royaltyinexile

Just wanted to share a quick note about this one. Part of the motivation for adding more feedback to engaging targets relates to some of the inherent limitations we face. During the Apex pre-production phase, we asked ourselves if it would be feasible to create a more advanced system, where successfully engaged target could, for example, be knocked down. Unfortunately, our animation system, together with a number of other related factors, wasn't able to support this. We had to consider other methods. Particle effects linked to the calibre of the round are a fairly robust, intuitive, compromise (although players should be able to disable these in the game options if it's not to their taste). We asked this question because we felt our existing solution both failed to adequately represent its real-life analogue, and to meet our design goal of letting players know when their shots connect. Indeed, the fact we have large terrains (and, therein, potentially large engagement distances) makes it more important to offer this type of feedback. While I don't think it's pandering to a 'casual audience' to reach that conclusion, I also recognise it's not up to players to care about the constraints of our animation technology. We'll take that hit (*cloud of blood spawns*). I could go on about everything else happening under the hood when a target is struck (recently added dynamic aiming error, etc), but this topic is about fatigue feedback, and I've derailed things for quite long enough. :) Although I'll try to leave additional feedback to the chaps handling the feature, I'll note my perspective briefly, which relates to your above criticisms (suffice to say, thanks for the feedback). I think it's not quite clear enough that the new system has been released to Dev-Branch at an early stage. The team felt that, on balance, publishing the system 'in the wild' was the best route. It's fair to say that a number of aspects (recovery conditions, rates of decay, sway duties, etc). can - and should - be improved. Ultimately, we have to compare the performance of the system against our originally stated design goals. In my view, if our end goal is to create a mechanic that: Encourages players to consider their loadout Asks players to plan their movement Rewards players that make objectively better choices Prohibits players from selecting unrealistic loadouts Is transparent and comprehensible for players Then, bluntly put - in its current, fresh-out-the-oven incarnation - it fails to satisfactorily meet a number of those criteria. We must ask how it fails to meet them satisfactorily, and identify things to add, change, or remove. Lastly, and it's Sunday, and it's late, so bear with me, I want to offer some sort of note of hope: although next week is going to be long and stressful and in large parts smothered in rage, we have some truly dedicated designers that will be doing little else than listening to feedback, making plans, and implementing improvements. This is certainly one of those topic that incites a lot of passion, which speaks to the dedication of the community and devs alike, but it's one I hope that can be conducted with civility and patience. Thanks again to all for sharing their views so far. Best, RiE

Full Report

Full Report

Hello, and thanks for the positive feedback! Just to be absolutely clear about our intentions, the current plan is to 'fully release' the Eden Editor (i.e. publish it to the default branch of the game, for everyone) in the New Year. At this time, we would continue to support the 2D Editor (i.e., it would be available as it is now, on Dev-Branch). When the expansion is released - at some point later in 2016 - we'll then consider removing the 2D Editor. Of course, we'd want to carefully consider our options, but the basic goal is to only have one tool to support and maintain, and only one type of mission export (saving the mission and sharing it). There will probably be a lot of special cases (like you describe), so our current plan is to give ourselves the room to address the most important ones, and also give the community time to adapt / find new ways of achieving their dark magic in the new tool! If there's a specific issue you're facing now, we'd appreciate it if you'd post a ticket to the feedback tracker. Meanwhile, enjoy Eden editing! Best, RiE

While it's true that Arma 3 changed direction mid-production, it was rather a return to its sandbox military roots / strengths - a path we're still walking. Of course, though, it would be madness to not consider the platform and its broader applications when making decisions about content and features. Arma 3's played in a rich variety of ways; it's up to us to make decisions about where to invest, and what provides the biggest gameplay return for the most people. It's also to work on what we're interested in, and what our individual preferences are. If you survey the key features and content delivered for everyone, for free, since launch, it's objectively a better military platform. I'm afraid I can't see much merit in any viewpoint that would suggest otherwise. I must also take issue with your notes on AI development. While it's true that, on our road to the expansion, we're looking to improve multiplayer and offer MP-focused content, that's not to the detriment of AI or SP gameplay more broadly. Our official scenarios and modes are and will be built around AI and PvE; improving behaviour here is key to creating splendid content. Furthermore, it's plain to see that our (investment in improving AI) is something that accelerated after the change in direction. We now have a skilled and experienced fireteam of programmers and designers capable of (and motivated to) fixing existing issues and bringing new improvements. If you take an objective look at the progress made by our team over the last 2 years, I'd struggle to find credence in your viewpoint. Indeed, I'd argue that the AI has made more (admittedly, long awaited!) progress in the last year of development than 3-4 years of Arma 2 support. Naturally that work will continue on and past the expansion. We're not complacent about the issues, and we're keen to make progress on issues like detection, lethality, and support for existing and new features (e.g., FFV). I look forward to setting out the high-level goals in a roadmap blog in the next few weeks, where I hope it will be clear what it is we're building towards. However, I think it's disingenuous to position our development as doing a disservice to the veteran communities. It's too easy to discount the hard work / dedication the team puts in - or, as AI might have it - to miss the forest for the trees! ;) Best, RiE

