Failberry

My problem: I experience high-rate flickering/flashing of mirrors, screens, and panels. My question: Is there a way to make PiP function properly? Exposé Pip is a graphical highlight of Arma 3 that I and several others cannot enjoy. Tickets have been made since the earliest alpha. With the full game out; I am very surprised to see such a major PiP issue go unaddressed. Additional Problem: When using native resolution, (1080p) and while playing in First-Person Perspective, I notice that terrain and grass flicker upon turning. This also occurs when firing a weapon -- when a shot is fired, the terrain flickers. However, when switching to Third-Person Perspective I do not get any terrain flickering while moving around or firing my weapon. This happens with Arma 2 as well, but did not seem to happen in the Beta/Dev versions of Arma 3 during my testing. Thank you for your responses. Edit: Specs: GTX 690, 3770k In Game Settings: Anything and Everything :)

You are so utterly wrong. What bis does and the logistics involved uses practicality no short cuts, and I feel strongly that they should not use short cuts. They create a simulation that is logistically better than anything on the consumer market. Cry engine failed and I know not of any other engine that accomplishes what this iteration of arms brings to the table. Bis is at the forefront; I do dought you can argue one engine has done it better. If th fundamentals needs to change than they know that, and that should be the communities focus. Bf4 can't simulate the logistics of war. BIS makes Sims for army's and that is why we play. We make arma not war. Let us not forget the creators

You post in a community forum, so you and your people are the vocal minority; all of them dissenting. AI is a huge deal for me; the adapt campaign is great and a major attraction. I and the non vocal majority buyers want this and are attracted to this. Nobody wants to go back to the dumb alpha AI.

This is ridiculous; utterly and ultimately stilted. To the author, this is not how you voice criticism. Your posts are self-served, hatred-deflecting rants directed towards a game you've never played and an overtly passionate attitude in upholding a status quo of what you feel a military simulation fps game should be. Any substance is immediately overshadowed by a waiving banner of contempt. Just the way you worded the thread speaks of poor taste and not one of us could possibly satisfy your agenda. You might as well have had the word, "entitlement" tattooed on your forehead. How can one seriously offer you a rebuttal? Maybe the well-intentioned, the righteous few, and much more likely, the naïve. Well folks, you are wasting your time with him. You won't be addressed by any developer. Your initial post was a guarantee. My only hope is that others can learn from the fruitlessness of your stone-walled, frothy-mouthed, and highly fencing manner.

Hi, Lev. We are both running a single GTX 690 and you just described the exact chain of events that I've been experiencing. Go figure! Even the time-frames with which the issues occurred in relation to the development cycle are nearly identical except that I only ran on a single monitor. This must be an SLI problem; doubly so for those with dual core GPUs. Will there ever be a fix for this?

I'm a huge fan of the LOGIC MAP. Bis should totally implement the LOGIC MAP. Appreciate a little resolution raising and everything, but what you really need is multiple medium distance textures that would be defined by Nord's LOGIC MAP. So logic map, I like the logic map. Logic map, guys. Hey bis, logic map.

Logic map? Logic map. Logic map! LOGIC MAP!!! Hey man, you really need to say logic map more, because people are not getting enough LOGIC MAP. ...Looks like some people confuse what you've done with just upping resolution which is exactly what you are saying doesn't work, yet you talk about that MORE than the actual LOGIC MAP. So I think you should be more like logic map, logic map, logic map, logic map is better than upping one medium distance overlay resolution. Instead of being like upping resolution, upping resolution, upping resolution is doesn't actually solve the problem.... logic map.

I am sorely disappointed with the fidelity of Arma 3's graphics. This game, even at the highest settings, does not look anything like the screenshots BIS has posted. Particularly, there absolutely is a lower level of texture detail with regard to the ground/grass layer, the bushes, the trees, the actual overlay image of the ground as viewed from above. The game is muddy looking, everything from the textures of the environment to the lighting, which creates what I would call a whitewash effect. I am confused by this. The screenshots BIS posted, look wonderful. I have even seen some image captures that show high geometry trees that do not exist in the alpha. What I have seen so far while playing the game, is a markedly lower level of quality and fidelity and texture resolution than what was in arma 2 even. Here is a BIS photo http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2013/02/Arma_III-image.jpg. Now here is a picture off of armaholic http://25.media.tumblr.com/2bbef0700551a79fa5f2891530525b45/tumblr_mjgbn6GSrY1s3xx02o1_1280.png I have a gtx 690. The game does not look like either of these images. Not at a 1080p resolution, not at any resolution. Not at any graphical setting period. Those trees in the second picture don't even exist!

