dnk

Pretty much my concerns also with this new system. I don't mind some tradeoffs, but ultimately a big tradeoff for having a heavier vest is just that the vest is heavier (and you have less stamina or whatever). The capacity should be based on the model's pouches, and you end up with less effective capacity just due to increased weight overall. We would since Altis is so ungodly large already. I'm very much in favor of a rebalancing towards detail rather than sheer scope of the island. Even something smaller than Chernarus would be fine, if it meant they balanced that with better details, microterrains, biomes, etc.For infantry combat, microterrains and details >>> island size. Given the dearth of planes and armor, it's a bit silly we have an island geared for those instead of infantry.

1) action menu ... ... ... 2) ragdolling after minor drops and having to reset stance, weapon position, etc 3) terrible 3D audio 4) weapon fire setting resets when leaving a vehicle (from full auto to semi) 5) holding shift and forward (running) and pressing pgup (standup) results in (stance left) instead 6) AI are suicidal drivers 7) explosives don't seem deadly enough at all 8) getting stuck in animations 9) vehicles exploding too easily (edit)

^ Agreed. Major peeve of mine, plus it resets my stance/weapon position.

Agreed that you could tweak the AI better, but they're still going to be dumb as rocks in a lot of situations because coding for such situations would take a bigger performance hit. That was my point. But, yes, I'd like to see those AI tweaks. Regarding the rest, they already had a ton of feature creep and then cut. It's nice that they've decided to continue implementing some of these systems (awkwardly at first), but a few of those issues I don't mind, hell never noticed. The poor explosion effects suck, but again with the too-many-featuritis. I hope it gets improved down the line, but given the performance issues we already have, having complex explosions with tons of particles doesn't work so well.

I was pretty much just talking about that video and reality. I don't play against AI anymore, so I don't know how they're reacting to hits. All I know is humans are finally dying again with less than a full magazine. huzzah! What I do want is some mixture of more damage (which we've got with the latest patch) and more effects to being hit (at least much of the time) as you can see in the video. Being shot at and especially getting hit have serious effects beyond bloodloss or tissue damage. I'd like to see that in the game. The game does reduce bullet velocity and damage based on distance. There's been videos of it. We have fairly realistic ballistics (well, minus quite a few variables) in that sense. What DW said.

What advancements do you want? Personally, I can't go back to A1/2 anymore. I'll play them in AiA, but that's it. I miss ACE, that too, but that wasn't BI of course. I'd always like more (I could list 20 things off the top), but I'm still aware that BIS is a small fry (so they can't do all that), and I really just want their tech to keep pace. If they can deliver a 2014-esque FPS game that actually runs well that's in the same genre/style as ArmA 1/2, I'm happy. I don't need 103 new systems per game or every latest/greatest bit of eye candy/physics (some yes, but not all). Just keep pace. They aren't, they never do, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue as "keeping pace" now requires a quantum leap into parallel processing and 64-bit.Given the state of the game, I'm glad they cut features. Clearly, they had to. They should've cut more. They should've cut diving and underwater and focused on the core game more. My issue is they try to advance too much. I'm fine with a well-running "update" of past titles for each new release, with some new/upgraded assets and a new island. That's all. If they can add a new system or two, like stances or much improved AI, I'm very happy.

1st, how do you know they were all shooting 7.62 and not 5.45. Makes a pretty huge difference. Might be it was mixed calibers and he got hit mostly by the 5.45s. Even then, old 7.62x39 isn't as powerful as everyone makes it out to be. It's not a whole lot better than 556, 20% more energy only (compared to NATO 762 which is 65% more energy and about 40% heavier than x39), but better at range. And given where he's shooting, the opposite ridgeline, it seems he's being engaged at a pretty far distance, 500m or so. At that distance, the bullet's lost at least 70% of its energy (perhaps up to 80%, depends). And it might've been 5.45, which is much weaker at range. Even as the 7.62, at ~500m it's basically just a 9x19 round. Hard to tell with the fisheye lens how far it is. Might be 300, might be 700m... Anyway, at range even the mighty 7.62x39 can be stopped by a IIA vest (which is a very weak sort of armor). Not sure about the helmets, but US ones are made of kevlar, which I'd imagine would stop similar threats to IIA (which is also kevlar, if I'm not mistaken). Distance is very important because velocity is very important to energy. I'd like to see him shake off several 7.62x51 hits from 50m, or a headshot from 300m. Actually, no I wouldn't; I'm not into those sorts of videos... :/ Ultimately, that video is just solid proof of the psychological dimension of getting hit. He doesn't receive any serious damage, but it still clearly affects him, his movement, and his overall performance greatly. He throws his gun down in the middle. It's clearly proof that we need either weaker protection values or (preferably) a TPW sort of approach.

