dragon01
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Posts posted by dragon01
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Yeah, especially since ArmA4 is going to have its own quirks. It's not going to simply be Reforger with an SP campaign, or at least I hope so.
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Well, I guess it was bound to happen. I'm not big on Reforger, but really looking forward to ArmA4, which I hope RHS will be able to transition to without much trouble.
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We don't really know that, given that none of them had shown up in real combat so far...
Yes, a lightly armored turret is a gamble. Given that they may not have the ability to armor it properly against modern APFSDS, it might actually be the right choice. Combined with tube-launched ATGMs and considerable mobility, the T-14 seems to be all about getting the first shot off in a tank fight. Whether the tanks can actually do that as built is another matter, but the design is pretty clever.
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It might be hacked together for DayZ, like ArmA3, it pushes the boundaries of what that engine can be made to do, just in different ways.
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VRS toggle should be kept, although it should be set server-side, of course. I'm pretty sure VRS as we have it in ArmA3 is exaggerated. In a real helo you have to try to get into VRS, settling with power is more common but easily countered through proper technique. However, this is just about the only thing that could be easily disabled. The rest of the difficulties are just helos being helos, controlling a highly dynamic machine such as that is never going to be super-easy.
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6 hours ago, stburr91 said:Why would BI remove the capability to fly aircraft for virtually all of their player base? Frankly, that just defies logic.
Because the "keyboard first" approach limits what they can do with aircraft physics, plain and simple. Making it possible to be reasonably effective using non-analog inputs would essentially be holding the helo physics back. The only way to fly a helicopter with keyboard is with arcade physics, not anything realistic. And the problem with optional arcade physics is, they introduce different rules for different players. You want to avoid that in a multiplayer game.
Also, I haven't said it should be removed completely. It should be a backup option, acknowledged to be inferior, and given minimum support required to stay possible. Just like in TKOH, flying without analog inputs is possible, but not recommended, and that's not the way it's meant to be flown. The approach should be "gamepad/flightstick first" in this area, with realistic physics and limitations (so, no autohover in an 80s Huey, though an early Apache from that time might have it). Hopefully, growth in the console area will be sufficient to reprioritize it as such.
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13 minutes ago, sarogahtyp said:you have no clue bout how many pilots (and others) on PC are using Joysticks, Pedals, Thrust Controls, Steering Wheels ... and how well those are working also in Arma 3
I do, I have a 400$ Winwing HOTAS, and while I haven't used it for ArmA yet (not enough time lately), I did use my CH HOTAS since ArmA2. 🙂 However, many, many more people will not have these. This is why I said "FPS-oriented". Of course a flightsimmer will have all that hardware, but the FPS market is far, far larger than the hardcore flight sim one. The issue is not in support for those devices, but rather with lack of focus on analog controls. ArmA was always keyboard first, with analog axes tacked on later, and analog throttle for jets was only put in rather late, previously it was like Ace Combat. Reforger, IMO, should change that approach, focusing on analog controls for aircraft in particular, with keyboard support being tacked on just so that you can still sort-of use them if you don't have at least a gamepad.
2 minutes ago, sarogahtyp said:Fortunately, that won't happen and never will.
I wouldn't be so sure. Helicopter AFM in ArmA3 is already hard to use via keyboard+mouse. Yes, you can probably manage it, if you practice a lot, but that's not what it's meant for. We want BI to move further in that direction, since now many players will be on console, with enough analog controls to make for a fun experience with a realistic flight model.
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Believe it or not, consoles being a consideration is actually a good thing for helos. The reason why? Analog sticks. One thing consoles have over a typical FPS-focused gaming PC is analog input, which you really can't do without in a realistically modeled helicopter, and only with great, great difficulty in a realistic fixed wing aircraft. Flying with a keyboard simply isn't flying. Gamepad isn't ideal, either, but there are actually people who use them for DCS. Mostly because they're so cheap compared to even an entry-level HOTAS and take up less space. A gamepad gives you a great number of analog axes to work with, meaning you can not only make analog elevators, ailerons, throttle and rudder, but you can even spare the other stick for the radar cursor, which would be far more comfortable and realistic than "TAB-lock" of previous ArmAs. This would also move the targeting pod camera, another thing that should be on a cockpit display and not a full-screen view that prevents you from flying the plane in a meaningful way.
