instagoat

Dev build is a more advanced but potentially unstable version of the beta. We get content earlier (for example, the two tanks arrived a full week and a half or so on dev build earlier than stable). Alpha has been discontinued.

That would've been yet another vintage model in the game. The L-159 is already pushing it along with the Kasatka and the Kamaz. I´d rather have more new stuff than yet more old stuff, to be honest.

Back when they envisioned the Attack helicopter that became the AH-64, they envisioned it to engage from 2 - 3 kilometers, and not get any closer. They even designed the weapons (initially TOW + 30mm cannon, then the Hellfires) to work together at that range. Helicopters need -much- larger engagement ranges. Best they should have a spotting distance of 5 km against moving vehicles, 3~ against "hot" vehicles with engine running and infantry in the open, and engagement range of 3 km, with minimum engagement range of 1 km (they should break off once they get that close, right now they fly right over the target.). The set object rendering distance should be the hard cap, though, to make helicopters on par with players.

But what the hell is an A-143?

welp, better pack up and close the company down, game won't sell with only one plane

I am going to look over all vehicles and units and see which have selections and which don't. I´ll pm you the FT issue asap, probably either before 15:00 or after midnight, so it´ll be "on your desk" tomorrow morning at the latest.

There's a couple of Units that in general don't seem to have functioning selections, some of the vehicles as well as some of the Units. Maybe we could make a list?

Once a cannon armed vehicle is around, helicopters are useless. I´ve a mission where an opfor gunship defends Rogain, and by the time it arrives, there are two or three AMVs around. It usually gets shot down the second it arrives.

Uh, no. I think you're not on the dev branch... The projectile has a perfectly ballistic trajectory. The NLAW and Titan behaves like you say, but those are missiles, not a rocket. Edit: At least for me, it describes a descending curve when launched in the horizontal from launch to detonation. I couldn't see any sudden abandonment of the projectile of slowing and steepening descent after 500 meters, but measuring this is a little difficult. Just from observing, it seems to be perfectly fine as ballistics go. At 30 degree launch angle, the detonation point is about 1.5 FOV's downward from launch angle. When launching from the south end of the air strip towards the east, I can get the round to impact on the ground when aiming 2 full FOV's above horizontal.

What? It already -does- have a ballistic flightpath. Aside from effects, it works like the ACE rpg now, unless I am missing something?

RPG-42 should not have a trail, it burns out inside the launch tube and is ballistic after that. But it also does not have a muzzle and backblast effect right now. The noise it makes is also wrong, it sounds like a rocket launch. The OFP LAW is more like how it should sound, interestingly.

I have a suspicion that they're trying to put a logistics and personell management side into the campaign, like the carrying over of gear and men in Resistance. And the way the map at E3 was designed, it looks as if they are also trying to go for a multi-ending, multi-forked storydesign, maybe with randomly designed mini-missions inbetween, using the generators they are putting together? But seriously, after all the rollbacks after the greek situation, pretty much everything we know about the Campaign is void.

VEHICLES DO EXPLODE. That Video is much longer. After about ten minutes, the tank still burns, and the MG ammunition begins to cook off. Vehicle damage "response" in arma is extremely simplistic. There is another video where a BMP blows up with an explosion as large as a house. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj7vIvw92HE Vehicles -do- explode. For example, if the purging system of an empty fuel tank is damaged and it gets punctured, you get a fuel air explosion. Example here: <- we do not have things like this either, where a vehicle gets turned into nothing but a flying cloud of shrapnel. Note how there's not even large parts leaving the explosion.Arma explosions are -much- too small, and the effects do not resemble in any way those found in real life anyways. They´re basically gasoline explosions, big, slowly moving, rolling balls of flame. The conditions of when a vehicle should explode are complex, and not even mods like ACE get it right. The consensus among rivetcounters seems to be that vehicles "do not explode", so they don't. Instead, they catch on fire and occasionally sparkle a little bit? Sorry, no. That the wrecks look ugly is a different story where I agree, however, the whole effects system is rather vintage, so I´d not expect many changes. There also are other places that need attention, with possibly higher chances of change occuring, so, yeah.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?59852-Mission-name-standard Well, there -is- this post... maybe that could just be popped in there, or something?

