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First off I'd like to commend BI on designing a pretty well made multiplayer mode. I had the chance to hop on the official servers and play with a decently large group of people and the experience was very good. The game mode's freedom plus hardcore aspects (no respawns) causes players to play with a decently realistic and tactical approach. My main feedback lies in the spectator mode. As it currently stands, spectator is mildly bugged and is capable of being abused. Since comms do not seem to be limited between alive and dead people, players are able to use spectator mode to spy on the enemy teams and relay that information back to their own team after they die and are in spectator. As I believe the inclusion of spectator is important I propose the following changes: On all servers regardless of difficulty settings, spectator should be locked to your own team only. If your entire team is dead, spectator should be locked to your base location to prevent one team from helping the other. On veteran servers, spectator should be locked to first person view only On regular/recruit servers spectator should be switchable between first and third person only Currently there is some sort of bug where when you first enter spectator you are allowed a free camera spectator mode that disappears if you switch to a third person or first person camera. I believe this was unintentional and should be patched away. I think the mode could also do with more varied locations. Having just one primary AO makes the mission a bit stale after several play throughs.

Bohemia Interactive really needs to implement some kind of team killing auto-kick. Right now it is ridiculous how often someone can troll a team on the End-Game servers just by repeatedly team killing with no consequence. The servers do not allow an admin to be voted in and the required votes for votekicking are ridiculously difficult not to mention how to vote is un-intuitive and out of the way. Repeated kicks should turn into a temp ban of some sort. I would go into more detail but honestly this problem is quite simple and BI needs to step up and administrate their own official servers.

As much as I like Arma as the next guy on this forum, some of this is not totally true or correct. Wind only affects how much trees sway, not when they sway (i.e. a gust of wind makes a tree sway). It's more like a number that tells it how much to sway. While cool whats missing is a lot of things like ballistics being affected by wind, sound being affected by wind, vehicles and planes being affected by wind, etc. The tide system is a mod. Base Arma does not support a real tide system. Day and night cycles to real time is offset about a week or two. If you try to create historically correct missions you are either forced to use the wrong date or have a mission with the wrong day night cycle for that date.

Hey guys, This is a known issue and I've found multiple feedback tickets extending back to Arma 2 that complain about the moon phases being out of sync with the real life one. Why is this important? Can't I just set the date to find the phase that I want? Yes at face value, this is a very minor problem. However, the existence of this problem in the first place is something about BI development practices that I wish to discuss. Myself and many others love the Arma series and BI's dedication to simulation and detail. BI has recently taken on a mentality of "if we're gonna add something to the game, it needs to be done right" which is a mentality I greatly approve of. Few things annoy a user more than when a feature that has been advertised does not work as it should. It is far less annoying for me to be completely missing a feature than to find a broken one. From a development standpoint, if the resources are being put in to develop a feature than at least it should be done correctly otherwise the payout is even worse than if those resources were not committed at all. When it comes to the moon phases, it is great that BI wishes to allow realistic moon phases and implemented this feature of moon phases being tied to calendar date. However, now that the phases and dates are incorrectly synced, you end with with a feature that does not serve its initial purpose that took more effort to build than simply allowing users to specify the phase. We as users end up having to work around this function now instead of being able to rely on it. Both parties here are inconvenienced by the shoddy attention to detail when this feature was first developed. One example is mission makers who are trying to make historically accurate recreations. Now they are forced to either pick the right date with incorrect lighting for their mission or pick the wrong date and take means to hide that from the user. So while the bug seems innocuous at first glance, it has larger downstream issues for all mission makers including the BI devs themselves. I implore the devs to take a look at this issue again and attempt to resolve it for the benefit of all mission creators down the road. If it is too much work to properly sync the moon phase due to backward compatibility issues regarding existing missions, then at least provide a means to set the moon phase manually to override the default incorrect one (a command I suspect is available for setting the moon phase for the sync in the first place).

I'm just using the workshop mission. I'm not editing it in anyway. The purchasable Falcon drone is not usable. It would be cool if this could be fixed for the next release.

I've discovered a bug with the new Falcon drone. It does not appear possible to connect to the drone with the terminal. Not sure if this is relevant but it seems that the drone is missing the AI required to pilot it.