IMO, BI should deprioritize, if not completely abandon, the idea of making aircraft viable to effectively fly via keyboard. This is a radical notion in this community, I know, but it's easy enough to get a USB gamepad for PC, and of course serious flyers typically already have a HOTAS, anyway. If they would take that step, only providing the bare minimum of functionality to users without analog axes, this would enable BI to spend all dev resources in the flight modeling department on the "AFM" for helos and planes, which, with analog input, are actually easier to fly than the silly thing we had in ArmA2. Also, by optimizing for analog input from the start, I believe a much better flight experience could be achieved, overall. I'm not asking for DCS-level FM modeling or anything like that, but merely for BI to approach the aircraft with a "simulation" mindset rather than "game" one. Performance documentation for many 80s era aircraft is freely available, and a flight model based on a lookup table that would be fed data from a real chart could be quite satisfying to fly. Downscaling airspeeds and weapon ranges is also unneeded even if the map is no larger than Altis, since with a 80s Cold War setting, BVR combat was very limited and pretty much only done by F-14 and MiG-25 (and even then, the Tomcat wouldn't always carry Phoenixes), with all the other restricted to SARH missiles. These aren't very good in BVR, so engagements would typically end up in a dogfight (which suits me fine, I like to get in close and personal 🙂).
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IMO, standing would work better for ArmA VR, at least for the infantry experience. Not running around, but adjusting your stance and such. It'd be a very immersive way to recreate all the movements the human body can do, and allow you to use a much wider variety of stances than the built-in ones. In DCS, seated works because, well, that's what you do in a real airplane.
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Well, VBS makes sense as an argument, since one day they'll want to make VBS5, and that might use ArmA4 tech. Since the underlying engine is where VR support ultimately resides, it makes sense, from a futureproofing standpoint, to add it to Enfusion at some point. However, developing the gameplay to go with it. Soldiers training with VBS can be made to endure clunky UI and poor graphics, but we have higher standards. 🙂
I would certainly pay for ArmA VR, that much I know. It's a weird intersection of the hardcore sim market and the tactical FPS market, the former want VR, the latter not necessarily, but I believe a product catering to VR fans and hardcore simmers would sell just fine, if done right, and it could contribute to popularizing VR on the FPS market.
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31 minutes ago, SwiftVengeance said:All the vr games I have played so far have been able to run at 90 fps on my hp reverb g2 which is way more then you need, and I can crank up the settings so it only does 45 fps locked which still feels extremely smooth but looks amazing.
So... 3090? 🙂 Remember that while ArmA always required high-level hardware, it's not a flight sim, so they need to think about people who don't quite spend thousands of dollars on top-level gear. That said, there are lower cost Oculus headsets that still look good, and they have lower graphics requirements, as well. I fly with a 1080ti and a Reverb G2, and it's not always a smooth ride. Most of the time it is, but far from 90fps.
Support from ground up is unlikely, if only because Enfusion got its start back when VR was still a gimmick, and the devs don't seem to have anticipated it coming out. That said, Enfusion was said to be incredibly modular, so perhaps it's not a problem. Adding VR to an older engine is hard, but something like Enfusion is made according to modern paradigms, and as such, should be much more expansible than those that came before.
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It seems like Enfusion will be very easy to mod, and Reforger tools are already ridiculously powerful. That said, VR support goes really deep, into the very rendering engine. Basically, you have to render the scene twice, from a slightly different point of view, each time at half the headset's resolution. Plus, you have to work with your driver of choice to drive the headset and talk to its sensors (I recommend OpenComposite/OpenXR, SteamVR has too many bugs). I don't know if the modders will be able to reach this far into Enfusion's guts.
BTW, voprX is not real VR, you have no depth perception there. It's a hack, basically turns the headset into a 1:1 trackIR. For a proper VR experience, you need stereoscopic rendering. For a shooter like ArmA, this is crucial, since depth perception is kind of important for how you use most gunsights.
