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Jockson

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Posts posted by Jockson

  1. Posted

    I don't believe so as I had almost the entire OA standalone on my Ramdisk, yet the morphing continued.

    Interesting. I wonder what causes the delay then. Surely it's not like that by design? Because it doesn't seem (much?) system performance dependent from what I can see. Even when I lower all the details and set the resolution to low to get high FPS it's still the same: right click, zoom all the way, delay, trees morphing to another shape.

    The optimal solution would be:

    - start the morphing process as soon as the zoom button has been pressed, by the time the zooming is over LODs have already been switched and you would be hard pressed to notice it even when looking for it, and:

    - disable the morphing and use instant LOD switching for high level zoom

    I'm surprised BIS didn't at least implement the latter because the way I see it, there is zero advantage doing it the way it is now. Sniping looks particularly silly in ARMA for instance.

  2. Posted

    Hmm, hopefully not.

    It would be great to see it as an option in a beta patch if it's technically possible. The morphing is not only ugly but more importantly it affects the gameplay too. The motion of LOD changing is extremely distracting when scanning around for movement.

    Still haven't found my Arma 2 disk but am I right in saying the LOD problem is much worse in Operation Arrowhead? I wonder why, because if anything, I expected it to be much better considering there isn't anywhere near as much vegetation in comparison to Chernarus :confused:

  3. Posted

    I have done some MORE testing and I am now convinced of two things:

    1. The game would be far better off without the morphing effect. It does nothing to make changes of LODs less noticeable.

    2. There either HAS to be something wrong with my computer or Arma2:OA is for some reason a lot worse than Arma 2 when it comes to vegetation LODs.

    Regarding point #1, like I've said, instant changes of LODs like in OFP are less distracting in the majority of the situations. I brought over friends of mine, all OFP fans to show them Arma2:OA demo and all of them kept asking "what is this, why are those trees changing their shape all the time?".

    It's the morphing effect that makes those changes more apparent which defeats its whole purpose in the first place. Another comparison video:

    OFP:

    rHBWfPWegxg

    These trees have the most drastic shape changes that I could find and yet LOD switching is very little apparent during gameplay.

    OA:

    wjFthhZQGbU

    LOD morphing wouldn't be too bad if it were almost instant, without a delay. Instead, first there appears to be some delay, then a tree changes shape and then it morphs to another shape. That brings me to point #2, I can't find my ARMA 2 disk right now but I'm fairly certain that vegetation morphing wasn't THIS bad. It was a problem, I made a thread about it after all, but I don't remember all this multiple LOD morphing going on all over the place. Can anyone confirm OA is supposed to look like in the above video? Object detail is set to very high.

    Also, yet another advantage of instant LOD changes:

    vjxq_mif3CE

    oPQBbKyq_rU

    Some recording frame rate issues but you get the idea. High level zoom with instant LOD changes = perfect.

    Instant LOD switching obviously isn't ideal but it is much better than what we have now in my opinion. The morphing effect does the opposite of what it's supposed to do and actually significantly pronounces LOD changes. It won't be on the list of priorities but an option to simply disable the effect would be VERY welcome :)

  4. Posted

    Sorry for bumping this thread again. I was doing some testing with OFP vs ARMA 2 and found that there is more LOD switching of trees in OFP that I previously thought there was. Still much less than in ARMA of course but the reason WHY it is so much more noticeable in ARMA is the morphing effect. As Sosna said at the beggining of this thread, the brain and eyes are attracted to motion and morphing just makes the switch even more obvious. That completely defies the reason why it's there in the first place!

    At this point, I would be perfectly happy if there was an option to simply turn off the morphing effect. Not just in certain situations (zooming etc), just to simply turn it off altogether. Shouldn't be too much work to implement and it would likely improve performance a little bit too.

    Now, I know chances of BIS doing this are slim, but I was wondering, is there a way it could be done as an addon? I remember when ARMA 2 came out and there was no way to turn off the motion blur effect, there was an addon that did just that. Any chance the morphing effect could be turned off this way as well?

  5. Posted

    Optional, yes of course. I wouldn't mind if an option to disable the switching was only available through editing config files or whatever, as long as it's possible to do so.

    So, we get an option to either a) disable LOD switching of trees and bushes altogether for low level zooming, or b) disable just the morphing effect, so the LODs still change but INSTANTLY while zooming, not with a delay.

    Having either of those options would make a big difference. The latter one would work like OFP did, the only difference being that morphing would still work when you are walking or driving - best of both worlds. Even simply disabling morphing, while not the optimal solution, would be good.