I think Karel Moricky (Gaia) is involved, and I also heard they have recruited some mission designers directly from the community at the start of Arma 3s development. Gaia was responsible for, among other things, Eagle Wing and the PMC missions.

1970s South American guerrilla war, involving national army equipped with french/south american vehicles, american/russian aircraft, british/russian weapons, reflecting a complex and troubled history since the end of WW2. Then you would have CIA and KGB training units on both sides of the conflict, guerrillas, and what would be essentially a counter-insurgency type of operation where -both sides have technological parity-. Then, as a bonus, you would have US Airborne (landlocked nation this time pls) troops along with all their airborne equipment. Vehicles to be used should be, for example: T-54 and/or AMX-30 as national army MBTs AMX-13 or SK-105 as national army light tanks AMX-VCI or M75 APCs (No M113s pls) as national army APCs M4 Sherman and M24 Chaffee tanks in national army reserve and captured by rebels Early BTRs as rebel and army reserve APCs RPG-2, RPG-7, Bazookas, WW2 surplus gear mixed with modern gear from various sources. US Paratroopers using M551 Sheridan tanks and M114 APCs, as well as then top notch assault rifles and other equipment. Mountain, Grassland and Jungle warfare on a single, 100 x 100 km map with 1x1 meter tile size. My hope.

BW mucking around photography things.

By the way, does anybody by now have a clue what CSAT stands for. Central South Asian Treaty?

Well, it is more about what the game theoretically offers, not necessarily what people actually end up doing with it. I agree about the tools, there have been many, many complaints about their quality for years. BI said they´d provide new ones at release, though, but if they´re so much under pressure that they toss out the campaign, I suspect the modding community will not see those tools at release either. I think complete sandboxing in a campaign is bad games design, but Arma has always been about an open and free approach, where success or failure was entirely the players responsibility, and not down to the forced nature of the mission design. But in the end, you always have an objective in a campaign mission, and if you want to achieve that you need to do things a certain way. An example is the mission in resistance where you go to the Villa in the middle of the fields on the eastern coast to listen in on the soviet officers meeting there. Going in guns blazing would not only screw up the mission objective, but it would get you killed. For the community to grow, the tools need to be better, though. The hurdles to get content in are rather too high for the average person with the average attention span and dedication to get in. No matter what the modders say, I think everyone who has gotten into modding Arma in their free time put up a lot more effort and dedication than the average person reskinning CoD, for example. And in general, if BI wants a healthy and active modding and mission building community, the tools with which to get content ingame need to be made up to scratch. Because without a community to sustain the game, it will tank rather quickly. re Red River. This is especially critical because the series has been around for ten plus years, and many really, really oldtimers are by now moving on. That will change the modding landscape, and right now I heavily doubt that we will see a modding scene as diverse as it was during OFP times, or even Armed Assault times. No lega warz, AK-wielding vampire wizards, Iraqi tank battles and hyper-realistic infantry mods galore unless people can get in reasonably easy, considering the changed type or person that is buying these games today, as opposed to ten years ago.

Sandbox is a game that, aside from providing native content, allows the users to use the full extent of its features to generate their own content, including and/or exluding native content. It means that you can do anything with it, and if BI decides to tell a story with the stuff they are putting in, they are just exploiting their own sandbox to provide a baseline for the player as he goes deeper into the game. OFP was the first game, and from the very first moment on, it was a sandbox. People were modding even the demo prior to the release of the full game. The native content was, again, to provide a baseline, and not a be-all end-all. Especially considering some of the talent in this community in particular, at least on the development side of new Units/Realistic and Authentic Vehicles, Soldiers, Equipment and all things that go along with that, Bi cannot provide the be all and end all simply because the community does some things better than they. DayZ and Wasteland are NOT Sandboxes, they are open world games. GTA is not a sandbox, it is an open world game. Pretty much -no- major title calling themselves "Sandbox" today is a Sandbox: they are bumble-about-and-collect-achievements open world games. Arma is not like that, it still and only rewards the Player through his achievements in the native Campaign and Missions, and through the creation of his own content in and for the game. In other games you get an achievement, in Arma you get your mission uploaded to Armaholic and the feedback you get is posts on the forums and climbing download tickers. At least, that's my perspective on the Sandbox, in the way that Sandbox is understood outside of AAA Open World sandbox-pretender games.

