dnk

Yeah, VON was an issue before. Could be again. That said, I've had horrid MP experiences with and without using it myself, so I'm not sure. I haven't noticed an big issues since the latest patch and since updating my video drivers, though. Maybe one of those fixed my problems... one can be hopeful.

Can't you just ban the guy?

*complains that the US Army is just recycling old WWII edition models with the B-52 - demands they spend $15bn to R&D a new plane that looks and functions basically the same because it's the future dammit and what am I paying taxes for?!* You honestly think most players care? Most players are either:A) playing the campaign and random user missions (and not being terribly picky) B) playing Wasteland/Life/KOTH C) back to DayZ on Arma 2 The forums are only representative of the hardcore fans, content creators, and realism geeks (who are hardcore fans generally), with a much smaller fraction being a more representative slice of the whole (imo, of course).

I also like this approach. Seems like you're not alone in that huh :)

To be clear, I don't trust in the tracker for big issues (not bugs, I think it's used for those clearly enough) because I think the devs already know well enough about "big issues" from the forums (they haven't changed in many months), and that they're doing what they can about it already, or it's been put off for good reasons for a later patch/release. I think the tracker might have been useful very early in alpha for big issues and new features and getting support for them, but certainly by late spring the devs had decided on a course and further voting/tickets wasn't going to change it. So, at this point, the tracker is a bug tracker, not a feature requester, since we're clearly not in that part of the development cycle anymore.

First off, people should note that this was originally started in the recoil thread, taken to the dev fatigue thread, and then appropriately moved to its own thread when it overgrew that thread. This was all suggested as an alteranative to the current recoil mechanism of "shooting to the sky" if you didn't constantly adjust, which many players have complained about (I'm less concerned about that aspect of it). One alternate was random direction for recoil, but in the original thread it was complained that this felt like "fighting against the avatar", which I tend to agree with. Right, and after a long life of playing FPS games I can compensate fairly well. Note I'm complaining not due to personal inability to deal with recoil but due to the opposite (for me and most players I think). What I want is the soldier simulated as much as everything else. Currently, the soldier is barely simulated. I remember in OA (perhaps it was ACE), severe wounding or fatigue made shooting straight very hard, as it should be. That was done via harder sway, also I found the sway (in ACE I think, but maybe it was ACE1 not 2) harder to compensate for because it was far faster, so the end result was more random. I liked that, and it made combat longer and less instantly lethal, particularly against AI, since players couldn't just sit back and one-shot them all with minimal effort. You either needed a solid DMR/sniper rifle to accomplish that or to get in closer where you were more vulnerable to their fire. It made the game challenging and made run-and-gun far less effective.Now, I find playing the AI online (at least in SP there are mods) a cakewalk with no skill or challenge required. PvP is of course more difficult, but run-and-gun is very alive there. Players want to claim Arma's this realism bastion, yet almost every MP experience I've had has been a matter of relative supersoldiers and rambos, either against each other or against super-accurate fish-in-a-barrel AI. It's silly, the lack of appropriate recoil and soldier-simulation (of any method) leads to these sorts of tactics being optimal. 500+ meter standoff engagements where you just slowly pick off the enemy one-by-one with a few shots, where it takes like 5-10 rounds most to get 2-3 hits to kill... A single soldier with 15 mags can basically take out a platoon. It's ridiculous and dull. There's little need for ammo management or tactics when you have superpowers and everyone's a top-tier sniper and CQC expert in one. Statistically speaking, law enforcement (highly trained with their weapons) tend to hit 1 in 4 or 5 shots within 25 meters, and far fewer outside of that (roughly remembering this). I think typical kill rates in the military are 20 rounds : 1 kill (how accurate this is is open to debate of course).

Right, but most scopes and ironsights in game are not like this.What exactly is demagogic about this - it's hard to be a demagogue when everyone is against your idea... Actually, that's basically the opposite of being a demagogue. Frankly your replies have been little more than trolling, and I'm done responding to you after this one.

Simple answer: having these microdetails and extra detail level looks much, much nicer than a simple, flat, featureless texture. If this very minor issue is the price to pay for that, I'm cool with it. As I said, it's such a nitpicky problem that it's silly to get negative about the devs over it. They have much bigger fish to fry, as every complaint thread and tracker ticket will attest to. I hope it gets fixed, but there's no reason to call out the devs as "half assing" it when they don't literally perfect the game in one or two passes.

