instagoat

With the right kind of food source, we can produce excess amounts of calories for the current population. Unfortunately that would mean we need to harvest insect larvae, and at least in the west it would be hard to convince people of that being a good idea. Resources aren't limited, they are just hard to get at. What farming collectives have to do with resource scarcity, I don't know either. There were reasons why the collective farming initiatives failed, but those are not related to resources, but socio-economical reasons, such as the fact that the massive overproduction was wasted on a complete lack of mechanized transport. The Ukraine produced tons of food during the Holodomor, but nobody had the equipment to bring that food anywhere, so it stayed in the fields to rot. And where it didn't, Stalin had bluecaps standing by to prevent the food from reaching the rebellious peasantry. Chinese food production suffered because of maos gross incompetence in leading a country, he was a general who had nil clue of how to lead and organize progressive developments in a country that was virtually without industry at the time. Essentially, all communist countries are prime examples of what happens if you try to force a country through the force of weapons to turn into something else. The illusion of marxism being "scientific" helped with that. However... Any modern view of economics is also just as "scientific", ie, not scientific at all. The Idea of claiming that anarcho-capitalist Ideas will work is just as idiotic as claiming that hardline communist Ideas will work: they both rely on grossly oversimplifying assumptions and ignorance of human psychology, as well as natural effects of friction, imbalance and frankly, chaos. The current system does not work either: no system with top down control can work unless you assume zero lagtime and that everybody everywhere fells the right decisions at the right time. Unfortunately, no one has enough information, much of that information is wrong, nobody has tools to "correctly" (We don't even know what correct is in economy, it completely depends on your economic school of thought) implement their plans to work with that information and nobody can project what the result of their implementations and decisions will be. The only thing that economic forecasts have succeeded in is getting it wrong, all the time, every time, and you only get clever people making obvious statements with 20 20 hindsight once the events have occured. It is worse than the weather. The good thing about money is that we have control over the amount in the system. The value however is extremely dependent on -subjective- perception of 3rd parties with relation to their own real assets. Because of that, it doesn't matter how much money the government hands out to people who need it (as they did with the banking bailouts, where 700 billion dollars were just summoned from thin air.) as long as the market's perception and acceptance of the currency remains in high esteem. Also, I agree with some people that by now we have reached the stage where the work people do begins to have less value than the Ideas they have. Instead of forcing people to toil all their lives, often throwing away a massive amount of their life in draining and bothersome pursuits that could be more economically and effectively done by machines, give them a basic income, and send them to school. Establish a system of reward that does not rely on eternally transferring value tokens from A to B, creating pools of wealth and pools of poverty, but rather a system that goes toward -rewarding- people, rather than just being a driver for people to prevent their fear of starving to death. People do not work because it is fun (That is a nice addition for many, but certainly not everybody), but because without work, in an elbows-out no welfare society, they would literally starve to death. If they would be guaranteed not to starve, and work was a truly free enterprise to pursue at ones liberty, I think the effects on society would be immediately beneficial. Unfortunately, as with all systems of economy, we cannot know beforehand, and so we have to try it out. Contrary to pretty much anything else proposed, this hasn't been tried yet, while communism and hardcore capitalism have, and both have been found to be detrimental to most participants in such a society.

Mateba Auto revolver? Quite looks like it. I like the news marksman rifle too, the camo looks like that used by the AAF, or possibly the russians?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-48_Enforcer This pls. Or a different super high performance turboprop driven attack craft. Prop driven planes make more sense than high speed jets, aside from the stealth aspect, but they can use small fields, carry heavy weapons, etc. There's a reason why the A1 Skyraider was in use for such a long time. This is also why in south america, turboprop planes are used for ground support as well as hunting for slow moving opponent craft (in their case drug smugglers, in our case attack and recon helicopters and UAVs). Another possible inspiration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_A2D_Skyshark

Uh, I've no clue, so I´ll just leave this here

Wow, that is magic! Many, many thanks! Did extract it by hand? That's a lot of work

I´m looking forward to that. Could we possibly get a look at the explosion effects and impact effects of shells at some point too? Reducing particle count and making the effects more varied and realistic, possibly changing the particle system so you can have assymetric particles that do not scale like the current particles do, ie, remain at a fixed size rather than scaling with distance to remain at their pixel width?

