Adjutant

The main arguement against a separate "hold breath" key is that it becomes harder to work with. What I can suggest is to have the "sprint" button work as "hold breath" when you go into sights. You can cancel the steady aim interval by pressing this button again. In my opinion steady aim should last somewhere between 5-10 seconds, but the devs will know better.

Taking into account the horizontal and vertical in-game FOV plus average monitor size, objects in the game are roughly two times closer than they appear (!). This is ofcourse without the zoom feature. I preferred just one sighted mode in 2001 Cold War Crisis as it made things very intuitive. Multiple levels of zoom are tedious and hard to work with (re iron sights, not telescopic ones). I think it would be best for iron sights to zoom the view just slightly. The justification behind this point is that enables to still track close range and long range to some extent (i.e. best of both worlds). Since objects in slightly zoomed will still appear further away than they actually are, ballistics of all weapons should to be shortened to 2/3 (approx.) of their real life parameters to compensate.

Worked out an interesting resolution. Give a longer "hold breath" interval (7-10 seconds) which will enable the shooter to re-center the rifle after it is thrown by a shot and send follow up shots accurately. That interval is followed by a recovery phase during which it sways (3-5 seconds). Going into sights triggers "hold breath", but what can be done to completely eliminate the "hold breath" button and to have it activate depending on context?

Good point. One strong consensus that emerged is that sighting the weapon will initiate steady aim (what is being called a "hold breath" function). Steady aim is not instant, but is reached within a short moment after sighting (Coulum). Consider what happens for a distant target. As you aim down the sights, you need to line up a shot. Should you do this in good time, "steady aim" interval will coincide with sight being placed on target. If you take a bit of time to find the target first, then you can still catch the steady aim interval in the middle or near its end.

A player can at any time type an action if he believes that the situation requires this. For example, player types "warn" to let a friendly unit know of an ambush. If no such intervention was planned for in the game, then no result is produced. If the developers did indeed want the player to realise this, then the relevant scripts are in place and the friendly unit changes course to avoid an ambush. The basic idea is to test the player's initiative and good judgment by requiring him to guess a particular action at set stages during the campaign.

I did not mean side missions. Normally you get an interaction menu and a communications menu with a range of standard actions to choose from. Let the campaign have certain moments where a player needs to use his imagination to suggest an extraordinary interaction with an object in the game world. So let there be hidden actions that you need to guess by manually typing them in. Developers could make up several good scenarios where the player can use this initiative.

In many cases it is difficult to control the friendly fire hazard when the 90 degree FOV is combined with operating in a close formation. This is especially important in an urban setting where the limited situational awareness increases the risk of such accidents. 1. The subject is not about IFF. It is about friendlies running into your line of fire or not knowing that you have just thrown a grenade into a room. 2. If somebody breaks from your formation and runs 5 metres in front of you without giving any warning, the weapon lock detects when he is dangerously close to the firing line and stops the shooter. A certain range threshold needs to be in place and 15-30 metres would be sufficient as IFF is not an issue there. 3. The normal rules for IFF will apply if an unidentified person is in your sights at say 100 metres and if you make a mistake you can potentially kill a friendly (weapon lock will not interfere). 4. Finally a 3-dimensional circle grenade indicator can highlight where a friendly grenade is thrown to units in sufficient proximity. This greatly helps when voice chat is unavailable for one reason or another. The indicator is mostly beneficial in clearing buildings as it will ensure that each player has the warning not to enter a particular room.

This is a good point as I have not given thought to how much processing power will be allocated to this system. It will have to check each soldier's firing path for friendlies within a specified range and if it locks, it will have to constantly update the position to see if he can shoot again. As I said before Arma offers wide open areas so this is actually a non-issue more or less.

Strange, Cold War Crisis is older but the A.I. in tandem with the clock system was so accurate it immersed me in the game. The clock was my situational awareness and really made the difference, it saved me from certain death on many occasions where I was walking into enemy teeth before my team warned me. ---------- Post added at 02:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:49 PM ---------- http://www.pcdistrict.com/modules/productcatalog/product_images/143699-operation-flashpoint-resistance-8110.jpg I am using the above screenshot for reference. There needs to be a "danger close" threshold for firearms. Friendly troops that are further away from the shooter (at about 30 metres) need more time to actually move into his firing line, whereas if you look at the troops who are closer (at about 10 metres), they are more dangerous as they can very quickly cross his firing line. What this means is that weapon lock will have to be flexible and activate at different proximity thresholds depending on the range from the shooter. On a second thought it may be appropriate to give some warning to friendlies in front of the shooter as well (especially if they are facing away from the shooter), but I guess bullet crack and sound should be appropriate and distinct enough.

Exactly, I am genuinely impressed with your ability to comprehend english, I think people here are generally tired of the same old suggestions and tend to wave anything off after looking at the title or reading the first line. EDIT: With grenade indication there only needs to be sufficient proximity. So when it is close enough to be dangerous to you. If you are too far away, there is no need for the indicator to light up.

