lev

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.

I didn't find anything on the forums so I'd like to start a thread to share and discuss features that we would like to see implemented with Zeus. From what I've seen and experienced, Zeus looks like a really unique gameplay mode that offers us that sandbox feeling that we've been looking for for a long time. I think a lot of us has ideas for what we want to do with Zeus and what we want to create with its features. I'll start off my list here: 1. Line of Sight object/unit vision for Zeus - i.e. Zeus can only see what the players can see. I'd go into detail about the multitude of things you can do with this in Zeus but I'm sure everyone already has their own ideas about it. 2. Map camera movement - this is so that you can easily navigate the giant terrains available. 3. Grouped object saving - so you can quickly add large numbers of objects that you commonly use (think this was mentioned in the live stream actually)

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.

Hi guys, Has there been any word from BI whether or not the current state of grass concealment will be worked on in the marksmen update? The main problem that we're experiencing right now is that a player who is prone in grass is actually at a disadvantage in terms of visibility compared to someone who is prone on a road/tarmac or crouched or standing. The main reason for this is draw distance where the prone player is seeing all the rendered grass while someone on a tarmac/road, crouched or standing is not seeing the rendered grass. I'm sure many Arma players are familiar with this scenario where you are prone crawling through what appears to be pretty high grass and then suddenly you are being shot at despite not being able to see your attacker and being surrounded by grass. Since the marksmen DLC aims to improve weapons handling and includes features like weapons resting and bipods, this would be a great opportunity to fix the grass issues as well since weapons resting and bipods probably depends on the player being prone in many cases. I know BI still uses their "sinking" the model into the ground solution but this is still inadequate as it results in the problems described above. Fixing this issue will "revolutionize" the base game play in a lot of ways by changing how basic combat is conducted over terrain. An interesting solution has been posted about here: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=3505 Any word from BI on if this issue will be fixed or addressed?

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.

I just received this error from Arma while trying to get missions through the workshop. So I've subscribed to multiple missions through the Arma 3 workshop interface. Occasionally instead of downloading the full mission right away when I subscribe it will wait till I try to play it to download it. Today I started getting weird messages where the download will hold at 0/x KB and then give me an error saying "Operation Cancelled - Not enough disk space". I currently have over 7 GB free on the default disk which is where Arma is installed. Anyone know the solution to this problem?

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.

Hi guys, Recently started trying TOH. I am currently using a G940 setup to play. I don't like to ease myself into the game so I prefer to start playing on expert and learn all the difficulties from the get-go. Unfortunately, TOH expert mode is exceedingly hard and I can not even take off properly. The main issue I experience is that as soon as I increase the collective enough to rise into the air even a slight bit, I just lose all control of the helicopter -> i.e. it starts spinning and swaying like crazy. I've read that I am supposed to hit manual trim set or something but I can't even steady it to the point that that control becomes useful. Any tips/guides to help this noob get started? Lev

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.

The game and steam is installed on the same HDD as where my missions and everything are located (C: drive). Total space available according to windows is 7.45 GB. I've run under 7.45 GB without a problem before so it is kind of strange that this is happening now. ---------- Post added at 09:55 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:52 AM ---------- Quick update. Restarted my computer and the problem seems to have disappeared on its own. Not sure exactly what was happening last night but the issue seems to have resolved itself!

Hey, As the title suggested, would it be possible for BIS to host an official server for endgame without 3rd person to cater to both types of Arma players?