As far as I know, lod such as the shrubbery is read from the disk. Though maybe now more of it is coming from vram, as others have said they seem to have noticed less pop-in. On a SSD, this pop in even less noticeable but it is still there, and I wonder if it's a bug with sli or something. Dnk, I need to try increasing the FOV to see if that actually stores vegetation longer and it doesn't have to stream from the disk so often, which creates the pop in. Night time looks odd to me, if anyone else could explain whether it really gets that pitch black, I'd like to know. I like the night from OA a lot better. Also, do the tracers seem odd to anyone else? The look much more laser beamy than what I think they looked like in ARMA 2. Too thick? The trails seem a tad too long? The color seems either completely green or completely red. I think in OA and ARMA 2 they looked, more stringy, maybe even had more blending or color difference to them. The stringiness of a tracer round would make sense to me, and I think it's more realistic that way as the ends burn, or however it works. They just seem way too thick and long to be actually bullets. They remind me of Red Orchestra 1. Also, does anyone notice tracer bouncing, I haven't really noticed tracer bouncing or the speed of the tracers getting affected like they were in the past ARMA games.

If it's only you and him, than I can live with it. I just don't care to explain anymore, and nobody could possibly be interested in me and this dude's(sixgears) conversation anymore, except for the fact that he always seems like he HAS to have the last word. Didn't you say you were through like three replies ago? Your original statement was that "That's all these game forums are these days unfortunately. It must be really disheartening as a dev to see someone outright dismiss your product as "garbage" because it has a few kinks that need to be ironed out." NOBODY EVEN SAID THAT. Nobody in this thread knew where you were coming from with your irreverent generalizations. Speaking of which, you then again stepped back up on the podium with a lecture on civil discourse. Again completely irrelevant and did not fit into the thread. Then, after some understandably confused posters replied to you, you went and practically attacked the forum, shooting them down, saying that it was perfectly alright to demand answers and that you weren't breaking any rules. I mention that you're in the wrong thread, and go search or create your own topic, with complete modesty mind you. Then later you are in the thread telling everyone that they must not know anything... You turned a complete 180; you became a hypocrite, plain and simple. BTW, I was never talking down to you, and I was never insulting your intelligence. But fine, just think that; I even bothered to help you by assured that that was what I was doing. Your inferences at this point have become so off-base that I simply no longer care to explain why you aren't finding the answers you are looking for. But basically, "keep on truckin'." Just don't truck along with any more of that whole lack of modesty and humility though, because it seems whatever hope you had of raising possibly good points has been pretty much obliterated due to your abrasiveness in dealing with others in this thread. ---------- Post added at 06:14 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:50 AM ---------- @dnk, I don't think it's my graphics card as I'm using a gtx690, but I do wonder if both cores are finally being utilized in the alpha. I believe I heard that currently SLI wasn't functioning in ARMA 3 and that it would only run one core, but that may have changed now with an SLI profile being added for arma 3. Also, I'm only dealing with 2 gigs of vram, if arma 3 has now become a vram hog. I used to think it was mostly disk streaming, though. I've got the 3770k, but I haven't overclocked it and I don't think arma utilizes all those cores anyway, correct? I have the alpha loaded onto an SSD, but could the amount of space left on the SSD affect the read times? Like say the alpha just barely fits on the SSD compared to having plenty of extra space on the SSD. Also, could I assume that more extra space on the SSD would make the performance boost by increasing the FOV more noticeable as well? I hope to god that yeah things get a bunch of polish from now until the release. My main concern was with the multitudes of people simply saying that it's only an alpha and everything will improve. Sure, I believe that. But I don't necessarily believe certain things will change if the developer doesn't receive feedback from the community. The ugly trees, the ugly medium overlay, and the ground textures were all things that I saw as areas that need improvement in terms of the graphical fidelity of the game so far, and that by mentioning them and discussing them, the developers would actually see that these are areas that possibly a large part of the community is concerned with.

I like the vehicles blowing up, the billowing fire from that, and the improved muzzle effects when firing a gun, but I would love to see an improvement in the explosions overall. Many of them seem pretty canned, especially the grenade explosions, artillery impacts, and rocket fire.