    Here's an example from OFP:

    fZrSHK9CLi0

    Notice how by the time zooming is over, those trees in the distance have already changed LODs. That's 10 times less distracting than the zoom... delay... morphing effect that we get in ARMA 2/OA. In fact, it's almost completely unnoticeable unless you look for it.

    It probably wouldn't work as good as it did in OFP because in OFP there was far fewer LOD changes but it would still be a huge improvement. Personally I don't think having as many LODs is neccessary. I mean, if I zoom in with RMB on a tree that is 15m in front of me, it completely changes its shape. It's a bit silly, really. I would much prefer the vegetation that doesn't look great up close but is more consistent shape wise and doesn't look like simple blobs from anywhere but close distances but that's another story!

  6. Posted

    Having just played the Operation Arrowhead demo, it was quite disappointing to see nothing has been done about this. In fact, it actually seems worse than it was before :( LOD switching of trees is ridiculously apparent with low level zooming as LODs seem to differ even more in shape than they did before. Anyone else think so? I quit playing ARMA 2 a long time ago and went back to OFP but these LODs in OA are so bad on my machine that I'm starting to think there might me something wrong with my hardware :)

  7. Posted

    Gotta love Templar's post. He's such a sellout. He mentions a heavily modified ArmA II, but nowhere does he mention what exactly is modified. He even complains about it being at night instead of daytime. What the hell? :confused:

    And then there's this:

    I play ArmA II most of the time in a vanilla state, mainly due to mission making. He has no idea what he's talking about.

    It's really sad to see people still clutching on to some glimmer of hope that DR will be anything worth salvaging for Codemasters.

    Maybe he should compare it to a heavily modified Dragon Rising then. Oh wait!

    Isn't that the same guy that couldn't figure out how to tell your squad to disembark from a vehicle in ARMA 2? And yet he claimed he was an OFP veteran and has played ARMA 1 too. You'd also think someone who has ever played BIS games would know there is no reason why you couldn't make large scale battles at day time. What the heck is he on about on that one :confused:

  10. Posted

    In a perfect world yes, they would write a new engine that looks better, runs better, has better physics etc etc but seeing as BIS are already tired of making milsim games and OA might be the last game in the series, I'd say that's not going to happen. Rewriting the whole thing from scratch would probably take too much time and cost too much money for it to be worth it for them.

    I'd rather have ARMA III sometime in the future than not have it at all, even if it meant it was just an upgrade of the current engine.

  11. Posted

    I always keep postprocessing OFF. Not only the motion blur effect when you turn around makes me physically sick, it is also very unrealistic. It simulates a camera rather than human eyes. Don't really know what BIS were thinking when they decided to put that in the game.

    Though it would be nice if PP was customizable so you were able to say turn off the blur, turn on bloom and tone it down with a slider etc.

  12. Posted

    the option i need isn't listed.

    some of the mods available have installation apps (they come in .exe form)

    some dont. for all those that do then yes they are easily installed but seriously how many shortcuts can one have for one game? is there a way to consolidate all the mods into one game and play all the different content at once?

    those that are not executional the install instructions aint so clear. and very arkward to work round even for someone with mod install abilities like me.

    so option...

    yes i have found mods i want, unable to figure out how to make them run at the same time.

    Just learn to use modfolders, there's many tutorials on that. Or to make it even easier use an ARMA launcher. That way you can simply select which mods you want to use at startup.

  13. Posted

    Here's a couple of videos from ARMA 2 (better to watch in bigger screen/HQ).

    AuIO2r3dqI8

    f3D64q_-Heg

    While the trees don't change their shape as much as in the ARMA 1 video, the effect is still very similar. The higher LODs hardly give you any more details at such distance and yet the switching is very distracting and IMO breaks immersion.

    I've been having a look at the scaling in game. It's definately not as apparent as in that video, but it's a bit slow and mainly it's just the vegatation that's affected. Buildings seem fine - maybe you should check out some of the mods available to reduce the scaling effect. But you are right, BIS should get it sorted out at some point, there's just so many other pressing issues with the game, it's probably lower down on the "to do" list. :)

    Have a look at the thread on RAM Drives. It's pretty easy to set up, so if it doesn't work for you then you can just delete it from your HD. There's a free one called DataRAM RAMDisk that works okay. There's also one available called Speed disk RamDisk 10, but the free version only works for 15 days.

