Nashable

Hi there, I'm currently in the early design stages of a new type of game mode using the Zeus tech. Part of the design is around faction specific Zeus' (or more specifically, each Zeus only able to see/edit the items that they spawn). Does anyone know if that is A) possible with the current tech? and B) If so, how would I set that up? I've been trying some things in the editor but can't seem to see an option to restrict editing/viewing to specific units/factions. Thanks, Nash

Defiance is a ARMA III Game mode that combines elements from the Zeus DLC and Team vs. Team (TvT) game play. It can also be played as a COOP or SP mission if desired. Looking for a TL;DR? Then watch this! If you want to support Defiance, please do so in the Make Arma Not War contest. DETAILS Current Version: Stable 1.4 Worlds/Islands Currently Supported: Altis, Stratis, FATA and all A3-MP islands PBO Download: http://www.playdefiance.com/download/ Armaholic Download: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=25192 Steam Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=244264556 Latest Changelog: http://www.playdefiance.com/category/updates/ Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/armadefiance Live Development Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/tH0bRz6Z/defiance-gamemode (Please read before posting suggestions/changes) Bottom of this post will be an overview video if you'd rather see the game in action. MISSION OBJECTIVES Defiance takes place with two teams BLUFOR (blue) and INDFOR (green). Blue team is trying to find and eliminate enemy HQs who represent the control of key towns by the Green team. Meanwhile Green team is fighting a defensive battle, trying to inflict as many Blue team player casualties as possible. Blue team win the game if they are able to shut down all the HQs on the map. Green team win if they manage to inflict a certain number of Blue team player respawns (a.k.a Tickets). BLUFOR (BLUE) TEAM STRATEGY The enemy HQs start the game hidden, somewhere across the cities, towns and villages of Altis. Blue team can obtain intel from local civilians via direct (scroll-wheel) interaction with them. Not all civilians have intel and can only share intel if there is an enemy officer in the region (~5km), if the Blue team keeps turning up no intel then they should relocate to another town. This intel will be marked on the map as white squares, these markings become more and more accurate as more intel is gathered. If a HQ is found and deactivated (BLUFOR player gets near to it) then the INDFOR operations are closed down. This means INDFOR can no longer spawn at the location and the INDFOR Leader can no longer spawn items there as a Zeus player. BLUFOR (BLUE) COMMANDERS (ZEUS ROLE) Blue team has two Zeus roles on their side. Mission Commander (MC) and Air Commander (AC). MC is the overall leader of the team. The MC is also responsible for spawning and controlling all ground forces. Blue Team also have a MHQ that the MC can issue orders to. The MHQ is a secondary respawn point for Blue team as well as a small spawn area that the MC can use to deploy forces in the field. The MC can spawn troops at the central Blue Team base or in a small radius around the MHQ. The AC role is to coordinate and deploy all Blue team air traffic. Air vehicles can be deployed either inside the Blue team base or at the main airfield. The AC can also remote control any vehicle they have deployed to assist with landing and takeoff of transport vehicles. The AC can also create empty aircraft if they wish to take a direct role in air support. If you enjoy being a pilot and fancy the challenge of managing all the aircraft for your team then this is the role for you. INDFOR (GREEN) TEAM STRATEGY The Green team win the game if they manage to eliminate all of Blue team’s tickets. Green team players should note that they are outmatched by Blue team’s resources and technology. The aim is to make sure Blue team pay the highest price possible for every gain they make. Green team members can respawn as much as they like and should utilize the ability to spawn at any of the towns containing officers for extra mobility. INDFOR (GREEN) LEADER (ZEUS ROLE) Green Team’s leader is also the Zeus player for INDFOR. The leader can deploy troops in any of the towns that currently has an active/alive officer. Officers cannot be controlled and will just patrol their respective town. If Blue team enters one of your deployment areas then it will be disabled until they leave the area, unless they manage to kill the officer, in which case it will be permanently disabled. As noted above, if Blue team shut down an HQ they will have the opportunity to pick up intel. This will mark your location on the map to the Blue team. If a Blue team member finds you and kills you then a number of tickets (lives/respawns) will be rewarded to the Blue team. In addition approximately every 15 minutes the number of tickets awarded increases, only resetting once a bounty has been claimed. VIDEO OVERVIEW I'll be releasing a series of videos that explains in more detail how to play Defiance Part 1:

Version 1.5 is now out! http://www.playdefiance.com/2014/09/27/defiance-1-5-has-been-released/