The whole effect looks weird still. i've provided a ton of videos of various vehicles firing in my feedback post here: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=14023 There should be a large, quickly travelling ball of fire followed by thin smoke, and then the smoketrail of the bore evacuator pumping out the residual gas and powder fumes from the barrel. It's still more reminiscent of a tannerite blast, rather than a tank gun going off. What'd be Idea would be an animated muzzle flash like they had for the rifles in OFP, together with the new muzzleflash animations in the game right now for the rifles, and the sprites and particles used for dust, bore evacuator and residual smoke.

If you want interesting and mentally stimulating games, look to the indie sector. Games like receiver, the Void, Penumbra, FTL or Antichamber. Everybody reduces games to the three mainstream titles and ignores everything that doesn't pop up on the major (and largely rubbish) games sites and magazines. There is everything you want out there, just go and find it.

The behaviour is generally not adaptive enough to the threat. When AI detect tanks, they should take all possible effort to find hard cover, preferably indoors and upstairs. They canÄt use the buildings, they just occasionally walk through them. In ten test runs, I had one of the AI once on an upper storey, and there he stood on one of the nodes on a balcony, in plain view of the street. (Not where the tank was, but still risky). They are also completely ignoring which way the tank is looking. The tank also has eyes in the back of its head, ie, it can spot enemies without looking in their direction. I ran across the street behind it with the turret, commander and driver looking the other way, and it still spotted me and opened fire. If it had cameras that players could access too, okay, but right now this magic vision vehicles have, especially tanks, is annoying. Tanks are incredibly blind even with modern technology to aid them. I have been inside Leopard 2, Leopard 1 and I´ve seen the inside layout of an ex-NVA T-series tank recovery vehicle (probably was a T-55 based one, can't remember), and how little you can see through these episcopes is astonishing. This is not reflected at all for the AI and needs to be addressed. Tanks should easily spot anything they are looking at, and everything outside their view should be invisible until they actively scan for it.

There was a mod for OFP that did something like this.

Crowdfunding is terribly risky, and not a solution unless you are fairly sure of your audience. I think the problems the engine has are a relict of its development heritage, which seems to have been muddled and confusing. BI never licensed the engine out, as far as I know, and so there was no real pressure to provide easy access kit to the outside, which is slowing them down internally even now. I remember the devs talking a lot about improving internal documentation back when arma 3 started to be developed. They didn't even understand how the AI worked on the whole in 2010 because it was undocumented and the original writers were not part of the company anymore. That DayZ is taking so long is also an indication to me that this engine is either a hell to develop on, or they do not have enough people, or there is some kind of organizational problem that stifles progress. I really don't know, but I'd like to understand why so much content that was shown working ingame in previous demos is not present in the release, and if it is present only partially. Case in point, there are two identical opfor helmets with different names, half the uniforms do not conform to the colorway they are named of (sage combat uniform is using the normal multicam, black hexcam uniform actually uses the green colorway, broken officer uniforms for redfor and greenfor, effects that seem to be rather half finished on the whole both visually and in sound, etc.), there are tons of missing vehicles and dubious config streamlining that suggests to me an attempt of speeding up development rather than balancing (Such as all vehicles using identical weapon sets.), etc. There is a bug somewhere in the system. Another thing I doubt other engines could do better is the AI, which actually still is a major problem for me. The performance is still bad, and the AI has stopped doing the taking cover and being prone (because people complained, I guess, don't know why), firing standing up all the time instead. And putting AI into close combat will kill your fps in no time. And the tanks get stuck a lot. But, aside from untested and unproven concept engines, there are no systems in game technology right now that do what RV does. And I`d be rather opposed to the suggestion of a change, unless somebody else first shows that they have an engine that can do what RV can do, and do it sufficiently better to warrant licensing cost and the cost of changing your staff over to learning the new engine, building libraries, figuring out a new workflow, etc, etc...

