slow approach, but are close to blitzkrieg tactics where time and thrust is a precious good and time consuming camping of resistance towns leads to nothing what helps to bring your team forward. Unliek in any other (competetive) scenario, Warfare heavily depends on the performance which each individual contributes to the team. Now comes the point: We asked these people whether they are new to ArmA 2, so that we have mistreated them, however msotly we got the answer that these people were mostly playing CooP like Domi beforehand and slowly some resentiments against these people (they seem to join the server at certain times aka late in the night on EURO time) evolved resulting that OPFOR gets stacked by the experiened hardcore players while the group where are talking about is preferably joining BLUFOR. I wanna emphasize that I don´t wanna point out that all CooP player have dificulties with PvP, I just talk here of a certain group of people with shared characteristics. For the future, as I just read yesterday, that BIS focuses on CooP in ArmA 3 as well, I would really which that people of either side put their noose int othe most popular game mode before they play, sicne you can expect from me that when I play Insurgency, that I don´t let injured people leave behind on the ground, teamkill team mates, mis-use vehicles for only my purposes insteead for me and the other 3 dudes standing next to me et.

This man has some very good points.

Does anybody know, whether there are the tutorial misions delivered in A2 Free ? When these are missing, then it´s not really surprising that peopel behave totally clueless, especially when you never got in touch with a mil sim game.

The problem could also be related to the scripted mission itself. One might consider this.

Here you find a arma 2 benchmark mission, where you can test different settings: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=73610

I have a question: Does BattlEye lower the performance of a dedicated server and cause connection issues? I ask this since people object to use BE in order to contain hacking since they fear more severe performance problems. Are these objection justified? ---------- Post added at 03:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:10 PM ---------- Ok, solution found. BE could mean a difference between 20 serverFPS by running it.

Awesome work!

Thx for the (quick) answer PuFu.

Hey, I have a question concerning the squad.xml: People say, squad.xmls would lag the server. Can someoen confirm that, since I never had the impression that it would be responsible for lag, sicne I play a lot Warfare and Valhalla where the squad.xml is enabled.

Also works with OA, ACE etc.....

ups, sry I mixed up the laser directed Kornet with the TOW.

The TOW modelation is not quite as in reality. The real TOW has infrared/laser in the launch unit which is alligned on the target. From the reflection of the target the laser calculates the distance and corrects the path of the Missile with data through the wire. All the operator has to do is to laser the target, the CPu in the launcher unit calculates the changes/distance and directs the missile into the target. However in ArmA you have totally control over the missile´s path, no laser nothing. In case the target is moving you have to aim in front of the target to hit it. Not a very realistic simulation of the TOW launch unit :) . An example video I did for Charlie Foxtrot PvP tournement to demonstrate how to operate the ArmA 2 TOW: wzmj7Sjib7Q

Yesterday, I played on XR-Hotshots Warfare and my Apache AI Gunner could lock and kill targets with the gun and the cannon.