If an icon is on top of a friendly grenade, isn't that 3D indication? It is very useful in an urban context where your friendly may not be able to tell you that he has just thrown a grenade into a room, but the icon will indicate grenades not just within your range, but behind walls as well. ---------- Post added at 02:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:17 PM ---------- Sorry I cannot understand what you are trying to say.

I can tell the difference, what is the point you are trying to make?

This is another misunderstanding. The subject is not about IFF. It is about friendlies running into your line of fire or not knowing that you have just thrown a grenade into a room. The normal rules for IFF will apply if an unidentified person is in your sights at say 100 metres, so the game will not tell you if it is a friendly or a foe. This you have to deduce yourself and if you make a mistake you can potentially kill a friendly (weapon lock will not interfere). If on the other hand, somebody breaks from your formation and runs 5 metres in front of you without giving any warning, the weapon lock detects when he is dangerously close to the firing line and stops the shooter. A certain range threshold needs to be in place and 15-30 metres would be sufficient as IFF is not an issue there.

This is a good point, but the issue with the weapon lock is the same as with the 3D friendly grenade indicator. I had very few friendly fire incidents in Cold War Crisis campaign. Mostly it was A.I. running in front of my fire line where I could not see him in advance as sighting the weapon greatly reduces how much you can see. Thinking about it now it is probably a non-issue as Arma offers wide open expanses of land.

No, Modern Warfare does not have 3-dimensional grenade indicators for friendlies. It indicates only enemy grenades in a 2-dimensional way whereas the suggestion is only friendly grenades in a 3-d way provided there is sufficient proximity.

Some brilliant points made. I swear CWC/Resistance animations, environment and combat looked better to me than the arma series that followed. The transitions in the campaign were brilliant. At first the brewing storm and the eagerness to fight, then exhaustion and a feeling of hopelessness as I kept getting pinned down in the first battles and had to witness defeat. Then the amazing cutscenes that reflect the players mood and give that necessary break from the action while developing the plot. And you are gradually being drawn in to the story yourself, your enthusiasm grows for it. Losing montignac and falling into enemy encirclement was an experience that no other game or film will repeat. It is just all the pieces coming together, not just one individual aspect of the game.

The game is incapable of populating the world with enough units for the map size of 225 sq km. To improve performance it would be more sensible if just the mission area was rendered and more units processed in real time. Lower end machines would benefit significantly.

but if these units are suspended so to say, then they lose the ability to move about and are solely dependent on the player triggering them to spawn again. Flashpoint needs real solutions.

The real issue lies with the a.i. using up all processing power. Strangely, cwc a.i. on veteran difficulty with super a.i. turned on performs much better than it does in arma 2. The only issue seems to be difficulty in acquiring targets at close range. The ultimate goal for bis is to produce more at a lower cost: a.i. needs to function under a simpler but a more efficient system. As it stands now it is unnecessarily complex.

The radio communication in arma 2 sounded very choppy. How about making radio communication less specific but more fluid? Narrow down target identification to more general classes (ie infantry, tanks, trucks, helicopters) and give more autonomy to the squad. That way you will hear more believable speech.

It would be better for the hitpoints system for armor to be scrapped in favour of a binary system where depending on where the tank is hit, it is either completely disabled, or certain functionalities are lost, or it does not take any damage at all. For example a T-55s turret and frontal hull can never be penetrated by lighter RPGs, but areas on the sides of the hull and on the back take only shot to cause complete destruction. You can also disable the driver's viewing prisms if you cannot flank it to attack the weak spots, but the driver himself remains alive and needs to turn out to be able to see again. By positioning yourself on high hills or rooftops you can also expose the weak armor on the top of the turret and the engine compartment etc. I just think it would be closer to the spirit of Arma if we had this.

Do you know what the Flashpoint/Arma series have been lacking all along? It is location-dependent damage to armored units. Imagine that Abrams' hull front and turret front are completely impervious to light shoulder mounted RPGs and you have to flank it in order to hit the track sides or the back of the hull to destroy it. A single rocket to a specific weak spot should disable it. This means that tank hunting will not turn into a frantic attempt to place 2 rockets anywhere on the tank before it sees you, but instead a single accurate disabling shot. As for kinetic "Sabot" rounds, the degree of impact should determine if damage is caused or not to a tank. So a 90 degree hit guarantees a puncture (this also depends on range and the location that is hit), and an impact at 40 or so degrees will just deflect the round with no damage being caused.

Is Arrowhead using binary armor? By that I mean varying armor thickness that will make some parts (i.e. hull and turret front) completely invulnerable to lighter shoulder mounted weapons.

I watched a demo of one mission where the player has to take out incoming Su-25 Frogfoot planes with some old soviet-era AA gun. I must say that it looked ridiculous that he took them all out as they went for their first pass. If you remember the Shilkas and Vulcans in Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, it was nearly impossible to line up a shot against fast moving planes with them and even if you managed to, you had to deal with the armor.

Does anyone know if the minimum specifications will now be lower for the expansion game? I am asking this because I assume Bohemia had time to work with game stability and take care of any bugs/glitches that were causing issues in the past.