The AI needs some work towards exploiting cover and learning to stay off the streets whenever possible, in towns as well as in the countryside. They also need to stop "hiding on the wrong side of the wall". The mission below (sqm file only) is set in Kavala, 1x Merkava vs 3x AAF squads, with the tank sitting in a street junction turning the streets into obvious killzones. Observe the AI moving outside of cover, across the tanks line of fire, often even at a walk. No use of smoke (Does that even do anything?) or grenades or anything. Also, the vehicle's defensive system doesn't work, why model it? https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9U3xtNMOp_8ejdpQ0VNM0pZQ3c/edit?usp=sharing

Well, he's posted the source files and everything, so people can change and adapt the sight anyways? Why not use it to learn how to change these things yourself? I know I am going to try and look into this and see how it works. Then I just need to learn blender and start doing my own stuff. Edit: Also, bloody hell, more conflicts. This bites itself with the iansky scopes and the native ones of massi's pack, maybe some of the others. BI really needs to do something about this dumb attachment system :/

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=14931 As an example ticket to get the thread on track. Also the issues with sounds not ranging far enough and all distant sounds being generally very electrically distorted, rather than atmospherically filtered.

Not the same unless you know the algorythms used for the camouflage. These things have definite patterns that are very recognizable, which is why pretty much every ad-hoc variant of acupat you find on the net is plain wrong, or why there are no good multicam swatches around apart from alex vestin's, that have been made from scratch. I`m looking for the pattern proper, so fudging it doesn't cut it. Pomigit: Yes, I have something similar put together from the sniper mattresses that were put in with the full version (You can see them in use in the CSAT demo showcase), but they are rather low quality, and getting a clean pattern from the uniforms is really difficult, I couldn't do any better than what you have got. I am hoping that BI can provide a tile of the pattern for community use, since they have shown so many different variants of the pattern I assume they have a template (We've seen at least five different versions of the pattern so far, excluding the ones used on the divers)

The vanilla optics should fit all guns, no exceptions. I suggest trying to disable all mods and re-trying. The conflicts caused by addons are a known problem since the alpha, but BI hasn't made any definite statements about fixing that problem so far.

And in the end it'll turn out to be an engine that can do one thing great (dynamic world generation) and sucks at everything else.You can't have everything wrapped into one, and people generally seem to overestimate the potential that is in these engines. There is a reason why so much vintage stuff is still around: it is known, it is documented, you have an industry backing the technology up as far as hardware, and thus it is less risky to develop on it. Since the potentials are known, people know what they can do on an engine and what they can't. Very few companies today use their own in-house engines anymore, simply because they are a pain to work with when doing new game concepts. Example: OF:Dragon Rising. A racing game engine with a 64 entity cap, streaming problems, memory leaks that they tried to build an Arma competitor on. The result was a failiure. Changing from RV to another engine would be suicide, especially to a new engine like outerra that is undocumented, untested and unproven.

Found an interesting snippet, apparently the pants on the AAF soldiers are based on a tactical pant designed for a set of PMC BDU's by Emdom. http://prostores2.carrierzone.com/servlet/emdomusa/Detail?no=66 The real life variants are apparently khaki with coyote brown knee reinforcements. There's the rebel with the T-Shirt and the AAF pants, possibly these combinations could be used to balance the combat Uniforms. With the new hiddenselectionsmaterials it's easy to alter the look of the Uniforms too, so you could remove the shiny flag patches on the shoulders of the blufor Uniforms you're using. The new outfits from civvies (beggar) and FIA really open a new world of diversity for these Units, so I am really looking forward to your next updates on these. Are you also considering replacing the reskins with completely new 3D models at some point?

You know, people have been whining since the 1600s about how people just have it easier every year and how they get dumber and more hectic and how new things don't need skills and attention and everything. http://xkcd.com/1227/ Go and try to play competition level COD and then come back about the whole skill thing. Just because a game doesn't focus primarily on being brainy or caters to your particular interests that are somehow more sophisticated than that of the rest of the world doesn't make it dumber. Just saying, you know

Nice Idea, but it messes up the firing sounds for all vanilla weapons. Is it possible to fix that? Otherwise I like this.

People don't understand how complicated it is to teach an AI to do something dynamic in a 3D environment. Computers today can easily beat chessplayers at their own game, but until today there's never been a robot built that can cross the average inner city street. -All- games I have looked at so far, paying special attention to the AI from a layman's perspective (ie, what the player sees versus what's going on under the hood), have the AI cheating to one degree or the other and/or use environments tailored to AI performance. Arma does the opposite of any of those. The ballistics for the AI are identical, the vehicle handling is identical, performance of weapons in general is identical... and then you also get a completely free form environment that has largely been designed for the benefit of player eyes than AI. The reason why OF:RR went away from the large Island is because an AI is so much simpler to get to work in a defined corridor, rather than a completely open space. Even the most powerful pathfinding AI's today have their individual entities barely functioning above the cognitive level of your average household insect. You are trying to write realistic behaviours by hand, and if you consider how many different responses there could be to a situation inside a 3D environment is baffling. That the AI is able to do what it does already is a marvel to me at times, and every time they do something stupid I have to rein myself in and consider that nobody else has done something on the level of Arma's AI yet, as far as I am aware.