Despite there is only little pure PvP activity in ArmA 2, one could find a compromise in order to set the respawn time to 4-5 minutes to penalize the player hardly (in contrast to the usual respawn time in TvT, C&H, Warfare). Furthermore, as I implied with the term "pure PvP" one has to clearly define what PvP actually is, since there are variations existing in ArmA2: Some call Warfare where palyers and AI are involved PvP, others call it CooP with a PVP element. Same with insurgency by Pogoman etc. The views vary here highly in the community. Apart from that, I personally took part in an effort to create such PvP missions. The were only played for 3 weeks, and most people lost interest, because their relatively "fast paced" gamestyle were punished so hardly, meaning they played these realistic missions with the habits of playing Berzerk, Valhalla or similar missions, where faults get penalized only in a small dimension in shape of 1 min or 30 sec respawn. In this regards, the first time I played this mission, it involved 35 minutes of driving around, finding the enemy, and then getting tked by the own Mk19, because he aimed faaaaaaaaaaaaar to short (at the wall 10 in front of him, where i was moving along). I had to leave the game first sicne I was virtually super dead. Some people might find this not very amusing since every error/fault gets can have desastrous effects. The dude behind you might accidentally throw a grenade in front of his feet (because he thinks he is still in the semi auto mode) and killing 2 or 3 of his own men. Implementing much higher respawn times might stress in that way the seroiusness of the virtual life and might preserve key elements of fun and entertainment for the participating players. Concerning the scenario, it might work with BLUFOR vs OPFOR as long as the entire scenario is not based on brutal firepower like arty guns, TAB-locking choppers for only one side and very open. What do we mean by that ? A scenario with three cap zones to hold or capture is pretty constraint since there is only one way to win: Keep the enemy away from caping the 3 points which is achieved by containing them in their base. On the contrary, an open scenario would be a design where you have certain key ressources which are required for warfare, like oil reffinaries, factories (industrial capacity), ammunition, fuel, manpower, political targets (like cities or towns) etc. There are different elements which might lead to the defeat of the other side: Ammo or fuel shortages immobilize the army, political key areas are seized etc. That means, the both sides fighting each other, have different strategic options to achieve a victory instead of pure annihilation of the other side. It also enforces a more realistic picture of warfare where you can hradly ( in the most cases) just burn your troops and eventually prevail cause you had a factory spitting out 20 tanks or Apaches more than the other side. How can someone realize such a realistic more advanced scenario, sicne where are not talking here of brute theory but also about option how to implement that in a real multiplayer mission. First of all, one has to define all the key ressources of the sceanrio like fuel depots, ammo depots, repair bays, region capitals etc. After having done one has a map of takistan or chenarus with a lots of ressource locations, which are spread all over the map and probably not in a very even matter ( more fuel in the west than in the east ). If you now wanna splitt the map into half for OPFOR and BLUFOR (North vs South constelaltion), OPFOR has more fuel ressources danger close to the front and BLUFOR more ammo ressources, might lead to some imbalance so that the designer has to put some of the key resources as a "reserve" toards the "homefront". The distribution depends onthe setup the designer wants to have for his scenario. NExt thing to do would be to keep the action close and intensive, in other words when 20 vs 20 people fight spread out over the entire map that might lead into a situation which sometimes occurs in Warfare where everybody is fighting at his own front. To focus more action in one area, the designer might structure the map/takistan/chenarus into sectors with its own regional capital, where also resources are located ( in the sector). These sectors can be static ( I devide chnearus into 8 sectors) or dynamic. Dynamic would mean that the sector where fighting is allowed and desired between the factions is moving with the pace of the battle: The sector consists of a circle which has a radius of (let´s say) 3 ingame km. As soon as one side secures a certain amount of resources at the edge of the circle, the circle shift and include new resources of the side which has not the initative. The side with the intiative decides in which direaction the circle shall be moved a bit to unlock additional resources of the opposing side, which could be called overall strategy ( we gonna go for their ammo resupplies in the NW now). The sectors are important in order to focus the action and the resources define the pace of the game. No fuel means limited range and amount of vehicles, no ammo means fewer weapons can be delivered to the side from their main supply depot etc. ( the more one side burns its vehicles the more fuel and ammo is consumed). In this regard the main supply depot should be loacted far behind the front in order to simulate a long supply route: The more territory you gain, the longer it takes for the resources to reach the troops at the FLOT ( farest line of my troops in takistan). For example in caputred reginal capitals or political targets, the seizing side can build depots to collect resources there. When they wanna retreat ( which is better than losing all war equipemnt which would cost a lot mor fuel, ammo etc. ) the also should to evacuate their resources, otherwise the town has a very happy new owner . Before I lose myself in more details I wanna stress here certain key points: The scenario should be considered as a model. A model is always a simplification of reality. The more simple it is, the less dimensions it has and the easier it can be dealt with normally. In order to get close to reality and to a more demanding challange, the designer has to include additional dimensions to make it more complex. More compelx doens´t neccassarily mean, no respawn at all, but a more punishing respawn of 4-5 minutes where one can spectate an allied player, play mini games on the desktop or whatever. To my mind, stepwise complexity enriches the game by just implementing the extreme pole of a dimension. However, it´s stil the responsibility of the designer to ensure; that even though the opposing side have different equipement or setups, both can achieve victory in different ways (like in RTS games where the factions have different options/tools to prevail), whereas teamwork aka combined ops should be the key element and not one army branch with superior equipment (which is hard to counter or only to be countered with one single element which might not be available on the other side for a reason ---> the balance attempts of RTS games are a good example, where there are different more or less ideal options to deal with a challenge). Nonetheless or all in all, it´s a shit load of work to create such a demanding theatre/scenario which might interest more people than the hardcore brute. Sept by step you can make them acustomed to the model you have in mind.

I would also welcome a more realistic damage system, like AC projectiles and AT missiles deal very little damage at the front part of a tank, but will have a certain % chance to deal much more damage at the flanks or at the rear of a tank in shape of a penetration chance. However that might eat up additional CPU power:( .

In ACE 2 the AK sights are fixed.

I highly agree with puFu and Zipper here and would favor a Non-Steam solution.

Nice Work.

Arma 2 engine is based on 32bit environment, so there are technical limitations for the engine like the max. amount of memory (2 GB) and many other things. You have to wait for a future engien which supports a 64 bit environment, which will be more efficent concerning the usage of the aforementioned hardware.

