instagoat

CMD 2005 US Infantry, ExA HMMWVs, Razani, Photoshop Deliberately playing with shaders off. They´re ugly in Arma 1 :(

The OA tutorials are a step in the right direction, and they´re much better than what came with Arma 2 vanilla. However, they´re not enough. For example, the HC one explains you how to set waypoints... and that´s it. Details like what type of Unit does what, or how to set up medical support units and stuff like that is left for the player to find out on his own. The tutorials only teach the bare bones right now, and not the juicy bits. Someone like the current default arma gamer, who is more or less versed in military procedures, knows what a base of fire and a pincer movement is, and how to execute these ingame will have no problem with that kind of setup. The usual customer, however, isn´t set up for this kind of game. Even if they´re the mature type that´s usually drawn to the Armas, if they´ve played nothing but the new Rainbow Six´s, Ghost Recons and especially mainstream shooters like the fish game or battlefield, they will have been trained to run around like a headless chicken and die a lot in arma. I think the game, after improvements (not cutting anything out) to the command interfaces, will need to give new players a rundown of how an infantry squad is used in the battlefield, what weapons are for and how best to use them. Most people will know what an AT gunner does. But how to properly use a SAW-gunner to greatest effect, or a Designated Marksman, or how to set up an ambush on the fly, or select a good route for an attack, reading terrain, reacting to contact, or even navigation with only map and compass will need to be explained to people. And, the realistic way of playing the game, ie, no waypoint markers, no HUD, things like that will need to be presented to the player as something juicy and enjoyable. The best arma experience is gained when playing with the help off and AI skill to the max, in my experience, and that is what people should be trained for. tl;dr: Add tutorials for land navigation, employment of assets, basics in combat movement and planning, and specialised weapon tutorials, with a big kobayashi maru style "exercise" at the end, which will test everything the player has learned. Make the training fun, and passing it an achievement. But without actual achievements in the game, please, I find those a cheap way of creating interest in the game.

This is something people seem to think a lot, that we (the ones who want some improvements on the game to happen, and throw a lot of buzzwords around in the process, like "Accessibillity" and "Ease of entry") want the game to be made more "accessible" by "taking out everything that´s supposedly hard". This is, (I hope) not the case, at least not for me. I am fond of my toybox, and I don´t want the next iteration to take any of the features out. I want high command, the modules, the units, the maps, the massive amount of commands, the AI, the openness and randomness. What I for example mean by "accessibillity" is tutorials that actually show the full range of commands, why they´re there and how they´re used. Same for pretty much every feature. A new player has to feel secure that they´ve been given the tools to fulfill their mission. My friends didn´t feel secure, because of the massive amount of content that was just thrown at them without explanation of what to do with it. Scaled tutorials, full body of content, improved labelling of the commands and more intuitive, clever context sensitive menus, less units with greater fidelity and features, and the possibillity to bring back all the goodies we´ve been playing with up until now. I bet there are a lot of people out there who would play Arma, and would grow fond of it, if they were just led into it a bit more gentle, instead of frust-bombing them into submission. The hobby could do with some reinforcements, but right now, getting into it is a bit difficult. I hope the team will fell the right decisions, not ditch the base gameplay that makes Arma so great, but instead focuses on explaining it so well that even the impatient players are captured. And if they then don´t get it, they´re probably the wrong demographic.

I think outside of realism, gameplay wise, it´s a good feature. Games like Commandos had it, and there it worked. As for the realism, I´d wait to judge the feature until it´s implemented. Picture the following. A power substation has been attacked by rebels and the garrison is in the process of getting beefed up by the Iranians. You know that, you get a contact to fetch you a clean Uniform and Papers from one of the new arrivals (Possibly conscripts, formerly wounded soldiers or washouts from other units that don´t know each other very well), you sneak in (wearoing the appropriate Uniform, Rank and Unit tabs (feature?) and weapon, get assigned to guard duty, plant your satchels and blow the thing up, and escape (sans Uniform) in the confusion. It all depends on how it is implemented. I agree that the "stealing the uniform from a dead guy" is a pretty ridiculous Idea, especially if you just turned him into swiss cheese.

With great difficulty. I tried to do it back in 2009 using pen and paper, using multiple layers instead of the two/three we have now, reducing commands, grouping commands, but the system right now is really as good as you can get it without making it less complex. What CAN be done, however, is better labelling, and improving the context sensitive command bar. Good, clear labelling can go a long ways in information design, which is what the command bar ultimately touches upon. The player needs to see at first glance what a command does. Example: If I click "Flank Right", I would expect the Unit to attack its current target, and try to flank it from the right. Instead, the Unit takes up flank guard to the right, and stays there. If I click "Advance", I would expect the Unit to move towards the current enemy position, putting down fire in the meanwhile. What this command really should say is "Take point". Bad labelling is the real crux right now, not complexity. Complexity is daunting, but good tutorials can teach newbs how to deal with it. And they don´t need it anyway if they want to do coop/pvp multiplayer anyway.