People have tried competing, and found even during development that a game as extensive and in such long-time development as Arma is very hard to match. Arma 2 smacked OF:DR around with the sheer bulk of its content and the heritage, while Codies decided to basically cut everything that made OFP OFP simply because they realized that it would be too much to try and make the game work on their inherently limited engine. You have other massive world games, but none feature such diverse AI and terrain combinations, and if they feature specialized assets, they are scripted. (Helicopters in Stalker, for example.) Could you imagine COD with the helicopters not being a show on rails, but rather dynamic AI trying to cope with battlespace, as the AI in Arma has to? There are probably engines that could do a better job, but A: this is a tiny market and B: BI pretty much has it nailed down at this point and C: others have tried at this point, and failed massively. There are obviously specialty sims, but those generally are unable to cover the breadth of Arma's battlespace simulation. The engine has some problems still, which are inherited from ancient times, but the integration of PhysX and the advancements in the graphics that are currently occuring tell us that it still has overhead. The problem just is that in the past, some parts of the engine have been very much neglected, and until everything is brought up to standard, we'll need another bit of time. The fact that the game is super enjoyable to play (I tried Binkowski's rendition of Infantry yesterday and it was really tense.) despite the flaws gives me hope that it will only get better. To me, this is finally not a release that tastes bitter despite all attempts to make it seem sweet, it tastes slightly sweet but a little flat. Building on a new engine is basically throwing -everything- that has been generated on RV so far out the window, including all knowledge and experience about the inner workings of the engine, learning a new engine to standard (which possibly needs to be licensed for expensive money), and then trying to build the game to the same extensive breadth of possibilities that RV offers right now. Sorry, that does not sound economical at all.

The BI scopes work because they are essentially the same as red dot optics, except with zoom. Previously with the overlay scopes you could tell the game to turn off NV (see the Sniper scope, it doesn't work with NV last I checked.), the new 3D optics do not seem to have that ability.

I liked VBS BAF lite's way of doing it. If you friendly fired, the game completely uninstalled itself immediately with a "The british army doesn't tolerate teamkilling asshats" prompt or something like that. Would be kinda harsh in this game, though.

I think the problem here is that the intended system was never fully implemented, much like the medical system that hints at more, but clearly is not taken as far as it apparently was meant to go. You -can- load yourself down with tons of weapons, realistically, but right now the punishment for overloading yourself isn't existent, practically. Another problem that really -is- important is the lack of seperate handling for heavy weapons such as heavy duty sniper rifles, MMG and other unwieldy weapons. I think one would need to go as far as having seperate animation sets for those, and I think it is something we should focus on and press BI a bit. The weight management system is crippled not because it iself is bad, but because of the deficiencies in weapons handling. For example, MMG's should not be fired from the shoulder, and if only for short periods of time. You should be physically pushed back when firing MMG/LMG when firing standing, and have a special kneeling stance for firing them when on the knee. Limiting the inventory by slots isn't the way to go, even though the current system is not perfect either, a weight based layout is more desireable. I'll probably try and survey what kind of stamina posts there are up on the tracker, and then try and come up with a solution suggestion for the community and BI to judge upon, because I want to be proactive rather than just complain. I doubt BI aren't realizing that some of the new features are somewhat inbalanced because of lack in other fields of the game, and I am sure we can get some synergy going to fix the infantry gameplay up to a truly superior standard. Which, in my humble opinion, should focus on enhanced gunplay (Inertia, Weapon weight affecting stance and stamina depending on how you carry the weapon, more sensible animations for heavy weapons.), enhanced bodyarmor simulation (Using RVmats and new penetration system and ditching the mathematical modifiers entirely.) and enhanced medical system (Knockdown on hit, Bleedout, Dual item medical system (Stop bleeding, Heal), increased body alarm response.). These three things, gunhandling, hit handling and medical system (including stamina.) appear to be most important as far as the infantry is concerned.