Full Report

Well, I've always insisted that Wednesday is a far more suitable day for the REPture. :cool:

Full Report

For a little over a (Dev-Branch) week now, there are two things at play when a player enters a building. Firstly, exterior sounds (i.e. things making a noise outside the building) are less audible. Secondly, some noises made inside the building (such as firing a weapon) reverberate. Currently, the implementation - partly in the interest of performance, partly due the complexity of implementation - is fairly basic. So far, interior reverb extends to footsteps and weapon tails, an approach that abstracts various real-life factors. Other sounds are excluded from exterior-interior attenuation; it's not true 'occlusion', of course, but it's pointing in the right direction. Nevertheless, we consider this to be a big improvement upon the previous state; that being said, we're also aware that a more complex solution, simulating more factors and more sound sources, would be more splendid. Finding an agreeable balance between samples / dynamic filters / performance, is always top of our agenda. Marksmen DLC isn't the end of our audio roadmap - it's a stop along on the way. We've had the opportunity to focus on some important (and, one might argue, long-overlooked) aspects of our sound engine, and along the way, our (growing) team has learned from the experience, which in turn, we hope benefits our community. This 'learning' applies to both technical expertise (ahem, trial and error), plus getting to grips with developing on an open platform, gathering feedback, and communicating with our players. Perhaps on the cusp of Marksmen DLC's launch, it's appropriate to thank everyone for their feedback! Naturally - given the reality of our development schedule - we can't make everything a reality, but I know for certain that our game will sound much better than it did before, which we can attribute to the splendid cooperation between our hard-working audio team and dedicated community members! I, for one, am looking forward to continuing along this path! Best, RiE

Dear Community, welcome to launch day! On behalf of Task Force End Game, I'd like to thank everyone for their contribution so far! With Marksmen DLC, we wanted to experiment with releasing our content a little earlier than usual, try to bring the community more effectively into its development and, overall, we're happy to have made that choice! Although End Game is neatly packaged up with Marksmen DLC - and today it hits Main Branch for all of our players - this isn't the end of the road for its development. What's become clear over the last few weeks is the benefit of developing important MP Systems with one eye on a short term goal: the next Dev-Branch update. Looking ahead - particularly, with our 3 scripted systems: Revive, Dynamic Groups, and Shared Objectives in mind - further iteration and feedback will be vital for the sake of both our own official MP content, and that of our community, too. We intend to expand and migrate these systems into the engine to offer better performance and true modularity. Some documentation would be nice, too, wouldn't it? To explore these systems - and make the most of our development time - we intend to continue using End Game on Dev-Branch as a vehicle for experimentation, validation, and gameplay focus. As mentioned in our Marksmen DLC blog, we plan to update and share the development roadmap of our path towards the expansion. Suffice to say, enhancing multiplayer gameplay and improving stability / performance will be at the heart of our effort. So, stay tuned, and keep on offering your feedback - we're listening. Thanks again, and see you in the End Game! :cool: Best, RiE

Full Report

02-04-2015 EXE rev. 130083 (changelog) ITERATION-05 KNOWN ISSUES

27-03-2015 EXE rev. 129935 (changelog) ITERATION-04 (HOTFIX-01) KNOWN ISSUES

26-03-2015 EXE rev. 129911 (changelog) ITERATION-04 KNOWN ISSUES

20-03-2015 EXE rev. 129822 (changelog) PUBLIC PLAYTEST (ITERATION-03)

19-03-2015 EXE rev. 129822 (changelog) ITERATION-03 KNOWN ISSUES

Thermal masking is certainly something we're interested in, but it's not something we'd approach lightly. We didn't consider the behaviour of the new ghillie suits to be a feature (although, I understand your point entirely); rather, it was (literally) a bug: an unexpected side-effect to our experimental approach of using a different kind of shader for the ghillie materials. Best, RiE