Absolutely not! I´m not trying to lobby for dumbing the game down here, all I am proposing is a perspective on why it could be that the general gamer has a hard time getting into the game. Arma is complex and vast, and I wouldn´t want to loose that in arma 3. Streamlining and optimization, yes, but dumbing down and ditching features for the sake of easy access, no.

Back when I got into OFP, I was in middle school. I played it maybe an hour a day, and mostly played the stock missions and campaigns, and fooled around in the editor. Some things were pretty daunting to me then, like the squad command interface, which I subsequently never used until Arma 2 rolled around.

Having spent a little extra thought, I´m not sure I like the prospect of a game-i-fied arma... The toybox is what I enjoy tremendously. Just the stock content needs to be a lot tighter than it´s been before. OFP was so good because it delivered a working, enjoyable campaign with some really memorable missions: they were simple at times, but very effective. So I actually enjoy hearing from the team that they´re not going to do hundreds of billions of vehicles this time, instead trying to make what they have as best as they can. less. is. more.

It´s a good weapon, especially in the hands of the AI. When pitting a squad of enfield gunners against a normal US army squad, the enfield gunners win more often than not, interestingly. At least, they did back when I tested it when OA came out.

Was only a matter of time for this to happen. Same thing as with kazakhstan getting upset about OF:RR. Halp, wargaem played in our countries, BAN EVERYTHING. That they don´t want their Island connected with WW3 is understandeable, but I think this won´t lead anywhere nasty for BIS, the Game, or Lemnos, unless they decide to embarass themselves in an internet lawsuit. I don´t know how much IRL lawsuits would hurt BI, though. Chances are, though, that this won´t do anything. Apart from official protest, nothing seemed to have come from the thing about Kazakhstan and Red River, for example. Unless that´s why they stopped developing OFP... (which I highly, highly doubt.) Nontheless, it´s a bit disturbing.

This won´t wreck the theory of relativity. It just would mean that our understanding of the universe is (no surprise there) even less complete than we thought it was. Einstein´s theory of relativity has been tested often, and so far without any wrongs showing up that would have wrecked it. One example is Einstein´s own calculation of the perihelion of mercury (which was previously inexplicable, using newtonian gravity), which turned out to be exactly what the orbit of mercury was. If the theory wouldn´t work, it would constantly come up with the wrong numbers: it doesn´t. So it´s not wrong, it´s just incomplete, if anything. We also have experience with particles exceeding the speed of light in a medium, so it might be that something similar is going on here (which I doubt, since neutrinos don´t interact with anything, bar a few very, very rare occasions. They can fly trough a galaxy of lead and not be stopped). There might be something going on here. Hopefully it´s not as wrecking as some things string theory might suggest (ie, causality just being an illusion that could fall apart for no discernible reason at every moment.) Interesting find, though, will try to keep updated on this. Edit: No confirmations from other places like this. Something like what lawrence krauss once said, if the data is radically different from what you´ve been expecting, most of the time the data is just wrong. So I´ll hold my breath on this, until something more definite is confirmed by the other labs working on this.

How about 2030 era Common Resource Zone North Koreans? (I know, it´s probably not a good suggestion, but some realistic near-future soldiers from a rarely done country could be fun, I thought. They could have a mix of chinese, russian and Iranian equipment, also some unique indigenously produced suits and armour.)

Questions of logic. As people know, I generally don´t care a lot about detail realism. Exact modelling of the looks of a particular gun, or the correct makeup of a force both in technology and equipment don´t matter in the end, because all guns shoot and all tanks do pretty much the same except with more bang. What I have a problem with, though, especially as a singleplayer person, is questions of logic in the force makeup. The most glaring twist in logic, at least right now, appears to be the extensive use of evidently israeli gear by similarily clearly iranian soldiers. This raises multiple, and to me, worrying questions. Firstly, why are they using Merkavas and Tavors, when there are modern weapons in development both in Iran and in China that could be used instead. And, this is the knick-knack part, -how- did they aquire this gear. The tom clancy (ie, cheap copout) explanation would be "China copied the gear and mass produced it for the alliance, because western gear is clearly superior and thus more desireable to be used." Ditto for the merkava and the M-ATV. How and why are these being used by the eastern alliance? Did Israel get overrun and had her stocks looted by the eastern armies, who were desperately short on equipment? (This has terrible political implications in the real world, obviously). Or, as I mentioned before, are these mere copies? Or, are the tavor and merkava not Israeli gear to begin with (!) in the Armaverse? It does not make sense to me. Moreover, the logic of BOTH nato and shanghai-cooperation org armies using Merkavas and (possibly) Namers escapes me too. Both of them using the same equipment at once, and especially these two vehicles which are -way- too heavy to be transported anywhere in any meaningful numbers (which is crucial in a high-speed modern global warfare scenario)... they -do- look cool though. Am I counting rivets here? I´d like to think I am not: the choice of equipment has implications for the background story, unless the origins of the equipments are -completely disregarded-. Latter would sort of tear out the last bits of connection to the real world, and I propose that any name for the factions would then become completely meaningless and interchangeable too. The story needs to be anchored in some sort of background world: if this isn´t the real world, a substantial amount of completely original content would need to be provided to make it make sense again, I believe. Ie, a timeline that fills all the holes, as well as background content about the equipment, its origins and how and why it is being used by whom. Maybe I am overthinking this, possibly I´m even being a rivetcounter at this point, however, I am genuinely concerned about this. What does the community think? Cheerio Instagoat

