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dnk

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Posts posted by dnk

  2. Posted

    *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?!*

    "Bunch of guys on the forum".. right.. it was a quite common complaint that there is no transport plane at all. Especially since there already is quite a bunch of choppers, so I don't understand the choice of yet another helicopter
    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).

  3. Posted

    To explain it better so people don't misunderstand. You sprint around a corner, stop, raise your sights, your sway is much more exaggerated. If you keep it up for a few seconds it becomes more steady
    I also like this approach.
    VBS2 doesn't need player dispersion - trying to aim one of their rifles is like trying to swing an 800lb Hollywood Panavision camera!

    And as much as I sympathize with OP in that aiming is just a little too easy -random dispersion literally fires my rage neurons in a way I care not to go into.

    Seems like you're not alone in that huh :)

  4. Posted

    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.

  5. Posted · Edited by DNK

    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.

    Sway and recoil are much better than a RNG determining if you hit or not as it allows it to be skill based. There's a reason Counter Strike's cone of fire and recoil patterns were set the way they were as it allows people to compensate and learn the pattern of the guns recoil.

    I really wish people would stop asking for 'realistic shooting' when every time its the same old 'please lower recoil to the point i don't have to actually do anything' or 'have the gun compensate for recoil itself because irl my muscles do that for me'

    You're holding a mouse, not a rifle, there's no way you can use any of the above and have it behave in anyway like reality as a mouse allows for much more precision than you'd ever likely to have in reality. This is why recoil, sway and the like needs to be exaggerated. Compensating for recoil is something that comes with training in reality, and it's the same in compensating for recoil in arma, you just need to practice it.

    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).

  6. Posted

    Because this is how it is in real life. Reflex/holo scopes work exactly this way.
    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.

  7. Posted

    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.

  8. Posted · Edited by DNK

    Feel I've stepped a bit far OT now, so it's spoilered.

    @maturin

    Picking your moment in the sway cycle to shoot at a target is gameplay. It is skill-based. It rewards concentration and practice.

    Shooting randomly with the forlorn hope that the game's fire cone will let you hit something is frustrating and down to luck. It is fake and it makes for bad gameplay.

    Keep in mind the randomness is meant to be equivalent to that of your typical real-world shooter (depending on skill selected and conditions), and in the real world there are frustrations regarding hitting randomly around the area you want to hit. How is it fake? Keeping some sway isn't out of the question - the two can be used together so some player skill can be added to the equation, but then we have the "hold breath" command to simulate this focus/effort aspect of shooting. I think that works well and would like to keep it specifically because it's simulating the soldier and has limits (you get worse shake if it's used too long).

    @DarkWanderer (and Deadfasts's points further)

    But whatever it is, the basic condition still holds: when the bullet leaves the barrel, it flies to where the barrel end is pointing (plus weapon's inherent inaccuracy - several MoA), not 10 degrees off. You're proposing to break the basic simulation truths for some artificial gameplay limitations/rewards - okay, it's fine for a game, but for another sort of game. It's fine for CoD or Battefield or Borderlands, but not for ArmA.
    You've not yet answered why properly simulating the barrel is more important than the shooter. And there's no reason why a simulation element is inappropriate in a simulation game. Please expand further on this point and how this is a valid counter-argument. This just looks like guilt by association to me.
    You can never perfect it, but why do you think noone can? It was made clear enough to you.
    By definition perfection is impossible here. I don't doubt there are a few crack shots out there in the population, but why is this relevant to a discussion over typical accuracy of grunts? You can set it so that skill level has a higher determinant, so a skill of 1.0 leads to very tight groupings, while only the lower skill levels have serious impacts.
    Don't propose nonsense and you won't be tired reading responses on it :)
    Right, but the issue is that the reply is quite literally nonsense in that it does not respond directly to any points made. I am not proposing a 45-degree "can't shoot worth a damn" mechanism, but that seemed to be the issue of the reply, that this would copy some horribly implemented "gamey" approach done in a different series, when I've made clear I want it to mirror reality closely.
    Noone says the problem does not exist - it does, indeed. But your way of solving it is invalid - it's like adding auto-aim to "simulate the soldier training".
    Yet the game does have this "autoaim" in that the bullet always goes where the sight picture says it will (+/- rifle imprecision) at the time you click fire, and that the level of accuracy of this sight picture is perfect - the crosshairs are all always perfectly aligned save when on the move or turning sharply.

    Frankly, I'm tired of every human always being able to hit 95% of their shots and of recoil having been made a wrist-pain-inducing matter of constant microadjustments. I'm tired of being able to constantly get easy kills on full auto running around at full speed and half health because I know how to compensate, even if in real life I couldn't compensate worth a damn in these situations. It's arcadey, moreso than BF or COD. Ultimately it's that lack of realism and the full-on gameyness that I dislike.

    As I said, making the barrel shake far faster and more often (like 5x more) such that easy compensation wasn't possible is another way to do it if you must have barrel=trajectory 100% thing.

  9. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    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.

  12. Posted

    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.

  14. Posted

    Not arguing against anything.