You said it, I only implied it. :rolleyes:

Okay, wow. There has been some miscommunication here. I never said that you were insulting the devs or calling the game garbage; in fact, no one has as far as I can tell. Your inferences are astounding; baffling really. You bring up civility and proper discourse in every post you I've seen you make in this thread, and you do so after demanding answers, becoming argumentative, and promoting discourse in way that can only be considered as somewhat less than constructive. Challenging posters is the least constructive way to go about your point, unless your point is aimed solely at disparaging the game and arguing with people. Especially considering you are trying to get answers about your confusion with performance in a thread that was created to discuss the game's graphics. It is mainly your constant tangential bickering and our discourse that serves no purpose. You're correct; we don't have anything to discuss. If you get an answer here, I'd be surprised. That's not even because of anything having to do with your perceived notion of... well whatever it is that you think that I declared myself in relation to you, but rather, that you would post it here in an unrelated thread. Make a topic about your issues with performance if you are unhappy with the answers you are receiving here. I would even bet you'd attract a serious discussion regarding performance or the inner workings of the engine. I would mainly like to see more points about the graphics.

LOL, good point. A beautiful vista, btw. In terms of forests that exist in the Mediterranean, yeah, there are a lot of brush forests like what you'd find in the Mexican arid regions and arid regions just in general. In the game, I like the look of those broccoli bushes down at South of the map by the guard emblem. I think they did a good job getting the vegetation to look pretty good there in that brown arid region. Good use of palette. You know, though, it's best when it's sparse, unfortunately. The bigger ones can look a little goofy and the lod flickering can really screw with them too. Out of the two bushes, the small ones are good, the big green ones need some hep. But the trees, they just plain messed them up. They aren't even the most flattering trees in real life, but in game; way too low res, especially the tops. They turn into these light, white washed, muddy yellow green blobs on brown sticks that have no blending with the foreground. Them messing up the coloring a bit is one thing, but there is just zero resolution on them what so ever, and maybe the light engine has something to do with it, but it just looks like puke. BEST example: the menu screen. Turn up the object detail and view distance all the way and everything looks good, the bushes look fine, then those damn trees, omg they look like a somebody took a bile-ridden shat on your screen. They are nothing special to look at when you are right underneath them either. They are all identical and that's what really what makes them look even worse. Also, the effect of running through a forest of them... it has to be the lighting engine, because it just seems flat, there is no brightness, no little plants or shrubs, no leaves that get cast in the light and make the floor glint a bit. Arma 2's, bottom forest layer did this right. It had so many more objects, leaves, details. It wasn't just a ground texture, it was risen. You could look straight down and even though it was technically flat besides the grass and stuff, it looked layered. Arma 3 should have a ground layer with twigs and sticks, and brown needles and crusted leaves. They dedicated so much time to these details in ARMA 2 why not in this game. Look down, it looks pretty unimpressive. Completely drawn on, with no density. Really sucks too, because then the ground under these forests is just a clean brown, makes soldiers blend right in to the foreground. No detail on the ground, all you see is puke green trees, a flat single texture ground, and a group of brown soldiers running around underneath them. Oh, yeah. No shadows either in these circumstances. Must be another lighting problem.

Man... What a whiner ;) The devs must get so depressed reading this. ;) Also, why is arma 3 not able to have the texture fidelity of those games let alone the textural fidelity of the screenshots that BIS posted back in 2011. While sixgear hasn't a clue why this engine can't process to the extent of other "high profile games, (he clearly doesn't, that's why he begs the question), I can't understand why the game's environment will sometimes look so terrible and, on top of that, RUN terrible as well. Personal note for sixgears: what the VR engine processes has been discussed in a multitude of topics so you might want to use the search bar to answer your question as it seems like the majority of us are talking graphics, at least in this topic. :) Now if the game looked amazing and ran terrible, that would make sense. I would rather have the devs leave in all the graphical details, add more even, and damn the performance problems if these performance problems have time and time again proved to be unfixable. If the developers decide, let's give them a minimal performance boost using a not so novel approach that would give 5 fps boost at the cost of removing tons of graphical features or not adding any more; I would call that a lose. Btw, just responding to Six, I've been running around on empty maps and the performance goes down due to processing power: looking at forests, objects, towns, and rendering all those things. Damned if I know how it all gets allocated, but these random drops are because something large is being processed. So, I disagree that you actually are aware of the circumstances that occur when your hardware usage goes up or down or the extent to what arma has to process, and you have an all-around bad attitude. You have suddenly turned into a full-on hypocrite considering your statement about game forum discussions; I can't imagine people would want to answer you. I can assure you, however, that it'd be redundant for people to tell you anyway, as plenty of topics exist addressing your very question regarding the engine and why it acts the way it does. I am sure that many others may know where the performance problems lie. So you're just in the wrong thread, bud. I think what a lot of us don't understand and what a lot of us haven't asked about are the artistic choices that have been made. Are the performance improvements worth having if the game is going to look rather ugly in some of the largest and most immersive parts of the game?(the overlays, the textures, the forests). Also shouldn't the performance improvements have gone hand in hand with raising the graphical fidelity? They made this new engine that seems perfectly capable of making a detailed medium overlay and beautiful forests, but they aren't there. Finally, are these things going to be changed? Let us talk about the graphical bugs and how the engine could produce something better than what is in the alpha. Is this all this engine can do? It seemed like it was doing much more back when BIS was showing it a year ago. To answer my own questions, my guess is yes, and that we should urge for a push towards certain better graphical aspects of the game or at least inquire about them. I want a dev to say to me, he is happy with the way the forests look in Arma3, or that was the best they could do. Or that they are still working on them. Or that they it's alpha, idiot, and it's going to change. But let that be said from a developer, okay. Doesn't everyone concerned with the graphics want to hear that? :)

