polar bear

Yes ARMA 3 is a serious game and I have learned a lot about quad bikes from it, for example, that you can drive one off a cliff and not get hurt. I'm going to try it out IRL this weekend, now that ARMA 3 taught me you can do it safely.

Just finished the campaign and here is my comment: the AI can be rolled over by an attacking vehicle. Literally. I found that in general only AT soldiers and sometimes grenadiers react appropriately to an attacking vehicle (they attack it). Riflemen, etc. just sit there like nothing is happening and you can run them over. They didn't seek cover or run away or evade, they just wait for you to run over them. Often they stay in formation on the ground while you run them over. While I used this to great effect to get through some tougher missions (snipe the AT soldier, get in vehicle, run everybody else over) it does hurt realism. Obviously AI is horrible at driving too, but it is even worse at dealing with an incoming enemy vehicle. The logic seems to be the AI only reacts to a vehicle if it has a weapon that might be effective. So in a hatchback or off-road they will shoot at you but anything with even light armor can just run them down. It would be good if the AI would at least switch to stealth, and find cover, when confronted with something they can't kill.

Me, I bought the game during alpha but I have not downloaded it yet. My hardware's too old. I am holding out as long as I can to upgrade my hardware, hoping hardware prices will come down a bit before the official launch. It's not for lack wanting to play.... but i want to enjoy it proper when I do. I may cave in and try but I know that my current hardware will disappoint.

There is a really big difference between someone hacking to get around steam's regional pricing, and someone buying a steam key on BI's store. Clearly when BI negotiated their deal with steam, it included the ability of BI to sell steam keys through their own online store at a competitive price, and the right to promote that online store. On the other hand, the stream agreement clearly includes regional pricing, and someone who uses hacks like VPN tunnels and proxies to try and evade the regional pricing is clearly going completely against the terms of service they agreed to when they installed the steam client. It's really a night and day situation. And yes, everyone should buy from the BI store to ensure that BI gets a bigger cut, most especially if that is a cheaper way for you! At the end of the day it means that steam will be managing the game, automatically downloading and applying updates, and having played many games through steam, I find that to be an excellent system and I am very glad that I can use steam to manage ArmA. There is no better game management system out there! It also frees up BI developers, who can focus their efforts on developing ArmA instead of reinventing the wheel by implementing their own alternative to steam. Remember nothing is for free. If steam haters got their wish and BI had to develop their own rights management system and their own distribution system, instead of relying on steam for that, then that's less time their developers could spend coding the game itself. I know I would rather they spend more time coding the game! Steam is a great choice for everyone, in my opinion. Win/win.

IBTL. Thank God ArmA 3 will be distributed through steam, a stable, reliable, and excellent method of distributing games. Well done BI in choosing to use steam!

I can get my i7 930 CPU up to about 3.15Ghz vs. the 2.80Ghz it's rated for, and after that it starts to become unstable. That's what I run it at to play ArmA II/OA, and I can get reasonably high settings. The video card I have now is an AMD 5850, which from reading the specs and this thread, maybe gets me over the minimum settings for the game, but that's it. I'd like to be able to play with a reasonable frame rate, etc. So I have to upgrade something. The question is, do I put all my money into buying a top end video card? Or do I split it between upgrading the CPU and video card both? Also, if I upgrade the video card - to what? NOTHING else I do pushes my rig like ArmA does, so if there is a preference for Nvidia over AMD, I might as well buy whatever is optimal for ArmA.

So I have determined that I need a new video card to play Arma III. Fortunately, just received my annual bonus from work, so I have some cash burning a hole in my pocket and itching to get into A3. I think my i7 930 cpu is ok? Versus the published recommend, with 6gb RAM and an SSD drive: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2012/compare,3142.html?prod%5B5765%5D=on∏%5B5752%5D=on Some advice please -- I have two choices here: -- Buy a whole new system with a faster CPU and the recommended graphics card -- Spend all my money on the best graphics card I can buy Given the CPU I have, which way would you go? I am thinking graphics card. But which one? And do you agree with my thinking? What is the absolute best graphics card for A3? Edit: GRRR GRRR I have just learned about PCI-E gen 3 and how my system doesn't have it and how that means a high end graphics card likely wouldn't perform so well for me, even if I did go down the "spend it all on graphics" route. So, total system upgrade it is. THANKS ARMA!