Hey guys, I'd like to take a moment to discuss an aspect of Arma that I've always enjoyed but I feel that has been under represented so far in Arma 3: night time. With the new 1.60 visual update, the nights are even darker during twilight hours which is great! Unfortunately tools such as the flashlight are still too dim to be of much use. I've taken several screenshots from my tests to find out what the useful range of illumination is and I believe it is for the most part inadequate. I performed this test by placing a soldier with a range finder, NVGs, a flashlight attachment and an offroad to demonstrate various lighting situations. I then approach a target building with the illumination on until I can make out the faintest outline of the building which I consider the point at which a player might be aware there was something there besides darkness. My findings are below: For a offroad, at ~93m the light starts providing illumination on the target building. If you look closely at the center you can see a faint outline of a house start appearing. Here is a shot of it with NVGs on to show you what you are actually seeing: I believe this does a fairly good job of illuminating a target object or building. Once you pull a bit closer than 93m with the offroad headlights you can see much more detail and at a reasonable range. Another test I've done for the offroad is road illumination. See the following images for what the headlights look like and the NVG view as well: Now take a look at this wikipedia article regarding headlights and the sample images provided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp The offroad does a great job of simulating the low beam mode of a vehicle headlight. The ingame image looks very similar to the real life one. However, while driving on a dark road at night there are advantages of having high beams on. It would be great if the devs could add in a high beam mode for the lights as well. This might also be used tactically when using the vehicle to illuminate a target object or building. For a flashlight, at ~33m the light starts providing illumination on the target building. Once again it's a faint outline at this point. Here is a shot of it with NVGs on: In my opinion, the flashlight is completely inadequate for anything other than lighting a small building or room up. Here are some sample shots from real life flashlight tests (not conducted by myself). Of course while a camera capture of an image would be different from what the naked eye would see, it provides some basis for comparison between the Arma3 flashlight and how a real flashlight would perform. 100ft is 30.48m for reference. The objects in the image below are far brighter than what we are experiencing in Arma right now at a similar range. When it comes to detectable range (faintly illuminated). Check out the following image: source of the image: http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/11/jim-barrett/gear-review-streamlight-protac-hl-flashlight/ According to the author of that image, the trees illuminated by the beam are approximately 100yards away which is equivalent to 91.44m away. Even if the author had misrepresented the range by 2x, it is still far more illuminating than the flashlights we currently have in Arma 3. I think it would be great if the devs could take this information into consideration and make the lighting in 1.60 even more awesome by giving the players tools to properly enjoy a night time scenario.

Will there be an upgrade or update to flashlights with the visual update? As it stands the current Arma flashlights are not bright enough and do not have a realistic lighting range. Even in the pitch dark, shining a flashlight around reveals little more than ~15-20m in front of you and just feels off. As such they find little use except in extreme situations where you have no other light source. It would also be cool if BI was able to create "dark" spaces during the day. Something like a cave like environment or windowless office room where it is dark despite it being day. This could allow for flashlights to be useful even during the day and could lead to interesting gameplay in CQB environments. But knowing the arma engine, this feature probably would not be easy to do or possible.

Just took a look at the new difficulty options. I like the cleanliness of the new menu and the customization options. Just some feedback below: Stamina indicator should be on a fade-out/hide/show system as well. Default for veteran should be fade-out and for everything else it should be show. This information is something that you are completely lacking awareness of in the game so to have it be hidden on any difficulty does not make sense IMO. Some sort of description for each setting would be helpful. Most I think are self explanatory but there are some which are not easy to understand which could benefit from this. Having this consistency would also be good for newcomers to the Arma series.

We had a modder attempt this. Look up ".kju" This guy basically created the basis for what we now know as the CUP packs. Back in the day it was called AiA and he spearheaded the whole thing doing most of the development work. He tried to rely on donations and posted the results of his experiment to live off of doing mod work for Arma 3: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/177324-do-donations-work-for-arma-modders/#entry2782783 The end result was that trying to live off of donations for his mod work is completely unsustainable. This guy wasn't just running a sever, he was building a fundamentally important modpack to the community on par with a mod like ACE, ACRE, RHS, etc. If you really want to work on Arma 3 for a living, like others have suggested, I recommend trying to get a job at BIS.