Nato, CSAT, AAF, Bandits, Civilians. I think they do consider the civilians as a faction, otherwise I would suspect we will see an additional Guerrilla faction. There are bandit textures for many Uniforms anyway, and a Bandit leader's codename seems to appear in the files too. Maybe Nato, CSAT, occupied Altian security forces (ie, CSAT supporting Native guerrillas.), Altian Armed Forces who may be actually opposed to both blue and red and finally Kabeiroi bandits grown from preexisting criminal networks on the Island, who may be running the black market (and thus may be useful to whoever can bribe them onto their side, since they can control the civilian population without exerting any force bar raising black market prices and starving them of water and food.). The political situation on the Island is very complicated at any rate, so I understand that a good campaign will take time. However, I would be disappointed if we would see more recycled Vehicles from previous installments. The kamaz and the kasatka are already and basically Arma 2 models (the Kamaz even appears in Game 2 screenshots from before 2006, if they used the same model, so that's pre Armed Assault vintage.), so I´d not be sure I´d like to see the green APC be something we've already had before. Also depends on how well done it is, too. There are some very slight quality disparities across some of the art assets in the game already, and I´d hate for more to pop up as the time pressure mounts. But we've had so many good surprises with the Ifrit, Marid and BTR-K already, so I´m hopeful that other things that will still be introduced will be up to standards too.

To be fair, what metalcraze means is that once you stop sprinting, all Units have the same penalty no matter how much they carry. The difference in covering 500 meters I just tested for a Unit in underpants and a Unit loaded to the max with missile launcher and sniper rifle was.... 0 seconds. The empty Unit only had an empty rifle to match the animations. The time for the 500 meters was 2 minutes flat, starting fatigue was set with this setFatigue 0.55 to prevent the Unit from sprinting. That is the problem with the system, not the sprinting. I think it is one thing that needs to be addressed, and missing niggles like that would worry me more than a missing campaign. Same for the -~*MaGiC*~- AT missiles, right-click-to-win lock on system, the useless action menu, the half-assembled health system and various building sites with the AI. I find those more problematic than the Campaign. And I would be disappointed if BI would provide the standing issues with "solutions" in the forms of rollbacks. The focus on the AI and the attention it is getting is fantastic, unfortunately there are more things that need to be solved, so getting the leading brainpower away from the campaign and into solving other, long standing issues is more pressing. Especially now that time is becoming a precious commodity.

I use the defaults for testing, and play on veteran difficulty all the time. I think it is .92 / .85

Actually, I -love- this turret from a tactical point of view. The turret is low profile and inconspicious enough to blend into the background when you go over the top of a hill, and with the CITV just being this tiny ball on top, you can use it like the Kiowa's Sensor pod in a way. It spoils the sleed looks of the Kamysh, okay, but we´re fighting a war here, not (entirely) out to look cool. I love this tank. My only iffy with it (and all vehicles) is that the AI doesn´t know how to fight hull down or use terrain as an advantage, even less than infantry. That, and I am still not sure about the armour system and its hp stuff.

I would assume defaults in the difficulty, and then changing the settings in the Editor. Otherwise it doesn´t make sense. I´m only using editor skill bar now, not changing the default settings in any way when testing. If you mess with the cfgs or skill sliders in the difficulty, it becomes impossible to do consistent tests. The skill slider in the editor makes it complicated enough.