Are you joking, or you just having fun at my expense? Do you really think I am trolling, where do you go when you ignorance (do you even know the real definition of that word means,) when you want answers. Ignorance is not a bad word at all, it simply means that you haven't been exposed to something. Ulterior motifs run abound in this thread coming from you and the other user, but I don't think you are smart enough to even know what they are. I don't have an ulterior motif, congratulations. I am just trying to learn, and relay what I've learned from others. For your pathetic attempt to kill my thread by describing as a troll thread, I award you the medal of "sad, sad man." Congrats, you won it. Many others may in fact had in the past, but your confidence, and your distrustful nature won your that award. I LOVE this game, and me and others with gtx 690's are experiencing PIP bugs. That is a fact, Jack. I don't see why moderators take you by the scruff of the neck and toss you in a river. I guess it's because they aren't paying too much attention. I'm real, maybe you aren't; maybe you are fake, but I mean what I say. To hell with whatever I don't understand completely. You want to disparage my character, go for it. It just makes you look like a fool. ---------- Post added at 01:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:02 AM ---------- Thank you for deciding to edit your post, however it's unfortunate you didn't edit out how you thought this was just another troll thread. I watched and enjoyed your video btw; it was neato! I am going to try your PIP fix.

PIP is a known problem. It is a well-documented problem. You and your squad mates are very lucky in that regard. For others, however, we have to suffer through unusable PIP flickering. This is a well-known bug. And I have heard from many who own the gtx 690 that they also suffer from PIP flickering/bugs. It's so bad that it makes it unusable. I have well looked into my computer, and no, there is nothing wrong on my end. It's all new hardware, everything checks out, I have made sure of it. The PIP problem is a known bug, and before you criticize someone who uses an NVidia gtx 679 compared to your HD6850, you really make yourself look stupid by saying that my graphics card of a completely different architecture than yours should have no bugs compared to your completely different system. This is the whole point of alpha testing; we aren't dealing with consoles here. Please, other feel free to chime in as I've made other threads where others complained about the PIP flickering bug. Again, my apologies for calling you stupid, I didn't mean stupid, just ignorant.

Right back at yah, buddy ;)

My concern is with the tree and grass and medium overlay, as well the expansive seen in which all of the far away stuff looks so much better. I understand that I can toy now with shading and stuff like that and have already begun to research into that, but the tree's all butt ugly from what I can change in the game's own settings. They look terrible, like these light green-yellow blobs cast against a darker foreground. To bring up arma 2 and I know you hate for me to bring up arma 2, but wow running through a forest was quite something. If you hovered above a forest in a helicopter, the forest and trees looked great at the time as well. In arma 3 the trees simply look gross; there is no forest for the trees (pardon my idiom.) Hovering right above them in a copter, makes them look even worse, and the same can be said when being on one hill looking at a forest of those trees on the other side. Only until you fly really high up and you get to the "high overlay trees" do they start to look realistic and magical like the pictures showcased in BIS's screenshots. I don't just see the blur or the browning in that screen, I see higher fidelity in low to medium to far distances, and the character models even look a bit smoother and higher res. Now for my general response to everyone reading my reply: Ak1287, this is my answer to your question. This was not me complaining or whining. Why don't these ugly terrible forests in the alpha look not so ugly and terrible in the BIS screen that I have seen? My drivers are up to date. Could this be an SLI problem? I do suffer from white grass and trees if I don't create a custom arma3 profile in NVidia, and my lod flickering is high and the PIP flickers uncontrollably and is virtually unusable. There currently exists no way to fix the PIP bug. That is a graphical bug that NEEDS to be fixed as that is one of the main graphical features the devs were so proud about implementing in the game for us and that we wanted so sorely. PIP simply doesn't work for some reason, but I'm confident that is an alpha bug. The over graphical fidelity however, is not a bug. It simply is what the game's graphics are. Btw, I'm loving some of those screen you guys have been posting. I hope to achieve the same without use of mods or scripts. Btw, I'm loving some of those screen you guys have been posting. They are all really cool, and I hope to achieve some cool ones hopefully without the use of mods or scripts. Now guys I have been reading all of your responses, trust me, but I'm a busy guy you know. I checking out all those cool sites and stuff, thanks. I was part of a hardcore arma 2 ACE/ACRE community myself, so I know the community knows what's up. That's why I'm thinking the community knows what's up about the graphics as well ;) ---------- Post added at 06:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:30 PM ---------- You aren't a threat to anyone; I'm sorry ;). But nobody said this game was garbage, as I made the topic and I pretty much want to defend the people talking about graphics issues, rather than the ones saying nothing is wrong, but that we are all a bunch of cry babies. I'll defend a response as well from someone saying that there is nothing wrong with the graphics because if they have valid reasons as well. Do you really care about what I want to defend? Be it you, or me, or another poster. Isn't that just my deal, not yours? So dude, do whatever you want, you know you aren't breaking rules, but are you helping anybody?