    You can download the program to make symbolic links to the files on your RAMDisk here

    Even if you have only 4Gb physical RAM installed, you can make a RAMDisk about 1.95Gb ~(which leaves 2..05Gb to run Arma) and put the following files on there (make sure to back them up first):

    buildings

    buildings2

    chernarus

    plants2_plant

    plants2_Tree

    structures

    utes

    If you have problems making symbolic links to the files, place them in an addons folder (in the ramdisk) and use a shortcut to the folder in the format -mod=r:\@Ramdisk.

    Thanks :thumbsup: I do only have 4GB of RAM but I'm going to try that and see if there's improvement. I agree it's not one of the most important things to fix right now but yeah, hopefully it will get sorted out at some point :)

  14. Posted

    Looking at the video, the problem seems more that the LOD changes after the zoom has ended. If the LOD changed at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem. A Sosna mentioned, it looks fake because of the motion after the event (zooming). If the two were synched, then it would fool the brain and wouldn't draw attention to itself.

    Are you sure your experience is as bad as this? you could look into using a SDD or RAM Drive to hold your texture files. Then there would be less lag when you zoom as the files are streamed much quicker compared to storing them on a SATA HD. I've put my Arma 2 on a RAM Drive and it's much better than it was at this sort of thing. To be fair to BIS, the texture switching is pretty good and is pretty convincing 95% of the time. However, they could look at tweaking some of the LOD threshholds. A quick walk around Utes with a DMR should yield a couple of examples of thrashy LOD switching.

    By the way, any chance you could update the video to one involving Arma 2 zooming? It's kind of like reviewing Empire Strikes Back after having watched some footage of A New Hope ;)

    Yes, definitely. If the LOD changing didn't occur AFTER the zoom has already ended, it wouldn't be nearly as noticeable.

    I did use to think it was my old computer that is causing it but now that I can run the game smoothly most of the time, LOD morphing hasn't really improved from what I can tell. When you stand in one place and keep zooming in and out like in the video, does the game load files from the hard drive every time? I know a SSD or RAM drive would help with textures popping and game stutter, but would it really speed up the vegetation LOD morphing?

    OK, I will record and post some videos of zooming in ARMA 2 :)

  15. Posted

    Salah ad Din;1491516']Or maybe if the higher LODs were more congruous with lower LODs the change wouldn't be so apparent.

    True, but that wouldn't be anywhere near as easy to implement I think. I remember reading about ARMA 2 vegetation progress on the blog before the game was released and they were talking about how they reworked the whole algorithm and stuff responsible for this and yet it still far from perfect.

    I'm still playing ARMA 2 a lot and still can't get used to LOD morphing :( Sosna is spot on with the eyes and brain being attracted to motion theory. Even during firefights I find myself very distracted by bushes and trees changing shape when zooming in. I've overclocked my computer to set the level of detail to very high but it doesn't really help much.

    I guess nothing will be done about it as not enough people care, but I would really love if they would introduce a "disable vegetation LOD switching when zooming" option if not in future patches, then in Operation Arrowhead.

  16. Posted

    They can cut more panels from the same raw waver, so more profit for them.

    That, plus the fact that 16:9 screens appeal to console gamers who hate "those black bars" and they can market them as "Full HD" which most people automatically think it's better.

    What bugs me is that soon if you're going to want anything with a decent vertical resolution, you'll need to go with a 27" or larger screen but then you'll end up with a huge ass horizontal resolution which means performance issues in games as anything outside the native resolution is too blurry.

  17. Posted

    You are not taking in consideration resolution. To achieve a 1920 horizontal resolution on a 4:3 setup you would need 1440 pixels on vertical, meaning 460.000 pixels more to render. Since our FOV is wider on horizontal than vertical, and anyways more information needs to be available in horizontal rather than vertical (up = sky, below = your feet, but sides are your flanks ;)), then better to spend those pixels on the sides.

    Yeah, for first person shooters 16:10 would be more optimal, but there is a lot more to computing than games and movies so I would take that 1920x1440 4:3 thank you very much :D

    16:9 is the future unfortunetaly. Most of the new models coming are 16:9 and so are many laptops. New iMacs are 16:9 too. Although the resolution on the 27" is nice, it is still way too wide for a computer monitor imo. 16:10 is/was a very good compromise for games/movies/browsing/work.