    Total lack of investment for multiplayer? http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=15987

    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.

  15. Posted

    The AI are almost always too good at shooting. The issue is they often:

    1. don't shoot back at all or
    2. don't take cover appropriately (and use smoke in a pinch) and
    3. 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:

    Oh, hey, Johnson just fell down, hey we're being shot at. Hey, like, let's lay down. Oh, wait, no I'm going to stand up now and slowly walk to the left 5m. Now I'm going to crouch. Oh, hey, I can't figure out where the shots are coming from, they're too far (400m). Is it to the west? The north? Let me look at those ways. OW! I was shot! Oh, there you are! Let me now crouch and start shooting at you in the open. Oh, I am dying now. Life is unfair. We should've called one of the 5 other squads to help us, but they're all slowly walking around in a blind confusion too. What is "flank"? What is "double time"? bleaaahhhhhhhh (dead)
    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.

  16. Posted

    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.

    If I remember correct, the problem was that you could be spotted from miles away without being able to see the enemy due to the high grass. So it was actually a bad idea to walk into a high grass area, while the enemy was in low grass area.
    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.

  17. Posted

    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.

  19. Posted

    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.

  24. Posted · Edited by DNK

    lol "PvP"

    Sorry but i had to laugh a little here.

    Anyone who wants to play this game for the person vs person "FPS TDM style" is just a bad who can't survive in the games that are INTENDED for that purpose . (Battlefield, CoD) .

    I personally poured some 1200 hours into battlefield 4 spread out over 2 accounts, (4.2 k/d, no vehicle crutches and no metro, only m16yoloswag assault) and i declare anyone who wants to play THIS game with the same purpose; insane, or just very bad.

    It's like "i can't survive in those games, so i'm gonna be a retard in Arma instead" .

    Yes, i'm a little bit pissed off that there's almost no domination servers available, and if i find one it's unplayable because of the server CRAWLING under the weight of the engine.

    This game is SO not suited for TDM style gameplay, but SO PERFECT for doing cool missions and domination.

    WHY THIS WASTELAND CRAP COME ON >_<

    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.

  25. Posted · Edited by DNK

    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. The purpose here is basically to simulate the soldier and negate the gamey tactics that have come to dominate play, particularly online.

    Regarding inaccuracy/weapon sway.

    I came up with this idea (well, copied a bit from another game) for changing the current recoil/inaccuracy system. It's related to fatigue, and since you're working on this already, felt I might mention it here as well.

    I'd just settle for real inaccuracy [rather than recoil], and have that increase substantially for X milliseconds after a shot is fired, cumulative, up to some hard upper limit. So, each weapon has a set base inaccuracy (much higher than current, since it's not only weapon-specific MOA but also the shooter's non-super-delta-force-ability/stress), which is adjusted for stance, health and fatigue. Then, each weapon also has an amount of inaccuracy increase per shot. Then each weapon also has a set reduction of inaccuracy per second, as well as a maximum inaccuracy (you're never going to accidentally shoot 90-degrees to your intended target due to recoil).

    Example:

    MX base inaccuracy = 4-deg (modified by health, fatigue, stance, and skill)

    MX shot increase = 6-deg (modified by health, fatigue, stance, and skill)

    MX decrease/sec = 4-deg 1/(modified by health, fatigue, stance, and skill) [might be adjusted more often than 1 second, but this is the cumulative 1-sec reduction]

    MX max = 14-deg (modified by health, fatigue, stance, and skill)

    So, it takes about 3 seconds to return from full auto to a "perfectly" aimed shot. Any single shot will take 1.5 seconds to fully recover from back to a "perfect" shot. You can adjust the values according to how much you think recoil affects attaining a "perfectly" aimed shot (given battlefield conditions, shooter error, etc), but I think this is clearly the best way to handle it.

    Proposed modifiers:

    "hold breath" (total)x(0.60)

    health (1.0 - 0.01) >> (x1.0 - x1.5)

    fatigue (0.0 - 1.0) >> (x1.0 - x1.5)

    stance (stand, crouch, prone) >> (x1.0, x0.67, x0.33)

    skill (0.01 - 1.0) >> (x2.0 - x1.0)

    So, a crouched man at 0.20 fatigue and 0.92 health with an "aimingskill" of 0.5, who has fired 4 shots in the past 3 seconds on an MX, without holding his breath, would have a Gaussian dispersion with 92% of shots falling within this many degrees of the cursor:

    (base: 4) x (x1.1 x1.04 x0.67 x1.5) + 4x(shot: 6) x (x1.1 x1.04 x0.67 x1.5) - 3x(reduce: 4) x (x1.1 x1.04 x0.67 x1.5)

    = 4.6 + 27.6 - 13.8

    = 18.40 degrees

    = 14 degrees (max)

    That makes way more sense, I think. You could add a camera-only shake/movement (ppeffect) for each shot (that doesn't move the cursor, and which will automatically return the camera to be centered on the cursor after X amount of time). That would add to immersion and at least be slightly disorienting vis-a-vis the sight picture, without requiring constant micro-adjustments of the mouse.

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