Thanks a lot for the feedback, Healbeam, and sorry for having to kick you out of my group - I think there was a bug with Dynamic Groups! Will try to repro on Monday (you were 'in my group', but not under my squad command, or group chats scope). Actually, in later iterations of the mode, we thought it might be interesting to experiment with moving the objectives further away. As it stands, although there is an innate pace to the mode, with proper co-op play, it does reward intelligent planning (divide into squad, plan and assign objectives, and react to the enemy movement) - perhaps just not enough to count. Without changing any of the logic of the mission, it should be possible to achieve more strategic gameplay by fiddling with the distances and means of transport alone. A larger scale will not be to everyone's taste, of course, but, once some of the basic gameplay is locked down (better handling of download and carrier mechanics), it should be fairly simple to create different variants that cater to players that want to plan and coordinate more. I agree. Again, not to make excuses, but we've been focused on developing the mid and end game mechanics. The basic function of phase one is to group players together around one simple objective, offering some immediate action, before opening the scale up with multiple intel tasks. As it stands, I agree, it's a bit unsatisfying and lends itself to simple rush tactics. We've tossed around the idea of making Phase 1 more like a very small sector control. Imagine one small-ish location, with sectors A B and C. To establish the FOB, the side should assault and secure each sector (optimally, by forming teams (dynamic groups) and tackling objectives in parallel (shared objectives)). It's also something like a small training / orientation stage (particularly with the planned introduction of scripted revive mechanics) before the scale ramps up in Phase 2. However, since we're focusing on some other areas for now - and since it would mean having to change at least BLUFOR's start point - we're planning to come back to it later, if possible. The guys are also focused upon the MP systems themselves, trying to make sure they fit for re-use in community missions more generally (see an above post for those notes), so we don't want to over-burden them too much! Yes, I believe Neo was working on this quite recently. Perhaps he'll be able to update you guys with the current plan! Best, RiE

Not currently. Since we've released the system in an early state, we wouldn't expect to publish any documentation until it's in a more 'final' version. Although it can be used in any given scenario, right now, we only really 'support' the system via this specific MP mode. It will hit main branch with Marksmen DLC; we hope by this time it will be in a better state for reuse by content creators. However, depending on how things go, its modular nature may not be fully fleshed out - it's a scripted prototype of functionality we'd look to support in engine as we move towards the expansion, which means there will be certain accepted limitations in the short term. All of these features are part of the current implementation, although, of course, we see room for improvement on several aspects. Did you find the time to try the system yet? It would be great to get some feedback on how these things are performing compared to your expectations. Of those not there, handing respawn more effectively is in particular something we'd like to do. The first step will come with the planned introduction of the Revive scripted proof-of-concept and, again, more low-level stuff in the longer term. Best, RiE

13-03-2015 EXE rev. 129712 (changelog) PUBLIC PLAYTEST (ITERATION-02)

Thanks for the report; this issue relates to the particular shader used for the new ghillies. Our art-programmer hybrid hyper-brain is actively looking at a solution. But for now, I'll just say #BIPODS. Best, RiE

12-03-2015 EXE rev. 129712 (changelog) ITERATION-02 KNOWN ISSUES

Occlusion is in game, because it's always been there-ish (it just hasn't necessarily functioned so splendidly; it does 'something' to the volume based on the terrain. ish.). To be clear, though, we would like to improve this area and, yes, some of the work relating to dynamic attenuation takes us a step closer; however, there are still a number of roadblocks in the way (i.e., detection, performance); for these reasons, we would not want to 'promise' improvement in this area in the short term. For Marksmen DLC, the features we're currently focusing on are: distance-based attenuation; weapon tails; supersonic cracks; weapon sound overhaul (scope: infantry primary weapon). This is in addition to the support Audio offers other features (i.e. weapon deployment, #bipods, etc). That's quite a burden for a small (but splendid) team, if I may say so. Yes, there are a couple more experiments buried deep in the darkest recesses of the infinitesimal space between the symbiotic minds of our Audio Lead and our Audio Programmer but - whether or not another feature or two can escape this dark void - . Yes, sorry, I meant to update you guys sooner. The tails are there, but many of them are still considered placeholder. In short: there is some inconsistency in their quality/effect. This should be addressed ASAP in some Dev updates next week. If it persists, I'll nudge our friend Dusa about providing some further description of intention / current state! Best, RiE

Rather by constraint, I'm afraid. We'll have another chat about the progress next week (which is splendid!), but it would appear that some issues prevent us from implementing this functionality. Best, RiE

:confused: We don't use or support these commands in official content. Hack away with them to your heart's content, though!