  18. Posted

    Even though I'm still using a 4:3 19" monitor, the first time I used a 16:9 sucked...it was waaay to narrow. I really hope 16:10 doesn't get phased out; cause I'd take a 4:3 or 5:4 over a 16:9 any day

    To be honest, I'd take a large 4:3 over anything, even 16:10. The wider the aspect ratio is, the smaller the actual viewing area. Check out how much larger a hypothetical 24" 4:3 screen would be than a 24" 16:9: http://tvcalculator.com/index.html?0f004f8c495d3ec59f8961016637638b

    My old 19" is STILL taller than a 24" 16:9: http://tvcalculator.com/index.html?5a9582635e498973360984d33caeaa6d

    16:10 vs 16:9 on the same screen diagonal: http://tvcalculator.com/index.html?e899de0148d17bae3f84acb40e5b9d8a

    Since 4:3 monitors are not being made anymore, 16:10 is the next best thing and I'm definitely getting one before it gets phased out by 16:9.

  19. Posted

    I'm still on a 5:4 screen but I like 16:10 much better as I also believe 16:9 is way too wide which actually most of the time means it is too short vertically. Unfortunetaly, due to the fact that the manufacturers can market their screens "HD" and "1080p", the 16:9 format is going to replace the 16:10 in the near future so you got that part about the 16:10 being the future kind of the other way around ;)

    All those new 23" screens and basically 24" 1920x1200 screens with 120 pixel rows cut off. Personally, I find the vertical space much more useful on a computer monitor and the vertical resolution of 1080 kind of sucks considering the 17" LCDs which became mainstream a long time a go had 1024, not to mention I use to use my CRT at 1200p almost 10 years ago.

    For this very reason I'll soon be looking to upgrade to a 24" 16:10 screen as there is still a decent choice of quality 1920x1200 panels around.

  20. Posted

    Compared to ArmA2, vehicles and aircraft control in OFP was very poor and synthetic. Its more lifelike in ArmA2 if you use the right controller gear.

    That's probably true, but I was talking about steering with a mouse which I believe most people use. Although the actual driving/flying model wasn't really realistic in OFP, steering with a mouse was super smooth both in first person and third person view. In Arma 1, it was simply horrible. The steering wheel would always return to center as soon you started moving the mouse which resulted in very jerky steering and frustrating controls. It was a left over feature from the console version of OFP.

    In Arma 2, the steering wheel still returns to center but only slowly so it's pretty good and easy to control as long as I see the wheel and where it is facing. Not so great for driving in third person, especially for motorcycles but I'm still happy with it.

  21. Posted

    Although still poor compared to OFP, vehicle controls in A2 are a lot better compared to A1. No more that horrible instant mouse auto-centering that made steering with a mouse such a pain in A1. The game is worth it for that reason alone to me but it's also better than A1 in pretty much every way. Not by much but still better.

  23. Posted

    I agree, it is very distracting and immersion breaking. Disabling LOD morphing when using low level zoom is one good solution. The lower vegetation LODs look pretty good anyways. Raising the FOV to more OFP like values may assist a little.

    Another point: I believe that the more gradual LOD morphing is more distracting than an instantaneous switch. Since the eye/brain is attracted to motion, the longer duration of motion causes greater distraction. It would be nice to have an option for instant morphing LODs.

    Gradual LOD morphing is a good idea, but not in situations of quick zooming. It does seem to conceal LOD switching when simply walking/running around.

    Yeah, agree with all that. Gradual LOD morphing works very well when walking/running around. All the movement plus the head bobbing makes it pretty much unnoticeable.

    For low level zooming, it would be better if either LOD switching was simply disabled because, as you pointed out, the lower vegetation LODs look good anyway, or make the morphing much faster/instanteous. I'd prefer the former solution, but I'm not sure why is there such a long delay for LOD morphing anyway. Perhaps if the morphing occured while you're zooming in and not after you do, it would be a lot less noticeable.

    The graphics in this game add so much immersion but this issue kind of ruins it for me.

  24. Posted

    I've finally upgraded my computer and switched from OFP to ARMA 2 and I'm loving it, but one thing keeps bugging the hell out of me: the vegetation LOD switching when using the zoom button. It's not my video and it's from ARMA 1 but just to make it clear what I'm referring to:

    RsfiXZaCZ_M

    Now, I do realize the models need to change at some point and when moving around that is absolutely fine as it's a lot harder to notice. However, when looking at trees and bushes from distance, those higher quality models that you get when you zoom in with the right mouse button are not really that much more detailed but the change in shape is very noticeable and distracting.

    I'm far from an expert when it comes to graphics in computer games so feel free to shoot this idea down if it's silly :) My suggestion is to disable LOD switching of the vegetation when using the zoom button but leave everything else as it is now. So, basically LODs of trees and bushes don't change when casually eye zooming but when you actually move/get closer to them or use optics/binoculars then they switch like they do now. Would this be possible to implement as an option and what does everyone think about it? Despite the models being actually less detailed, it would make the game look better IMO and perhaps even improve the performance as well.

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