Can you post a video of your issues? Load up virtual arsenal or something to demonstrate it. Without more evidence it is hard to find out what the problem is. In my personal tests in VA, even pistols kill reliably on unarmored targets (chest shot). You also need to keep in mind that if you hit the guy in the foot, they will twitch the same as if you hit the guy in the chest. This goes for ricochets as well. This might be why it appears that they are able to take several shots instead of just one.

Bullets do definitely originate from the gun's barrel and not the character models chest. A simple test to check this is do a corner lean. You'll notice that sometimes even when you can see a target that you are aiming at, you will still hit the wall in front of you. That is because your view extends a bit further than the barrel of the gun and the gun's barrel is still hitting the wall in front of it. This is quite a common problem which is why some people prefer to play with crosshairs on so that you can tell if you are aiming at the wall or the distant target.

I believe you have misunderstood me as well as the devs intention. As I understand the dev summary on the wiki, the intention is to have 4 modes: recruit, regular, veteran, and custom. Custom being whatever settings you want with everything being adjustable so you would not lose any choice or option. While I am generally a supporter of 1st person only servers, I would never support the removal of choice from the game as I see it being one of Arma's most powerful aspects - being able to play the sandbox how ever you want. As it currently stands the concept of a difficulty preset (recruit, regular, veteran) is a useless differentiation and only adds confusion as most of these "difficulty" settings can be tweaked to the point of not even resembling the original preset. You can run a recruit server with AI turned up to extreme, all UI off and still show up as a recruit difficulty server in the browser. Or more like the actual status of the servers, you can run a veteran difficulty server with every single aid turned on as to resemble a recruit difficulty server. Imagine how confusing that would be to a new player using the in-game browser. Having consistent preset difficulty options are really for the benefit of the whole community, not just a server admin or a player. It allows both parties at a glance to setup or choose their desired difficulty at a glance without having to dive into the details of what each setting is. For those who do have that desire to dive more deeply into each particular setting, there is a custom mode just for that.

This is great news. I've been waiting for a difficulty overhaul for a while now as it leads to the most confusion when finding servers to join and also when people are setting up servers. My two main desires for this update are to have: Clarity in 3rd person camera and crosshair modes. e.g. Veteran = not possible to have those on at all. Regular = 3rd person and crosshairs on. Mainly this is something that is immediately understandable in the server browser without having to rely on servers titling themselves something like this "3pp:on | xhairs: off | etc". Stamina and stance indicators default on at all difficulies. I believe this type of knowledge regarding your soldiers position and status is very important and not easily discernible without these indicators. Some possible nice to have features: Bullet and magazine count off on veteran difficulty. We can check via our inventory so this could be removed without much impact on experienced players. Close range name tags optional on all difficulties - e.g. under 10m you can see a name tag. This is mostly due to the fact that without name tags it is often hard to tell exactly who is who even at close range

I'm quite surprised that this thread got revived after so long. I was just randomly browsing this forum too and noticed that this topic looked familiar. Anyhow, I've played and beaten every single official showcase and campaign on elite difficulty with AI set to expert and I assure you it is possible. First of all if you mean showcase by "presentation", then there is no showcase called "Combat Helicopters". There is a "Helicopters" showcase and a "Gunships" showcase. Which one do you want me to explain the strategy for? In a previous post I made in this topic, I explained a test I created with AA manpads setup in a town while I flew transport. In multiple tests I was able to dodge at least one missile using flares while performing a very dangerous flyover of the AO. So the claim that every AA missile will always hit is simply not true. I've also flown fixed wing and helicopters in multiple scenarios in Arma (pvp and vsAI) and I've managed to dodge AA missiles before. I'm not saying I never get shot down or never crash but I've dodged enough that I don't see how anyone can claim 100% AA missile effectiveness. Also unless you have a more official source besides anecdotal evidence of flares effectiveness, I can't accept a single story from an uncle who flies transport PLANES but happens to be an expert of flares in combat HELICOPTERS. As I've said the first time this topic came up, unless people have some credible proof that flares are 100% effective versus an AA missile then I see no reason for BI to start working on an updated CM simulation in what is primarily an infantry game.