instagoat

I can´t see how they did a bad job with the cover, apart from the fact that it´s visually too busy (which works sort of as camouflage when its sitting on the shelf in a store), and maybe a liiiitttle cheesy. Otherwise, it points towards what´s inside the box, and it shows a little bit of what can be expected. Arma does have intense moments of action, but just like with guard duty and cleaning the lavatory which are omitted from ads from the military, they omitted the long walks and the... uh... I can´t think of another bad thing about Arma. A plain green (or in the case of Arrowhead, sand colour) box with the logo big on the front of it, and all the action on the inside of the flip-cover would´ve been nice, but I think I can live with this, as long as the contents are great.

I think BI is following trough with the general Idea of the cover, ever since OFP. In every case, you had a soldier on the cover, pointing his Gun (exception being Armed Assault) and looking dramatic. I completely don´t mind! And if you want to nitpick the focus of the picture you could continue with the lighting being off and the uniform not being too dirty, etc, and its pointless. After all, what matters is what is inside, not on the face of it. Whats much more interesting to worry about remains the AI, in my opinion. I don´t think I´ll be able to get into pvp gaming in the near future, so PR will nicely and silently slip past me. So that remains my primary concern. Suffice to say, I´m still confident, though. A few preview video snippets prove nothing. :> Cheers

This just gave me a dreamy burst of imagination about a mission like Cipher or Abandoned Armies, but with not only the locale and enemy troops being randomized, but the whole terrain, from the topography to the roads down to the last blade of grass and flower petal being randomly generated upon mission start. Is this just dreamweaving, or is something like that -actually- within the realm of the possible now? I am really getting excited about this expansion. It looks like it´ll reach Resistance levels of awesome, which means I´ll probably stick with the game for another 7 years like I did with OFP. Thumbs up on this

I concur, this was good. Looking forward to hearing more, I got your page bookmarked. Cheers Insta

Indeed, it´s beautiful. Again, the AI, though... I hope we´ll see a few snippets in the future that shows off a little more active reactions to having hellfires blow up all around them. Really trying to keep my hopes high here on the AI matter, however, after the improvement Arma2 gave over the OFP/Armed Assault AI, I think yet another leap may be a little too much to ask. Would be awesome though. Otherwise, great looking game, and the new features are really snazzy all around.

That´s a little bit disturbing. How are they going to do combat in these beautiful, dense townships if the AI still isn´t able to use Buildings to their advantage, and properly exploit cover?

I think Arma is first and foremost a game, before being a serious sim (That niche is filled by VBS), so features like that I actually find pretty welcome. Plus, knowing BIS, they will add an option to turn this thing off in case people don´t want to have it. So worrying about it seems a little pointless, no offense meant. Cheers Insta

A handful new Screenshots to be found over here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=70317&page=525 in the posted previews. I have to say, it is looking fantastic. Face textures on the caucasian people that don´t make them look like mannequins anymore? Super! And the other new gadgets that can be spotted there are superb. The HUD for the vehicles apparently has been updated too: I hope something similar has happened for the command interfaces, both HC and the normal one (Streamlining, making it more userfriendly and intuitive, etc.) And the landscape looks great too! Keep it going BIS! Now the AI only needs to be enabled to think three dimensionally for more immersive and tough close quarters combat, and you have an absolute winner here. Cheers Insta

What I do is, in this order, check for direction of incoming gunfire, try to find muzzleblasts (smoke, flash), shoot at flash. That, and looking out for movement: this is mostly a subconcious skill. After a while, you´ll notice automatically without trying if there´s something moving awkwardly among the bushes, but it took me a few years of playing OFP to get there. To ID, what´s important to check is the shape of the helmet, shape of the weapon, and the colour of the camouflage. For example, Chedaki use this blue-grey russian splinter camo which is very easily seen, CDF troops use this off-green pattern with western style helmets, Marines Uniforms have a very fat green with coyote brown vests, Russian troops have a peculiar helmet shape and their camouflage is darker and more towards the blueish side, while marines green goes more towards brown. Direction of movement, and position relative to yours is also important. If somebody is shuffling around in front of me in the bushes, and I know I have friendly positions behind me and no other Units were mentioned in the missions briefing, I´m more inclined to assume that it´s hostiles rather than friendlies. Friendly fire usually happens with me because of panic shots (Ai bursting around a corner in front of me, or running into my line of fire.) Hope this helps a bit too Insta