Enjoy Edit: Noticed an error and corrected it, altered the logo so it doesn´t have the blurry flag on it anymore. Hopefully this is more pleasurable than the previous version.

Well, weh... Looks like their take on the OFP franchise has run out of steam. Now that they´ve run a good name into the mud proper, they´re finally moving on to doing something else. Not even a hint of competition for Arma 3.

Good points there. The whole argument is about perceived "unfairness" more than "unrealism" in this case, I think. Modern combat is deadly, tanks out in the open will get sniped fast by enemy air power. The argument that "In real life you have to hit more switches" doesn´t count, because adding more controls only enables less players to do good in the game, because they have to fight the controls first. If you´re in a helo, you´re playing a trained individual who knows how to work the switches, so it´s realistic to assume that he can (even if the player can´t) work to detect and lock on targets very quickly. The only thing that´s maybe a bit off balance is the speed and precision of the detection, as well as Identification. IFF would need to be implemented to make that more realistic: detected targets should be white by default, and manually be designated as "enemy" by the on-board AI (gunner) or the player himself. Don´t know how practicable that solution is though... Cheerio Insta

This would be neat. The whole undercover thing offers a boatload of possibillities, all of which would be quite fascinating to explore. I wonder, though, how much of it the devs will be able to implement in the relatively short time left until next year. There´s a whole game to be made, and unfortunately, small yet complex features (like this looks to be) will end up under the bus :/ Still, interested to see what BI do with this. From what we´ve seen so far, though, it unfortunately seems to be quite simplicistic.

I´m totally interested in the 27th MEUs valiant stand against the Iranians on Limnos. Or the battle of Brno. Can we get maps? Maybe even missions (A full battle is really just a lot of smaller ops being carried out simultaneously)? As for the Nato forces, I think the lore only relates to the assets you´ll have available during the campaign. The toybox on the whole will likely be more complete.

A more realistic take on the "snatching the enemy uniform" bout would be cool, even though difficult to implement from a gameplay perspective. Players would need to be able to judge wether or not and how fast and by whom they´re being spotted, so they can plan their actions accordingly. Otherwise, snatching an enemy uniform would be a frust fest. On the other hand, if it remains as it is right now, it´s gonna be too easy, even for sneak-haters like me.

Congrats on the new website, BI, beautiful work! Nice read too, looking forward to whatever else you´re gonna put up on there

ACE2 Smokedog3´s Hellmand 5x5 map

Working parallax has probably been stated already. Here´s an example: Because it´s clearly doable in Arma 2, as evident from this, totally not photoshopped picture, it should also be easy to do in Arma 3. Totally. (But in all seriousness, it´d be nice, albeit not a high priority.)

Just found this. Really nice work, if you ever find the time to continue and finish it, I´ll get this for sure. Both thumbs up on this :)

This is happening only with AI. Player weapons are unaffected. Thanks for the info too, looking forward to the next release :> really enjoyable mod! Edit: Can you also specify which version number the fix will be in, so I know when to update to which version. Will it be 1.12?

Hello. I updated my ACE a short while ago, and my internet is currently capped to 64kbit/sec so I cannot update. My current version is 1.11.497. In some guns, in particular machineguns and some vehicle mounted weapons, I am noticing excessive dispersion, rendering some guns but worthless. Added is a pict showing the M134 on the PMC truck, showing the dispersion. The target was only about 150 meters away, and he was shooting at it, expending his entire ammo supply without destroying the UAZ, only killing its driver after a couple of minutes. HMGs and coaxial MGs on tanks also show pretty bad dispersion levels. Is this intentional, or a bug on my end? I have inquired this before and I was told that the version I have now fixed this: are some of my other settings incorrect? Both AI skills and dispersion values in the config are set to 1. Thanks for any forthcoming information on this.