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone else has tried mixing Headless Client support with Zeus? I'd assumed that the unit locality for Zeus was on the server side. In my scripts I transfer ownership of all non-player units from the server to the HC. Though what really happens is that the units become unresponsive when issued waypoints or anything else (the waypoints are not deleted but they just stand around or adjust position slightly but don't move towards their waypoint). I was wondering if anyone else had tried Zeus and Headless Client integration yet and what their experience was? This is my first HC implementation so I'm not sure where to start debugging this one. Cheers, Nashable

Hey all, My current rig: CPU: i7 930 OC'd to 4ghz GPU: GTX 760 4gb, OC'd also (used by 337.50 and 337.88 with same effect) HDD: Arma is running on its own dedicated SSD RAM: 12gb Dual Channel OS: Win 7 64 bit Ultimate Settings: General: http://i.imgur.com/fU3NWwf.jpg Display: http://i.imgur.com/OFVoA5K.jpg AA&PP: http://i.imgur.com/m6u0zg3.jpg [*]Startup Params: -cpuCount=4 -noLogs -noPause -noSplash -showscriptErrors -malloc=system I've always gotten crappy performance out of Arma 3 but for some reason but since 1.20 its taken a nose dive. I'm capped at 15 fps during MP (Before the "its the server/gamemode", I regularly ask other players and they have 40+ frames at the same time on the same server) and can barely get 30 FPS in SP. I've just spent the entire day running every performance suggestion out there and reinstalling (such as http://day0.com.au/forum/arma/638-arma-3-performance-tweaks-and-settings-guide), also in my profiling Arma is utilizing about 20-30% of my CPU and 50% of my GPU. I even for science totally underclocked my system back to stock and I got exactly the same performance :O I was wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar since the patch or if anyone has a similar rig that could help me understand my performance here. Thanks, --- Solved! With a new cooling solution in place I'm running at even better performance than before.

It was a very subtle fault that seemed to have developed over several days. What was weird was that it kicked it the exact same day as the patch which is what led me initially astray. What I would recommend anyone in the future with FPS issues is to download something like core temp and just check the CPU frequency is what you think it should be and that your cores are running below 90C (preferably below 80C)

Yup a blacklist (exclusion) that filters out the main list would probably be best to get the results you want.

How did this turn into a debate on how RV uses cores? :) So I was able to identify the root cause of my issue. My Liquid Cooling pump had soft failed resulting in my CPU underclocking itself to 1.5 ghz :( under load.

In fact a script version of this addon pretty much solves all my complaints with the Kart's DLC model so that if DLC assets were to be used then mission makers could still support non-DLC players and not fragment the community. Ultimately the fact that this exists though undermines the whole point of them moving away from "Lite" in the first place. Not sure if you could answer this directly but if BI changes the functionality of MoveInDriver/MoveInGunner to counter mods like this will you offer people refunds?

Agreed that it's good they are opening this up with Karts for us to look at. The only problem is Karts are really outside the typical sphere of ARMA content so the impact of people not having the DLC and the amount of support by content creators they'll get is negligible. The price of the Karts and the fact they are donating some of the revenue from Karts also shows that BI don't really value the content as much as the delivery and market research from selling them. TL;DR I don't expect Karts to show up and be critical part of any popular game mode but the same cannot be said about Helicopter DLC. Agreed we're talking about what if's, my job involves the daily evaluation of risks in my business and how I avoid or mitigate them. I prefer to recommend paths of action that meet the objectives of the projects I work on while reducing as much exposure to negative risks as possible. At this point BI put out a model and asked for feedback. As a member of, and as a contributor to, this community I want to provide feedback on what I consider a serious risk and brainstorm alternative solutions that are less risky. Just humor me on this as a thought exercise. Let's say Plan A is "It won't happen", what would Plan B or Plan C look like to you if there wasn't a paywall? I'd assume BI would be well within their rights (and ToS) to take action against anyone circumnavigating their business model. Depending how the DLC is licensed they may be forced to take action to retain effective copyright of their own content. I'd expect any mission or mod that allowed an easy bypass of their DLC restrictions would at least not be supported or promoted within official channels and at most be removed from places like steam workshop or receive a cease and desist.