If this series was ever going to die, it would've been with A2 or OA. It nearly did, but I believe A3 sold pretty well, and clearly there's still a profitable market for the product, which means they're going to keep producing for it. Some of their devs ran off to do Kingdom Come, so I guess there's your "wild west RPG" group gone. I expect at least another major expansion, and if that does decently then another full title down the line. They've got a second series to work on now (SA), one which is paying for itself and then some, so there's no reason to drop the flagship, just branch out with additional ships. The biggest problems with the game are: 1) too big of a map scope (50000km2 island and like 3 armored vehicles?) 2) poor performance (includes poor AI) They can focus more on assets and less on A FULL-SCALE REPLICA OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY for the next one. At some point, more is less. The AI sucks because they've run out of processing room to improve it. This isn't so much a coding issue but a resource issue. You just can't do much more until you fix the performance side. That means multithreading/multicoring/CUDA/paralleling/etc. I think that's the biggest bump going down the road, because it's by far the most difficult thing to do. Do note we're not going to hear much about that until it happens. They're going to keep very tight-lipped about any serious engine rewrites until it's a sure thing, and we all know why. So they may be well underway on that, or maybe they haven't even put it on the to-do list. If it's the latter, well, A3 may very well be the final installment - that's a white flag. 2000s code (32-bit, single-core) has no place in 2015 or 2016. They should know already that they can't get away with that again. They've pushed it as far as it and the fans will go. Hopefully, the SA's money/resources give them enough to do such a rewrite and export the changes back to the Arma series later on. But clearly, they're still committed to this series and improving it. It's just there's so much needs improving.

10ft fall could still seriously injure you. It's not unexpected that this would be hazardous. I survive 5-10ft falls constantly, though, so I'm not sure why it's an issue.

My biggest gripe with the armor system (other than that I hated the prior patch's overprotection for PvP) was that it was just rushed into the main build without really being tested out in the dev build and tweaked, then they went on a 1 month siesta. It wasn't the poor execution of the new system so much as the improper rollout. This is why we have a dev branch, so everyone doesn't have to beta test some new system that isn't doing what it should or balanced like the preexisting one. Honestly I don't think most people would've cared that the fire geometry wasn't implemented had they not totally changed damage-rotection values and resultingly changed the gameplay experience (for the worse in most people's view). That issue came up mostly over helmets, because now they were magical bullet stoppers and people wanted a way around (or out) of that new protection.

I like the new system for PvP at least. People are dropping like they used to. It feels good again.

Render is basically the draw calls. Sim is basically everything else. If I'm not mistaken, currently we do everything in the sim side first (plus PhysX and some bells/whistles that work on separate threads), then do render at the end. There was a graphic of how the various threads progress on the cores over the course of a frame. It's very serial. Like 30-40% of the total processing is done for the main sim thread, then some other stuff resolves, then the other 30-40% is done on the same core for the draw calls.I'm sure I'm being simplistic about the difficulties with doing 2 frames at once basically, but they need to do something. At the very least get the AI running multiple threads to speed up the simulation part. With luck, DX might get a major draw call performance boost and that alone will improve FPS considerably. If bandwidth is the issue, we can still rely on that increasing for the foreseeable future. RAM hasn't hit the 4.5GHz barrier last I checked.

tortuosit: it's the object quality setting. Set that to low or very low and you can punch out VD to 4000 without much of an impact. I have an i5 3350P 3.3GHz, hardly a beast, and there's next to no difference in FPS between 800m and 3500m. But my IQ settings are low, so past 800m I'm only seeing very low-complexity models (and few of them) and terrain. Doesn't matter if it's urban or whatever. Only killer is when I get close to vegetation.

I don't understand why they can't save the state from the last frame, use that to render, and while the rendering is happening start calculating the next state at the same time. You don't render the frame you're currently processing in parallel, but rather the last finished frame. Once both new-frame sim and last-frame render are finished, you start over. It'd cut out like 40% of the time (though overhead might take some of that out). If you can parallelize the AI, and if DX gets a Mantle-like bump to draw call performance, you could have double the framerate with the current system, perhaps even much more.

Way back when I promised I'd get some new environmental samples. Unfortunately, it required a long trip to get them, which I haven't been able to take until now, but that trip is now just around the corner. I'll be heading first to the coast, then up to the highlands. Are you still in need of environmental samples, and do you have any specific requests? Congrats on the new job!