Beautiful Units, great stuff! One of my favourites, thanks for these! :D

Is this -really- running on the RV3 engine? I can´t believe how smooth it looks. This is looking beautiful. BIS, you have my attention on this. Also thx for the translation, much appreciated! Cheers

Aaaaah, revelation! Thank you, I didn´t think to check those. Nevermind my post! Otherwise, great job, ACE team. It´s getting better and better with every update! Cheers

Checked the thread, but I seem to be the only one with this problem: Upon updating, ACE dutifully notifies me that my clientside config is out of date. However, the userconfig folder inside the @ACE folder is empty. I´ve updated multiple times, placed the old files in there, added an extra ACE folder inside the userconfig folder and removed the userconfig folder entirely to see if it would notice and generate a new folder with the new config.hpps in it. However, this isn´t the case. Is there any other way to get my hands on a v.335 user config? Thanks in advance for the Help Insta

Beautiful work on this. However, I have to ask, is there -any- way to turn off or replace the music you have in there? The Silent Hill music in the beginning is very distinct, and it´s hard to get a feel of being in the Zone, while having this song play in the background. The african-styled song that plays at the very beginning isn´t giving a particularily eerie and grim vibe either. I´d like to run the ambient soundtrack of Stalker in the background while playing this, but turning down the music in the options does not affect the one you have running in the missions. The overall work and effort put into this is fantastic, and I love what you´re doing with it, however, the music is putting a real brake on for me. Keep up the good work! Cheers Insta

Actually, it rotates in certain positions in the sky, depending how you look at it. I´m delving into astronomy too, so this was quite the apparent... curiosity about the Armaverse. It´s nothing big, even though I´ve pondered if it´d be possible to, like, do much more detailed night sky maps somehow and then use Arma as a helper in setting up astronomy sessions. You could even simulate different scope types down to the rivet... OTing... but yeah, the moon rotates. The dimensions are about correct though, unless I´m completely off.

Maybe one could take inspiration from other games, such as Empire. There, Units that have been "killed" in battle have a chance of being healed after the battle, reducing casualty levels. You could have "important" characters that survive wounds all the time, while the other squadmembers have a percentage chance of returning after being critically injured in battle. (If they survive, they carry their experience over to the next battle, or are replaced by a newbie, like in OFP:R)

The AI is quite capable in Arma 2, and while it still has some problems here and there, the new system is showing a lot of promise. Something just occured to me while reading another thread (http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=97196), that the AI does use a Buddy system, with two squadmembers always moving together as long as their buddy is alive. However, while this feature is working well for the AI, I think it represents some problems for players because it is lacking an interface "plugin" so to speak. You neither get told who your buddy is (Are they even strictly assigned? As far as I can gather from real life documentation, they should be.), nor can you really tell where he is. My question would be if a visual buddy system, giving cues of some sort as to who you´re supposed to work together with, is A: Desireable, both in Gameplay and Realism terms, B: Actually implementeable and C: How it could be done. I´m slapping together a few pics with rough Ideas that come to mind, and will update if there turns out to be some interes in this. :> Cheerio Insta EDIT: Came up with some suggestions, just to start this off. First suggestion is a permanent Diamond marker, very basic, located over your buddy. This could fade in/out depending on for how long the Buddy didn´t report anymore, wasn´t seen anymore or how far away he is. The icon of the Buddy could indicate things such as low ammo, injury, as well as his role inside the squad. Example here: http://img690.imageshack.us/i/arma2diamond.jpg/ Second suggestion is a hovering Tag over the head of your buddy. This only pops up briefly when looking in his direction, and only after a short while or never (for example if he has his back turned to you and is far away, you won´t recognize him. To simulate this, the tag won´t show up.), and then fading out again so as to not clutter the screen. Example here: http://img7.imageshack.us/i/arma2floating.jpg/ Third suggestion is a triangle tracking along the edge of the screen. If it´s on top of the screen, your buddy is in front of you, if it´s at the bottom he´s behind you etc. The icon would fade in and out depending on distance, last report, last seen location. Example here: http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/3301/arma2edge.jpg This is probably coming way too late to be implemented in Arrowhead, if it´s even a viable/desired suggestion at all. However, in my humple opinion, the potential advantages would warrant at least a basic implementation of a system like this. The advantages would be that you would indeed could be sure who you´re supposed to move with, and who to look out for in particular. A tag would be only the most basic starting point, however, the possibillities for extending this system could be virtually endless. (You opened a can of worms in my head there BIS. :D) For example, you could replace the standard commands with Buddy team commands, for example "Stop" to prevent your AI buddy from charging around a corner recklessly, or telling him things like "Suppress there so I can move" or "Stay low until I give the clear sign". The AI would do the same with you. (I think this would even be necessary, as it makes the player put more effort into keeping his buddy alive if he actually has the -chance- to do so.) Hope this illustrates what I was going for with this. Cheers Insta