I agree with the rest of your post but how do you know if crowd-funding was considered? To me it feels viable because its actually very low risk if you know your production costs (which hopefully they do to set their DLC prices in the first place). They get the money up front and scale their production based on funding levels/goals. BI get paid UPFRONT and we all get shared content. It's a win-win. Just so we're on the same page with regards to terminology, Arma 3 is positioned by BI as a platform (Sandbox). So I'm talking about the full feature/content set of the Arma 3 game not just the engine. If functionality (the ability to drive/shoot from certain vehicles) is locked behind a paywall then its fair to say that content can not be trusted to be available. As a designer I can't make it a core part of my mission or balance for it because I have unknown external dependencies placed on that content. Ultimately I'll keep doing what I do, its the people that buy the DLC are going to find their purchase devalued by this model. Especially as BI are not driving the multiplayer playing habits of the game that's the content creating community. Also I'm not sure why we're debating if this is or will not be an issue? Helicopter DLC hasn't dropped yet, and what I (and others in this thread) are pointing out is just a massive risk created by the model. Our energy would be better spent discussing alternatives that don't create the risk of fragmentation than debating if a risk will manifest or not (because we will never know that for sure, until it's too late to make changes if required) So A2/OA is a great example of a similar issue. OA for a long time had issues of people moving over from A2 and it created a pretty big speed bump in the creation of content as mods had to adapt to the new engine. Missions were less of an issue as they are generally tied to a specific island/map anyway and even for framework missions like mine its easy to port them to a new map. Players within the mission still have full use of the design. Also it's worth saying with an expansion you only have one major point of fragmentation "Does the user own the expansion or not?", which is way easier to handle than "Do they own XYZ DLC" of which we know about three and maybe more in the future post Expansion.

For now there is no marketplace for mods. You can download large platform style mods like AGW and TFR (as well as ACE/ACRE in the past) and all it will cost you is your time which we all have as a resource, maybe in different quantities but we all have it. Not everyone can justify the costs of the DLC (leaving aside arguments such as "well they don't deserve XYZ if they don't buy it" or "they're not a true player if they dont want to spend $25 on Arma" as they are purely emotional) therefore it splits those players away from the rest. Though there are plenty of missions/game modes that exclude mod/addon content as well for lots of reasons (or are just built on the premise of their own self contained mod). BI are in a privileged position that any content they bring to the party has a guaranteed 100% coverage of all Arma players, I feel like with this content model and DLC we're all being sold short on what should be platform investment. Also unlike the modders they are compensated for that work everytime someone buys a copy of Arma. Also before the "BI should get paid for their work!" I totally agree but this isn't the way to do it. I would be the first in line if they took a different approach such as a crowd-funding (kickstarter) style model in which the DLC they offered would be based on funding targets/goals that they would set. They could bake in profit margins and used tiered structures of funding to keep their costs down (i.e. the level of funding would always = a profit for them) and they'd get the money upfront. Then afterwards that content is released as a core part of the package for everyone. If additional incentive was required they could throw in some low cost assets (skins/cosmetic items) that would be exclusive to contributors of the DLC funding.

That's awesome your group has already 100% coverage on the DLC, for a lot of us who create TvT and/or public game modes that is a much bigger dependency to deal with. While there may be more private group mission makers out there, more people play Life, Wasteland, Invade and Annex, CTI, Battle Royale, Breaking Point etc. (that's the draw of being in a private group in the first place, the tailored and unique content) It's the author of those public/community game modes who are going to be faced with the issue of dealing with a split community and perhaps even some of the larger clans/units as well. We should be spending more time and energy discussing other viable ways that could avoid the risk of fragmentation entirely. The argument of "Well this won't even happen" just doesn't get us anything, if it does not that happen that's great but there is a huge risk that this just hurts the DLC owners.

Will you be including the new DLC items in a mission critical way to your mod?

I'll use a personal example of why this is an issue. In my game mode, which is TvT based, I have to balance the assets available to both teams when deciding what units a particular team can spawn. I'm faced with two options: Allow DLC assets to be used and accept the possibility that players of one faction may not be able to utilize them because they did not buy the DLC Remove the DLC assets to retain control over balance due to external issues (i.e. did the player buy the DLC or not) This is also not counting that any included DLC content in a game mode effectively turns that content into an advert for BI.

You do realize who you are addressing with these comments? These are people that have given hundreds, if not more, of man hours to working on community missions and scripts FOR FREE. These aren't "freeloaders" when it comes to contributing to the armaverse. BI benefits an immense amount from the work of people like this. Imagine playing ARMA if none of the community content existed. How does this DLC compare to that? You're right expansions do create a segmented/fragment within the community. I think it's fair to say though that the amount of content provided in an expansion creates enough of an incentive for people to buy it and also makes it easier to target players. Nobody is arguing against paying for content, what a lot of us are throwing down a red flag on is the locking out of usability and functionality behind a paywall. Again if BI want to monetize content they would be better off selling campaigns/missions and including new vehicles/weapons as part of the ongoing product improvement cycle to increase their user base.