Feel I've stepped a bit far OT now, so it's spoilered. @maturin @DarkWanderer (and Deadfasts's points further)

Propose your easy fix that wouldn't take much time to implement. Note when expecting (X) to be fixed you need to consider both how (Y) much time it will take and (Z) how important it is. So, how much time is this going to take to fix, and how important is this really? Personally, I notice it about once every 5 hours of gameplay for like 5 seconds. I'm sure it makes sense for them to focus on this world-ending bug instead of other things. Yeah. Priorities.

K, I can line up a shot "perfectly" as I see it, but that bullet's still going to hit within a certain circle of my intended target, even with an ideally perfectly precise rifle with the sights properly calibrated to myself and conditions. If I've been running around a bit and breathing heavy, I'm never going to shoot as accurate as if I'm lying down calmly. I can improve my accuracy with focus and some effort, but ultimately as far as I can be concerned that shot's going to be randomly around its intended target, and more randomly than in the calm scenario. In this game, I can just take a little extra time to wait for the dot pixel to be the same as the target's pixel and click within 50ms (1 frame) and that's exactly where it's going... but in reality my whole body's moving, muscles perhaps shaking a bit, when under fatigue conditions, and sight pictures are never as static or perfect as they are in this game, the trigger pull never as non-affecting as the mouse click, and the pull never as quick neither, such that the barrel/picture has moved by the time the weapon fires. It's all things that I can improve upon with practice and focus and effort, but things that I can never perfect, and things that my own condition can impact quite negatively in a way I can't fully compensate for, making the end result effectively random from my perspective - why'd that bullet go so far up and to the right? Hell if I know, felt good at the time I shot. Now, I don't know much about BF's latest and "greatest" techniques and how extreme they are (seems from comments it's quite extreme). I think I've mentioned enough already that it doesn't need to be 45 degrees (indeed, that's ridiculous). Actually, I've specifically stated 10 or 14 degrees twice now. It could be even less that, plus sway (so you can feel better about your skills). Ultimately, the effect should be realistic. Frankly, I get really tired really quick of these arguments that "COD/BF does it terribly, therefore it's a bad mechanic and will necessarily be implemented in an equally terrible way." (this isn't the first issue it's been used for either...) Be fair enough to this to at least consider what I've said specifically about the seriousness of the effect being more minor than "can't hit a barn door at 50m because of the randomness." I don't want that either. I just want to have to stop fighting the mouse all the time and have the simulation, you know, simulate things.

I feel like a lot of the sucking has to do with speed. They do things slowly. They rarely actually run, but if you ever see humans playing it's really binary: still or sprinting. It makes a huge difference both in the AI's ability and the human's sense of that ability.

Fact is with sway, you can still hit highly accurately if you know how to adjust, so in most cases it's basically being a super-soldier. Your point about getting a shot under heavy sway still being possible to do shows it. Ultimately, reality's more like the RNG than just waiting an extra half second to time it right. If the sway was a lot more erratic and fast I'd find that as acceptable. Currently, it's just too easy to adjust for in all but the most extreme situations.

It seems like only bugs get treated by it, though. Every dev update, etc, seems to have only referenced bug issues. I don't fault them for it, but it is how it is. Also, I totally forgot my credentials.

If I believed in the tracker still, I'd upvote it. The one real large flaw in the release has been how poorly MP has been handled and how little was put into it. I'd rather they shifted resources from the campaign towards proper MP missions (PvP specifically) that were more realism/difficulty-balanced than other FPS titles. Or even some that weren't. It'd just be nice to have widely-supported CTF or smaller TDMs, but I'm glad we have KOTH at least now.

The AI are almost always too good at shooting. The issue is they often: don't shoot back at all or don't take cover appropriately (and use smoke in a pinch) and are relatively unaggressive under fire, typically just staying roughly in place and wandering around as they're slowly shot down, rather than having move/attack orders created dynamically (if this is the case, I've never seen it in action at least) and truly engaging the enemy, especially when they are vastly superior numerically (A) is an issue with engagement limits I think, but it's really only a problem because of (B) and ©. If (B) and © were functional, (A) would make sense, but without (B) and ©, (A) sticks out like a sore thumb since it's what we have to fall back on - sitting in place mostly and returning fire. (B) is perhaps the most necessary. You can't have real suppression when the AI don't even understand "cover", where it is, or how/when to use it. © requires more computation, and it requires the AI to find higher-level "cover". I'll give an example to illustrate what's needed: I'm on a ridge 200-400m away from a city. There are 8 members of my squad (7AI+me). The town has 4-5 groups of 6-8 AI wandering around inside and patroling the outside. We open up on one group 400m away in an open road. Their reaction is the following: Yeah, that behavior needs to change. The AI need to know when they're in a vulnerable position and need to be able to find less vulnerable positions and they need to know when to move to those other positions as fast as possible and to take cover behind obstacles appropriately and they need to be better at figuring the direction of incoming fire at a distance. The distance they are willing to travel to find "better ground" needs to be relative to the distance of the force engaging them as well.