I get far worse lag on Stratis specifically because of all the high detailed vegetation (oh, to be able to FORCE OFF the highest detail LOD of trees!). Sucks being GPU-limited (not for long). Stratis was boring because it was empty primarily, secondly because it was small. I played on Zargabad a ton in A2 because it was interesting, though small. Detail counts for a lot more than size. Stratis just lacked both.We couldn't have something half the size of Altis but twice as detailed? Or a quarter/quadruple? Takistan was a bit large in my opinion (164km2), Chernarus just about "right" (~150 taking out ocean). Altis is needlessly large at 270km2 (excluding ocean again, which does actually add to this due to underwater whatevers). If they took all the resources that went into Altis and made an island the size of Chernarus with more detailed terrain, I'd be far more pleased. Especially since they haven't given us much to use on all that space (limited armor/aircraft). I really hope they stop with this "bigger is better" attitude for the announced island DLC. A flaw in that game as well...

Yeah, 4.5 months after the "final" release. Development should be at least 95% done by now, though I suppose I can't fault them for continued support and improvement. But that should've already been in, certainly within a couple months of release. Of course, it CAN be improved, but it might take another year or two, or they might never get around to it (though it seems they are trying hard now).

Yeah, Korea's got great locales too. Basically everything along the coast from Nha Trang to the NE tip of Korea could work. There are like 50 different places that would be amazing to have in a game. It's all hilly, coastal, lush forests, and dense urban. I feel Korea's a bit too developed and "clean" for my tastes, but whatever North Korea could work too. So you have to have this mediocre low grass clutter that turns into a blank, bland flat polygon after 50m (a polygon that is about the same size relative to the gameworld as we had 10-15 years ago in games I might mention) and a few tree models inbetween. Yawn. I've played on winter Thirsk. On this engine, you need a dense forest for it to not look like a desert. Why not just have a jungle then? It'd look nicer. Snow just isn't going to sell (but maybe they can add it in dynamically like in VBS).If they can overcome that, yeah, okay snow wouldn't be terrible, but it wouldn't be great either Oh, and if they haven't added considerable parallelism to the engine's execution by the next major DLC/map, I won't buy it unless it's like a "perfect" map for me. So that'd fix the performance issues for AI (at the very least, make THAT parallel, then it takes a much smaller framerate impact). We already have dense urban from an AI standpoint (not a huge difference between Kavala and NYC even, just in the 3rd dimension), so it shouldn't cause huge performance issues (though getting the AI to intelligently use an improved 3rd dimension might).

Hey, it plays sounds. They might not sound exactly where they are angularly, and it's anyone's guess how far they are, but they play sounds. Sometimes multiple sounds at one time. It's amazing. Laurels, time for a rest.

Well, I beg to disagree with snow. It's just a white desert > been there.

I get about 1 crash/hour playing KOTH. Never crash in BP. I'm willing to bet it's a vehicle thing since that's the big difference between the two: one has tons of them, the other almost none (actively running about and blowing up at least).

Yes, it needs drastic improvement. Drastic.

Three things we need for the next map: - (sub)tropical - heavy urban - middle developing world that has both the traditional, poor housing and modern urban landscapes (China) We've not had these yet. I know performance is the big concern with the first 2 of those, but reducing model complexity and adding an additional <10m high-def vegetation LOD (for higher settings only) would negate much of the dense vegetation issue, I'd bet. I've got $50 on Zhoushan being the spot! (it would be really cool anyway) Well, there's a ton of Chinese coastline to choose from, or Philippines coastline, or Malaysian, Indonesian, even Vietnamese...

You know, I always wondered about that video, since even with a relatively recent CPU I can't do more than like 200-300AI in OA before crapping out entirely (in editor, not as client-server). Certainly not with the frames he's getting could I go even half of his AI count. I'm guessing he's playing as a client running off of some amazing server. Even then, I'm not sure there were 1700 AI running at the time he was shooting video. Might've been at mission start, and he might've been getting 5FPS for some time before he began capturing video. I mean, pretty sure if you took BE Warfare (the latest) from OA you couldn't have more than like 500AI before server performance began dipping badly. I'll let an actual server admin comment on that, I'm not sure, but I just severely doubt he managed 1700AI and those framerates, whatever the setup.Personally, I'd rather have 100-200 good AI than 600-900 bad AI. Mass AI that suck are "fish in a barrel", and offer little more than reactive target practice.

Let's also note that an SSD has other benefits. Like, you can put your OS and regularly used programs on it and get lightning load and startup times. And map/game loading times for Arma, of course. A 120GB SSD is about the same price as 8GB of 1600/C9 RAM, give or take a tenner, so the question is: which will give the most benefit? Since apparently I'm wrong on the 3GB thing, and assuming your RAM is considerably slower than 1600/9, I'm thinking now that the RAM would be better, but the SSD more useful in general computing.