Understand that I am the topic creator; hence most of the replies and discussions therein are in regard to such topic as identified. I felt the responsibility to read every single post in my own thread in order to get a sense if whether I brought up was legitimate or not. What you bring to the table, notice your join date and post count, is values and feelings from other communities' games' forums, or; a different topic on the BIS forums. Since obviously people will discuss on many tangents occasionally as the topic gets longer and has more replies; that is acceptable. What is not acceptable is for you to derail my thread and the people talking in this thread about issues that we feel are legitimate. That is why I will respond abruptly and necessarily to you.

Goddamn you. How dare you say that to me. I love BIS and the fact that this has 88 replies means something. I hate your guts for having the nerve to say that I said that their game was garbage, you slanderous scum. Read my second reply regarding people talking about how this is "just and alpha." and think before you say such an asinine thing to someone willing and loving to purchase their products and talk on their official forums. I have been insulted, and overwhelmed, and as you can tell I haven't been able to reply partially because of your misjudgments. I like graphics, I like gameplay. I LOVE graphics, I LOVE gameplay. Get it? Some people agree that it's nice to talk about, nobody said it was garbage; I didn't say it was garbage. I will forgive you, but you really made me hate you. BIS I really appreciate the game you've made for us, I will try some tweaking, but I do feel that some of the images don't look as good as your original images. I love communities because you all can correct me, give me advice, but not trash me or others make up slander or tell the devs things that you inferred and that we never said. You, sixgears, are the one who disheartens the devs by doing so. Not me for asking why the image quality looks different. Thank you. I am pleasantly surprised to see the amount of attention my postings brought up.

Yeah, thanks for summing that up for me.

Many of the official images that BIS posted for this game through 2012 look much better than what we are seeing in this alpha. I'm talking about the grass, the textures, and the overall geometry in those official pics. They were of much higher quality. These images came from an even earlier alpha state of the game. The trouble I having in accepting your response is that you seem to believe the game's art/mechanics/etc will change once it gets in beta if everyone's feedback is that they don't really have any. The game was already looking better than this when BIS was releasing photos in late 2011. If they changed something, they want to know if this is what the consumer will accept. I'm sure they didn't pass it off as lowering the graphics of the game to see if anyone would notice, but they want to see if this is what the consumer wants. I think the most important thing when discussing a game's art is obviously to put it in terms of what we see. I think a lot of people noticed that it didn't look as good as the pre-alpha pictures. Questions are raised; did the art direction change, did they have to lower the overall fidelity for some unknown reason? I think that's a more reasonable way to approach this topic and hopefully get feedback. My fear would be that everyone would feel content with this alpha state's graphics, that nothing gets changed, and we begin to discuss it after the game has long experienced a full release. This is especially the case because you can see that the game did become worse looking from 2012 to 2013; you can see it in the media. I feel that many of us want to know why, or what happened, or if there is some other reason many of us are noticing this difference. In the alpha stage, it would be a great idea for us to be asking these questions as BIS is giving us their content so they can determine based on our feedback if we like this game as is and will want buy it once they add the rest of the content.

The PiP bug is that the mirrors and thermal screens constantly flash/flicker. Anyone else suffer from this bug? The other bug, which at one time was a bug in OA before being fixed, was that turning ATOC on turns the grass and trees white. Anyone else experiencing either of these problems. I am using a gtx690, and I am wondering if perhaps the ATOC and PIP problems are related to each other. The ATOC can be corrected by disabling, but nothing prevents the mirrors from flashing or the thermal screens inside the vehicles from flashing. This is a bug that needs to be corrected as it makes using the GMG gun's thermal impossible.