This article is one of many regarding "Key techniques in Player vs Player situations in ArmA2" posted in the previous 13 months in forums dedicated to organized PvP. However, I decided to also post these things here, so that the entire community can prosper from that, and not only 10 interested choosen individuals, active in the same forums as I. Previously, you may also find my post about "tossing handgrenades into buildings in OA" interesting: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=109708 ArmA 2 is a very complex game refering the simulation mechanics and also in the way how the envirnment is simulated and rendered. Unlike in any other game, the environment is so filled up with complex objects and vegetation that one can easily can loose the overview. Who don´t know the situation where one get shot at from some hundred meters ahead and the question arises in your mind "from where the heck is he shooting". Wouldn´t it be easier if you detect the enemy before he detects you so that you can plan how to engage him instead the other way around ? What we are talking here now is about situtational awareness, which can be increased drastically by just increasing your detection sensetivity. What does this mean in plain words ? To illustrate the point we got here 2 pictures of a typical situation in ArmA 2: The difference between these two is obvious: The second one is taken while the palyer zoomed in. (Picture One and Two are attached to this post). We see in the second picture the head of the soldier, who is lying on the ground and which we would have overlooked if we hadn´t zoomed in. We realize, that we can detect most of the threats around us or in our fire/watch sector by zooming in and verify what is vegeation and what is a living being. Picture 1: http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/6959/arma2oa2010120300585869.jpg Picture 2:http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8687/arma2oa2010120300590068.jpg However in ArmA 2 there are 2 given ways to zoom in and get insight on the environment: * Hold the right mouse button * Holding the "+" key on the Num Pad But these two aforementioned methods have some particular side effects: Holding the right mouse button also holds your breath with the ArmA2 control settings, so that after some seconds your aim becomes very shacky until you have recovered your stamina. Not very healthy when a firefight breaks loose in the next second. The "+" key at the Numpad is far away from your left hand with which you normally control the game. Everytime you press it to zoom in, and in order to keep the view zoom in you must hold the key, you can´t do anything else, but standing there and scaning for targets. That´s also not very healthy. The ideal solution for your left hand and a zoomed in view on your demand is the key between "Left Shift" and your "Y" or "Z" key on your keyboard (depending whether you have an British or Euro keybord - note that some keyboards aren´t equipped with that special key and instead they have a large "Left Shift" key: http://www.bengalinux.org/images/probhat_layout.png ). It is unassigned in ArmA2 and you can reach it everytime with your left ring finger (the second finger from the left on your hand) and at the same time while you zoom in, you can change your stance or press "W","A","S","D" to move your avatar (or however you call your person in ArmA2). In order to assign this key to zoom in, go to the options, controls, and assign the mentioned key to "Zoom in" where also the "+" key of the numpad is assigned to. A picture of a keyboard layout can be found here : http://wiki.genunix.org/wiki/images/d/d7/United_Kingdom_Solaris_Keyboard_Layout.png So, what can we do with that new key? We can zoom in as long as we want when we look for targets or try to identify them and what is also an important addition, when we are at the ironsights, we can also zoom in and the ironsights/weapons optics will stay at max zoom. That enables us to perfectly allign your ironsights at our target without pressing the "Right Mouse Button" as long as we want and we are not limited by the breath holding ability of that Mouse button. Now some may ask, why don´t we simply assign the Right Mouse button to zoom in ? With the new Recoil system, implemented 3 patches ago, the shooter has a natural trembel while aiming standing or crouched, so that in order to perfectly allign the sights with your target, breath-holding will temporaly negate that effect as long as you press a button for holding your breath. Furthermore, when you are wounded or sufferung under the supression effect, the breath-holding Right Mouse button is very handy to increase your accuracy in a tough firefight. Without it, your aim is shakey like the earthquakes on the Jupiter moon Io. The backside of using this is that zooming in may create tunnel vision, so effectively one may use the follwoing scanning pattern: * Amidst dense vegetation areas like forests with a lots of Xmas trees, it is recommended not to zoom in to much, since targets could popup 30m ahead of you and zooming in will reduce your field of view from 100° to 40° and you may overlook it. * When you re supposed to cover an open field as your fire sector you may constanbtly zoom in and scan the area for targets in the distance. Especially moving objects can be detected easily in the distance In general, zoom in when it is neccessary and fits to the demands of the surroundings. Consequently, a video where this presented method is used alot to scan for targets and used while having the ironsights up to perfectly allign them with the target. fZhWfsO5WP4#ws

When you game is stuttering, it might also come from a HDD with relatively fragmented data. Try to make sure that your HDD is 0% fragmentated, since ArmA is loading a lots of things from your HDD like textures for instance.

GUID bans is something they can´t bypass easily and will prevent them from joining your server unless they connect with a "false GUI".

With that commenly used scripting code, one can make out of every weapon a disposable one-shot-weapon. No need for addons:

Time to toast some frakking toasters !!!!