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I'd propose an "ArmA VR", a separate title that would use the same assets and be able to take most of ArmA content for Enfusion, but would have extra features. The problem is, the VR shooter gameplay is just too different. For instance, you no longer need to toggle stances, this is accomplished by just changing your actual stance (measured by height of the headset from the floor). You no longer need controls to bring up the gun, since all weapon handling is taken care of by moving your controllers. OTOH, your marksmanship will go to pot, because it'll now depend on what you physically do with your rifle. So, it wouldn't be fair to put VR players in the same server with pancake ones. Most other controls will have to be similar to the console version, admittedly designing for a gamepad is already a factor, so hopefully that won't be a big issue.
Yes, you can have a simple port, like Skyrim VR, but we should aim for something more than that. ArmA VR needs to be a proper VR shooter, which unlike flightsims is a very different beast from the regular thing.
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I didn't buy Reforger, because there's no SP content and not only am I still on ADSL, I have to share it with the family. Yes, really, 1Mb/s for the whole damn house, and for the price of premium-quality fiber connection, at that. I'd love to play around with it, but with no content that can be enjoyed without a decent internet connection, I'm gonna pass. Unless Elon takes pity on my country and makes Starlink subscriptions available at less cutthroat prices, or those dolts at the local ISP (a monopoly, what did you expect?) finally pull fiber over here, then I'm stuck in SP for the foreseeable future.
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28 minutes ago, Harzach said:Reforger has a separate web portal - https://reforger.armaplatform.com/ - which had a link to its own forums yesterday. The link is gone today, so either they scrapped it and are planning on opening a new section here, or took it down for some other reason.
I know it has a separate web portal, but for a forum, you need more than that. Software, moderation team, admins and all that. Makes no sense to duplicate it just because you've got a new engine. Adding a new board on an existing forum is much less overhead.
It seems like it was confirmed on Discord that there'll be a new board here. The previous link was just a placeholder.
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14 hours ago, Harzach said:*edit* - Oh, you asked if there will be a section here. Looks like not, but there are many unknowns still.
Sites like this often just link to a relevant section on the official forums. There's little point in maintaining multiple forum sites, so a Reforger board will likely appear sooner or later.
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So, what your guys' take on Reforger? A harbinger of a bright new future, full of customizable guns, fully modeled, clickable vehicle interiors and PIP optics for everyone, or the end of ArmA and RHS as we know it and the start of console armageddon? 🙂
Myself, I'm hopeful, but what we got so far isn't much on its own. That said, it seems like they did address most major sources of clunkyness of the UI we were stuck with in RV, and performance is better, as well. The modding tools are mighty, and Enfusion is more or less everything I thought it'd be. It's not ArmA4, but it's a damn good start IMO. I'm really looking forward to the RHS take on the new capabilities.
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So, is there any place where the information from the announcement is collected in text form? I don't do Twitch, and I prefer reading to videos anyway. From what I've gathered, Reforger is some sort of a glorified MP/tech demo for Enfusion, which is fair enough, but was there anything else said in the announcement?
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18 hours ago, Harzach said:At this point during A3's development, we all thought there were going to be railguns and lasers and aliens.
Well, we got aliens with Contact DLC. 🙂 TBH, it's a bummer the railgun/coilgun tank got nixed, at the time the game was made that seemed like a possibility by 2030s.
1 hour ago, oldbear said:1 hour ago, oldbear said:Set in an alternate 1989, players will develop a persistent military career and
join either US or Soviet forces in a fierce battle for the strategic island of
Everon.
It's a pity it seems MP-focused, but I'm really interested in the fact that they plan to take the series back in time setting-wise. There's been a tendency to go futuristic in ArmA3, and all it resulted in is a hilariously inaccurate vision of of what is, essentially, today's battlefield. Admittedly, some of their predictions were correct (VR took off beautifully in the sim community and in professional environments), but they didn't predict a lot of other things that we're seeing today. Believe it or not, I was thinking about posting a suggestion, with a detailed rationale, of why ArmA should stop chasing the moving target of latest, greatest sales presentations, and instead focus on the past, on OFP days in which all you had were iron sights (attached to a gun most of the time, at least on the Western side 🙂), a tactical harness and a flashlight. Officers got a paper map and binoculars on top of that. I'm glad BI arrived at the same conclusion independently. It's much easier to simulate older hardware, not only is it, for most part, unclassified, it's simpler to operate, yet harder to master, and it allows a symmetrical, "Cold War gone hot" type of war that both sides had been heavily planning for, as opposed to modern era, in which this type of warfare is basically made obsolete by the combination of economic ties and nuclear weapons (any US-China conflict big enough to stop the flow of goods would cripple both economically, regardless of nukes). Plus, there's no need to make stuff up, since most of those classics are out of copyright by now. 🙂 So no need for silly fake names.