Copying way points is a hack getting around the lack of a proper implementation. We should not argue against proper implementation on the grounds that some ridiculous hack can accomplish the same thing in a round about, arcane way. For one thing it's not going to be obvious to new players. They might actually have to find this thread, or one like it, to learn about this hack. Common scripting cases should be implemented with clear, clean, intuitive, well documented methods that are directly accessible in the editor. In general all ridiculous hacks should be replaced by proper, clear implementations if we want scripting to be something any savvy user can do, as opposed to old timers who scour forums for hacks.

The steam update issues are a BIS issue, they didn't seem to take steam very seriously and released patches there late and sometimes untested. That should not have happened.

It would be nice if this were simplified as it is a very useful thing. Perhaps we could have a "DECISION" waypoint, which could be connected to multiple next waypoints, with some logic choosing which one to go to next. The default would be to choose randomly, but with the ability to attach some scripting to make the decision in other ways. Similar to trigger logic maybe. Yeah you can do this with some semi-complicated scripting but it would be nice to see it visually represented in the UI and to be able to draw these waypoints out in the editor and then hook them up, with at most a little coding in a "decision script" texbooks on the DECISION waypoint, that defaults to the code for "pick at random". Here are some examples of things that it would be useful to make a decision on, which could be supported in the UI with minimal scripting: -- Choose next waypoint based on whether enemy units are detected / how many -- Choose next waypoint based on whether friendly units are detected / how many -- Choose next waypoint based on time of day -- Choose next waypoint based on how many units in my group Lots of possibilities here: -- A patrol that circles around to different locations until nightfall, at which point it heads home until morning -- A patrol that circles different locations, but if it finds one abandoned, switches to garrison it -- Move to an area, get in/out of a vehicle based on presence of enemies -- A patrol that goes to different locations at random

I cannot see how it requires much change in the game. It would require change in the server browser, putting an extra screen between clicking on a server and connecting, where the mods get sorted out. It might require a bigger change in attitude about how important these usability issues are to having a successful product.

I have a hard time believing that there's anyone left who doesn't have an always on internet connection, much less someone with a rig that can play ArmA 3. I have played civ5 on a laptop while travelling on an airplane, but it would never occur to me to try ArmA there. The steam offline mode worked fine, though, and I understand airlines will be rolling out WIFI in the next few years anyway.

I only buy games through steam. I like having one updater and not having a different updater for every game. I don't care whether ArmA uses VAC or the steam community/identity system, etc, but the steam integration has to be rock solid in terms of game updates and DLC. It's not a problem with steam that ArmA hasn't always got it right with the steam updates, steam just pushes out what BIS provides when they provide it. Any errors in the instal or any delays are a BIS issue.

Sounds like that might be it. I had several hundreds of units, including lots of air, I did expect it to be slow. Didn't realize that taxing the CPU would also make the AI stupid. Just out of curiosity, is there any way to get data out of ArmA to figure out how heavily taxed the CPU is, and whether it's having these kinds of problems?

Have you guys ever seen enemy units fail to recognize each other as enemies before? For fun the other day I got out the editor and decided to see if I could simulate a multi-stage attack on Zagrabad. I filled it full of AA and OPFOR units with anti-tank, then sent in a bunch of A10's, followed by a wave of Apache's, a lot of armour, and finally some infrantry units. I had hundreds of units on each side. Then I set myself up as a civilian to walk around Zagrabad and watch the violence unfold. Well the air campaign went swimmingly with lots of planes getting shot down, but also significant bombardment of targets in the city. Seemed pretty good. Then the helicopters arrived and there was some more action, and finally the amour rolled into the city. Infantry was still some ways out marching in. Well this is when I noticed something odd. There were a couple of BLUEFOR armor units wandering around Zagrabad, and a bunch of OPFOR defenders, but they weren't fighting each other! I saw one Stryker sitting at an intersection and all around there were some Takistani army infantry units just hanging out. One guy was lying on the ground next to the Stryker, pointing the opposite direction. Apache's were circling. Funniest--I had provisioned a little Takistani airforce, a couple of those biplanes flying around in a circle. Nobody bothered with them--they continued to fly around the whole time. So everybody was getting along just fine, and nobody was shooting. Seems like they had all become friends. That's swell, but not what I was expecting! Any idea what causes this?