I think that effect comes from the highest/closest level of detail for terrain, which is rendered as "lower" than the base terrain height save for the "highest" features (like the little rocks) - it's a negative-only rendering adjustment, so the ground usually looks a few centimeters lower than its mesh is. Well, I would also like this long-distance masking effect to be far more pronounced as well - higher grass, and units in prone are basically invisible almost everywhere and crouched units are almost invisible in many natural places as well. Instead of it being like 1-2 feet high, have it be 3-4 feet, which is far more realistic.

Well, personally I think people get a bit too involved in having the virtual projectile following the path of the virtual barrel a bit much while insisting that the virtual soldier's own abilities/skills are not to be considered at all. Which is more important: the soldier or the barrel? And it can be tweaked to be less offensive than "BF3 suppression". Setting the max to like 5 or 10 degrees only would keep shots pretty close within 250m at worst. Make the base inaccuracy lower to like 2 degrees, and you get pretty tight shots when you're taking your time and on single-shot, as is realistic - it's only a real penalty when... you have low health, high fatigue, or low shooter skill. I suppose suppression effects could be added also, but you can reduce them to something more minor so they're only really effective when you're at a considerable range (250m+ say). Point is, you can set the system up so that people who play "realistically" don't really have this affect them much because they're usually taking well-aimed single shots in crouched/prone positions without fatigue.

Have you double binded the lock-on key to a multiplayer-specific key? Check your controls configs for that.

Note that Arma won't use more than 4GB of RAM since it's 32-bit, and that includes VRAM. Have you tried a full and clean driver installation? Are all your other drivers up to date? Have you altered any of your system defaults ("tweaking", as it's called)? What settings are you running in the game? What is your hardware and OS? Have you overclocked any components? I suggest using Process Explorer to watch your various performance metrics easily without an installation of new software (with a 10sec update speed for longer play). If you want something more indepth, you should use HWINFO and create a logfile for the important things like virtual memory load, memory load, gpu memory load, gpu core load, etc. It can be helpful in spotting a problem. It seems to be only cancer for your specific computer, as this is one issue I've not seen basically at all on these forums, so perhaps don't generalize so much.

Seems they react when I shoot at them, but TPW mods improve that considerably. You want TPW. I'm not sure what servers use them, and as with any mod, performance may deteriorate due to the extra scripting.

No, it's not, and I have. I loved BE Warfare in OA, but it's not the same now, and it's not at all what I'm talking about: infantry-based pure PVP flag capture is totally different from combined-arms-based town PEvPE capture.

When objects are destroyed via a cleanup script, are they still included in arrays? Might be having scripts that regularly check arrays with 15,000 elements is clogging up the threads. I'm not sure, but I have a faint recollection of this being an issue when scripting in OA.

You can't see much when prone anywhere except a recently mowed yard.

1. Maybe I don't want to spend an extra $60 for a game that...2. Has obnoxious visuals/UI elements that give me a headache and 3. Is over-the-top frantic and mindless and 4. doesn't even have a semblance of realism to it (though it tried to appear that way - BF was best when it was gamey and didn't try to cover up that fact) and 5. is full of obnoxious tweens shouting random epithets and insults and typing in penises and other such idiocy (this is really minimalized in Arma thankfully) I enjoy TDM, prefer more tactical modes like KOTH/CTF, but stick with Arma because I love the pacing, relative realism, and simplicity of visuals/graphics. Also, I play the game for other, non-TDM purposes, so the $35 I spent on it was already a sunk cost, and spending twice that much more on a game that I aesthetically dislike is just not a good use of my money. Saving it in a bank is, so that's what I do with it. When I was 16 I loved BF, but I'm not a... caffeine-fueled twitcher that can handle hours on end of intense combat without getting a severe headache. Well, I can sometimes, but I don't want to make a habit out of it. It's more stress than it's worth now. Also, I like spending time with a more mature crowd, or at least not being constantly reminded of the fact I'm playing with a bunch of kids. Oh, and if I could script for MP worth a damn, I'd make a Delta Force-style CTF for sure. It's where each team has like 10-20 flags in their territory to defend/take back to spawn, and the winner either takes them all or has the most after a couple hours playtime. That would be killer for Arma. I really hope one of the skilled MP guys makes that, or it gets added to Tactical Battlefield down the line.