Well, Operation Flashpoint did this in two ways: the characters you were with (Kozlowski & Co.) could get shot in a mission, but would be up again in the next. For example in the first mission, my whole team was shot up. In the second mission, they were back up again talking about their rifles. Then they had the story relevant characters who appeared only in cutscenes, who were working from behind the scenes anyway as they were high command. (Guba, the two Guerillia leaders on Everon as examples). The main character the player needs to attach to is is the one he is playing, though, so at least those should receive some focus. Which will be difficult, but if it´s done right people will remember their names YEARS after playing the game. ie, Gastovski, Hammer, Armstrong and... the guy who crashes on Kolgujev (I guess I don´t remember him because I like to win???). I agree that doing voiceovers and scripts for a game like this has got to be a pain in the backside, and is probably a time consuming and expensive process. Still have my hopes high that there´ll be something great coming my way when I install OA. :P And even if not, then I´ll be disappointed for a while, and then go back to community made campaigns and missions, of which many are quite fantastic too.

Aside from technical improvements, I as a pure singleplayer person really hope for a good campaign. A nice, tightly written story, characters you can relate to in one fashion or the other, choices to be made (the more controversial/morally challenging/dramatic the better) and everything delivered in a nice package. OFP did that great! Arrowhead should first and foremost be a game, and I think many people won´t even get into the game if the singleplayer content doesn´t deliver. I didn´t figure out the Editor in OFP until about a year into having the game, for example. And what keeps people in the game is a challenge which is fair, engaging, and which motivates them to push on to see the end of it. Harvest Red was too ambigoous, and trying to do too much at once, yet the missions still felt short to me, now that I´m almost finished with the campaign. Some missions felt artificially stretched because you had to constantly reload because a teammember died, or because you took a bullet yourself. I´m more afraid that the Campaign and Missions will fall short of the standard Operation Flashpoint set (which is pretty high bar, admittably. Maybe I´m also biased because it´s the fondest childhood gaming memory I have): in the content departement, I´m 100 % sure that BIS will deliver, and deliver like never before. My two cents. Edit: Linearity aside, Eagle Wing did it right (how could I even forget this?). It´s cinematic, and if you can tie the realism together with the cinematic experience and non-linear gameplay á la Manhattan, Arrowhead will be fantastic³, I think 8) Had to add this for the sake of completeness.

Hi! Those MK48s look beautiful, however, they don´t seem to work with my Arma 2. I´m patched to 1.05, and tried running them from the @LAE folder with and without other mods. Every time, I get a "Cannot open object lae_mk_48\mk_48_mod_0_mix.p3d" (for the mix version) or "Error loading lae_mk_48\mk_48_mod_0_black.p3d (magic)" (for the black version) error. I tried downloading both from Armaholic and from the other provided link. Is this something on my end? Thx in advance for the help. Insta

It works well most of the time, and it´s really cool to observe. The only problem I personally have with it is that I have zero clue who my buddy is, so I always stick with a random squadmate. That´s possibly also the case where the endless "go, I´ll cover" occurs: your buddy (somewhere on the other side of town) wants you to move up with him, but instead you´re stuck with a guy of a different squad, causing your teammember to go into an endless loop. What´d be a really cool is some sort of cue to who your buddy is in Arrowhead... uh... actually, I think I´m going to carry this to the suggestions thread.