So I've been furiously playing the new Endgame mode since its release and here's my thoughts and feedback on it. First off, I'd like to congratulate BI on what I consider to be their best competitive multiplayer mode yet. Its a ton of fun and gives the best out of the box tactical/team work experience I've had with stock Arma. Now for the feedback. A lot of this feedback can be chalked up to differences in opinion regarding game design and what fun means so please take it with a grain of salt. Some feedback isn't necessarily about the Endgame mode itself but impacts it and may be considered for an update in general or at least with regards to Endgame. 1. Carrier marker - this is probably the weakest aspect of the mode. Because the carrier marker is extremely accurate and globally visible, it limits the capabilities of the attacking team and adversely affects the quality of play. The precise and real time information makes it a lot easier for a defending team to neutralize an attack and also leaves no uncertainty which removes the need for things like recon and having a defensive net and instead promotes an almost single minded deatchmatch like siege on the schematic. My suggestion for this is to have a globally visible marker that is only accurate to within 50m meters of the location of the schematic and only updates every 15 seconds. This should apply to both the map marker as well as the visible marker. My intent for this change to promote more tactical play by allowing both teams some breathing room. One thing to consider is that the current implementation is good for UI/UX reasons because it makes it very clear to all players (especially new ones) that the schematic is an important objective. The suggestion I gave may introduce some confusion to newer players as they might run to the marker only find nothing there. It also makes it less clear who the schematic carrier is so something else might be needed to indicate that an enemy player you are looking at is indeed carrying the schematic. 2. Teammate markers - I think this needs to change from only group markers to two kinds: in group markers, and on team markers. Anyone in your group should get the current style of marker and anyone on your team but not in your group should get a secondary fainter marker. This would reduce the amount of friendly fire as well as increase team work since its easier to see where people on your team are. 3. Loadouts - the current system needs some limitations otherwise there is a potential for a lot of spam. Right now no matter the class you select, you can choose pretty much any weapon that another class has access to. So you can be a medic running around with a marksmen rifle while carrying an AT launcher and some mines. It also reduces the need for teamwork if one person can serve multiple roles. My suggestion is to allow all classes to have access to the basic rifle and the carbine version of it but limit certain weapons to specific classes. For instance only marksmen can get access to marksmen rifles, only machine gunners get access to machine guns, only the AT soldier gets access to the AT launcher, and so on. In addition, I think the current rifleman class should be replaced by the combat engineer who should be the only soldier to get access to mines and tool kits (for repair and mine removal). This will limit some of the mine spam that I've witnessed. The main issue I have with my own suggestion is that it potentially limits the number of play styles. For instance what if a team wanted to run 4 machinegunners rather than the 2 currently available slots? Or what if someone slots a role that they don't know how to serve and now the team does not have the capability to supplement that role? Other difficulties would be logistical and technical ones like what happens if you pick up a dead teammate's weapon? Would it be counter to the class system if you allow that or could it be abused to allow people to get access to a restricted weapon anyway? I'm not sure what BI's philosophy is around this mode and how it should be adjusted. My personal thought is that these limitations would benefit the mode since the limited roles would encourage teamwork over solo-ing and prevent spam of explosives. 4. Respawn zones - this is actually a couple of issues combined into one topic. Firstly, I'm gonna start with some bugs/improvements. I think some clarification is needed when it comes to the naming of the zones. For instance the FOB respawn zone is not actually the FOB but a different area (not sure if this was a bug or intentional). Another quality of life improvement would be to show the carrier's position and status of zones on the respawn map so you can make a more informed decision about where to spawn. Next, I'm gonna discuss the placement of respawn zones. While I like how the current respawn zone placement allows players to quickly get into the action, it does need a bit of tweaking to feel better. Right now as you assault an intel download point, it kind of feels like a team deathmatch since several of the respawn points are placed so close to their download locations that even if you wipe out a squad of enemies they can get back in the action in less than a minute. A minute is not that much time especially with the uncertainty of how safe a zone is. Along the same lines, another thing that I want to discuss is an alternative proposal: the complete removal of the existing respawn zones (near the intel zones) and the ability to respawn onto a teammate. What I am proposing is having additional optional FOB/s that allow you to forward spawn closer to the various objectives and that come with a set of vehicles to help you get there. These optional FOB's should be re-capturable so it can change hands for a team to get a strategic edge. The reason why I feel that this is superior to simply moving respawn zones furthur away is that it adds some predicatability and logic to where people are popping up. The current respawn system creates a lot of situations where players can feel like they've done a great job defending or attacking only to find more attackers/defenders popping in "magically". The other change to the respawn system I would make along with this is to respawn in 1 minute waves across all FOBs instead of 30s after death. 5. Randomization of the upload zones/pickup - I believe that the preset upload zones is kind of a weakness in the gameplay. This allows players who have experience with the mode to do things such as defensively mine up a zone from the very start of the game or preemptively setup a camping spot by the capture/defend zone before the schematic is even located. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that when I'm confident in my team's ability to retrieve the last required piece of intel, I would immediately proceed to the capture zone and setup to pick off incoming defenders. This can be an unfun experience for players who aren't aware that the upload zones stay static from match to match and aren't given a fair chance to defend since players like myself are already preparing for their arrival before they even know they need to be there. After playing some more and realizing that the pickup zone is consistent as well, I've seen players go so far as to camp the pickup zone to ambush the players coming to pick up the package. This isn't an inherently bad thing but because of the lack of randomization it is not because we had a scout detect the location and report it back or track the enemies there, but rather because we simply know and it is in our advantage to pre-camp it. I think a simple fix would be to randomly choose which upload zone your team needs to go to between the harbor/hospital and introduce one or more pickup zones for the schematic. I've made a map image to summarize some of these points. http://i.imgur.com/AyzwFHe.jpg (211 kB)

Awesome thanks!

What do you mean you don't have a choice? Here is your choice: buy the DLC and you get access to fly those additional helicopters or do not buy the DLC and you do not get to fly those helicopters. Pretty simple. This isn't a humble bundle package; you don't get to choose how much you want to pay - I'm not even sure what made you think you have this right?? Maybe you never read the post BIS made when they came out with their new DLC strategy, but here is how it works. A3 DLC has two main components: major engine updates and new content. Engine updates come free for everyone, you pay to get access to the content. I don't understand your confusion with this concept? If you think $15 is too much to pay for access to the helicopters, then don't pay for it. BIS isn't forcing you to and you aren't gonna lose the ability to play with 100% of the community. BTW I don't know how long you've been around but this DLC strategy is primarily from feedback from the community. The Arma modding community has always been better at making content (e.g. models, skins, army collections, and missions) than BIS has been. The things the modding community couldn't do as well were engine updates like AFM or ZEUS type things. It is good for the community that BIS is starting to recognize this fact and is switching their focus to improving the engine over working on adding new maps or campaigns. It is also very cool that they've figured out a way to pay for developing these updates without splitting the community or forcing everyone to pay.

Hi guys, It has been a while and it appears the problem is still there. Recently, I've re-enabled SLI mode on my GTX 690 and the PiP flickering is still an issue. Has anyone had any luck fixing this? Things I have tried: -turned my mobo to PCI3 instead of PCI2 mode (this has fixed an issue for me where SLI mode was actually reducing my frame rate) -used nvidia control panel to force multi-GPU rendering mode to alternate frame rendering 2, 1 and single GPU mode -used nvidia control panel to set multi-display/mixed GPU acceleration to single display performance mode, compatibility, multi display performance mode