Oh, well, we'll see tomorrow, I hope there's more information than in the leak. However, a Cold War era ArmA4 makes sense, especially considering the popularity of both mods and the fact Creator DLCs were almost exclusively set in Cold War. My biggest hope is that they'll support VR in the future, since it's just so much more immersive, and a new engine has a chance of incorporating it if not from the start, then at least from early days.
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BIS really needs to stop being afraid of complexity. Most of us can drive a car perfectly well, even if some have problems driving stick. 🙂 It's not that hard with a sequential shifter, though, the real issue is when you have a fully manual transmission complete with the clutch, and if you have hardware for that, you probably know how to use it. I actually prefer the stick shifter somewhat. At the very least, give us a proper automatic transmission, complete with "park" the ability to force low gears. I actually find the "simplified" system more clunky to drive, brake should be a brake, and not double as a reverse. It might seem odd, but increasing complexity often leads to actual difficulty being reduced, since things are much easier to work with when they act in a way that makes sense.
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NVGs aren't really bright, particularly if you put them on when your eyesight is already dark-adjusted. IRL, in most cases you have control over the gain, and I think brightness as well. Combined with green light being easier on eye adaptation, I'd say we're pretty spot-on. ArmA2 overexaggerated that. NV scopes would be unusable if real night vision worked like in A2.
As for ambient light, well, moonless nights are dark. If you're away from other types of light, starlight doesn't help much. I'd say, ArmA3 got it pretty much right, at least as far as it was possible in the RV engine.
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Got back into ArmA after all this time, bought Contact, and I have to say, I'm impressed. Really good writing here, characters were interesting and varied, dialogue felt good. Loved the new comms mechanics, though I often had an issue locating both speakers in a conversation, and brining the device out fast enough. No FPS issues, but the reason for my absence is that I got back into flight sims, and when you've set your rig up for flying jets in 4K VR, it doesn't even warm up properly when playing on the good old screen, so this might not be the average player's experience. I enjoyed the plot twists, I have to say that the story was really fresh.
I'd love to see a BI game follow up on this. Even if not in the ArmA series (which should probably remain closer to Earth, although there's no harm in tying the universes together), not necessarily even a shooter, but the story has some real potential. Could be a better way to continue the future setting's storylines than to set the next ArmA even further out in the future, in fact (mostly because good chunks of A3 are hilariously outdated even now).
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They have to keep the money flowing somehow. Ideally, that would be achieved by releasing ArmA4, but seeing as RV reached its limits with ArmA3, that means a new engine. Engine changes are hard.
I would appreciate it if my money went towards developing ArmA4 and not, say, DayZ or Ylands, but that's just me. At least DayZ has an engine which could possibly serve as a basis for ArmA4, if they ever get to actually doing that...
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AFM pretty much requires analog controls, and on all four axes at that. Stick, collective and pedals are operated in a very smooth, fine manner in real helicopters, something you cannot replicate on the keyboard. A HOTAS is best, but even a gamepad would help, people fly RC helicopters using radios with similar arrangements (albeit with collective axis non-centering). Analog control is a must in this case.
It's time to upgrade Thermal Vision?
in ARMA 3 - DEVELOPMENT BRANCH
Posted
Even if it was taken from military software (which can be of varying fidelity, too), it was hardly realistic. The environment was more or less uniform on thermals, while enemy troops and running vehicles stood out very much. This is not the case IRL, where you have a lot of different temperatures, and for example a sheet metal roof in the sun will "glow" brightly, and the ground and houses will be a patchwork of temperatures. Ultimately, I don't think it'll ever be fixed in ArmA3. The next installment can't come fast enough.