Dodge is a pretty dodgy function. You can put it on a key combo in the setup (it´s called "evade" there I think.), but it rarely works. Apparently, it only functions when you pull a Tekken-esque key combo, which causes your character to do a sidestep in slowmotion. An animation whose length appears completely random, and if it plays out you can´t stop it, you can´t shoot while you are dodging (but you can reload) and because it´s so slow, just running sideways is usually much more effective. For me, I can get it to work if I do W -> A -> Shift (Release W). Then sometimes he does a dodge. Sometimes he doesn´t. Really awkward... has anybody else observed this, or gotten it to work properly?

Good post there. I´ve just finished another test series where a Squad has to go up against a static machinegun. To my surprise I found that the AI notices the killzone after taking some casualties, and that there is a way to get behind the MG using cover. There were a few problems, like friendly fire, or the AI getting stuck, but generally they did a really good job at getting the task done. http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/700/arma2mgtest1setup.jpg <- this was the setup. The AI noticed the killzone in EVERY test, and in EVERY test they tried to get behind it. I did ten tests, and in two cases there were friendly fire incidents (with three losses in total). However, in five out of the ten cases the AI got stuck in the pathway leading to the rear of the MG, which I think has to do with the confinement of the area, which was the only massive problem I came across in the test. The AI also never used grenades, which surprised me. Short version: Rly gud job BIS, keep it up! You people rock.

I don´t know if CQB is still a topic in here, but I thought since the other thread is gone now I´ll repost it here, since it seems relevant. I did a very very basic testing setup to see how AI uses cover, and moves as a squad. I also did a test using ZeusAI, but couldn´t spot any distinct difference in casualty numbers, movement or anything of the sort. I had some other test setups with hesco barriers perpendicular to the testing area, five placed in a row (to see if AI would prefer firing over moving sideways into nearby cover: in most cases they didn´t, even if they were slower in aquiring their target than their opponent.) Another test involved a more complicated maze built of Hesco barriers, where AI would, instead of moving trough provided doorways, clipped trough the barriers instead and right into enemy fire. I´m also testing a setup now with barriers and a machinegun nest (the warfare one), to see if the AI really doesn´t notice killzones, or if its just slow at doing so. The only way to really find out where the flaws in the AI lie is trough testing like this. Most environments are way too cluttered, and you lack oversight when testing, which is why I built these things so I could actually see what was going on. Hope it´s at least a little bit helpful. Cheers Insta Edit: Forgot to add that one of the MAJOR issues in 1.05 is friendly fire, especially from vehicles that use explosive ammunition such as the AAVP. I´m also trying to find out under which situations these occur most often.

The problems I usually encounter when trying to get people to play it is that they´re put off by the clunky animation/movement system, the AI, or the fact that, as some people explained to me, Arma 2 isn´t even a game, but a toolbox that happened to be shipped with some preset Units and a Campaign, leaving everything up to the community (I thought that was the point?). Another problem to them always is the interface, which I can agree is pretty unintuitive to the newcomer. After playing OFP/Arma for 9 years, only when Arma 2 arrived I really figured out how groups work, and what the "advance" and "Flank" commands really do (and that for the things they do, they´re mislabeled). It´s either those things, or the performance. Bugs, not so much. And while the Story of the Campaign isn´t coming across so well because of the at times awkward voice acting, and the fact that the characters you play are complete heros who never have to fell any moral choice of impact during the campaign (at least not that I encountered), it´s still far better than that of the COD, which has apparently been dragged out of a hole by the hair, beaten with a rubber baton and then told to sit straight. At least Arma 2 isn´t -completely- taking itself seriously (just look at Eagle Wing), but trying to have FUN while still dancing on the ledge to being (to the normal gamer) a hardcore, realistic battlefield simulator. To get back to the topic, I think the biggest downsides of the game are that you need to learn of the community to really enjoy it, the clunky animation and movement system and the somewhat outdated and cluttered interfaces. Once you get over that, though, you can really feel that it´s the successor to the best game in the world. Cheers Insta