Let's put this another way. If you're a player who joins a server running a specific game mode, that game mode contains the new Helicopters as the default transport options. Nobody else on the server has the DLC so those assets are now unusable. As a reaction to that potential scenario mission makers will just edge their bets and not include those assets, or include them as non-essential side options. In either situation it hurts the actual paying customers for the DLC and lowers it value.

DLC content that locks players out will effectively just mean the DLC assets will be removed/not included in most community shared created/generated content. This hurts everybody involved with ARMA. Personally with a platform style game like this I think the smarter play would be to bake this into the main game as free DLC (like Zeus) and then kept the price of the game at $60 for longer. The increased content and word of mouth is going to generate more sales than the anti-consumer approach of this business model. Thinking of the new experience for players Q1 2015. Me: "Oh so you buy the base game for $60, then another $25 and now we can play all the same content together!", Them: "$75? No thanks". With paid DLC all they are doing is competing with modded content and puts a big spot light on the quality and amount of content each DLC pack provides. To BIS' credit at least they've said this model is still being iterated on and open to feedback so let's hope we see the company acknowledge and respond to our feedback. ---------- Post added at 01:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:50 PM ---------- I totally agree with this. It just won't be included in any PvP/TvT mission and probably many other MP missions as well. Great that you bought it but good luck finding quality content that uses it. To be honest I think BIS have to accept that their business model doesn't support a paywall. They benefit immensely from the amount of gaps that the community fills. We host online infrastructure for them, we create game content for them. This is the result of running ARMA as a platform (sandbox) rather than as a focused game (e.g. Battlefield/COD). BIS can't have their cake and eat it on this one. They should invest in their platform with DLC and have it pay off for them with more players/users within that ecosystem.

Hey there, I have some questions but will follow up with you via PM.

Hey all, Looking to see if there is any interest in playing some Team vs. Team this weekend. Usually every Saturday I organize a dedicated event but wanted to mix it up a little due to the A3 "Freekend" This is a Vanilla server and specific details are below: * Server Address: 64.94.238.213:2302 * Password: None * Date/Time: 9am PST (5pm GMT), Saturday May 17: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140517T09&p1=137 You can drop in and out as much as you like with the game mode and it will also control any bad behavior such as teamkilling etc to ensure a smooth experience. I'm also streaming the event live via http://www.twitch.tv/nashable if there are any other streamers out there that would like to take part it would be great to create a multistream from different POVs (such as http://www.multitwitch.tv/ ) Any questions please let me know!

The OP is old. Thanks for the mod. I'll make sure to post future events to the group.

Version 1.4 is available via my website or via steam. This build has been focused on balance changes, trying to allow more mobility into the game. In addition a few requests made via the steam page for better Singleplayer support. [New] You can now save your game. You can enable saving in the mission parameters. The game will also auto-save after each INDFOR HQ has been captured [New] Single BLUFOR CO mode. Primarily designed for singleplayer / smaller games in which you want all the assets from the Air Commander to be consolidated into the Land Commander [New] Defiance is now officially supported on Zargabad [balance] Major Balance changes to AT/AA: Missile Specialists have had their costs doubled/tripled. INDFOR now has access to static AT/AA at double the previous Missile Specialist cost. The intent is to reduce the amount of spamming of those units. [balance] To compensate for less AT, INDFOR have now been given access to the KUMA (Tank) [balance] To compensate for INDFOR getting a tank, BLUFOR’s Slammer has been upgraded to the TUSK variant [balance] Civilians have been removed from INDFOR Zeus. It was too easy to exploit [updated] When TvT/No Thermal Virtual Ammo Box is enabled, Zeus players will not be able to spawn ammo boxes. Players would use ammo boxes to get around item restrictions. Will investigate to see if there is a long term solve [updated] Zeus FOW now hide s the INDFOR HQ from BLUFOR [updated] Zeus can no longer edit the skill/respawn settings for Groups [updated] Additional Improvements to Team Killer checks. Should no longer award Team Kill on helicopter crashes [updated] Players can switch to INDFOR, even if locked to BLUFOR, if there are no INDFOR players online [Admin] Admins can now reset team locks and forgive team killers in the Defiance – Command menu (you need to be logged in as Admin) [Admin] Sometimes players would spawn in the corner of the map, a valid spawn checker is in place and will move any player that mis-spawns

Hey all, Looking to see if there is any interest in playing some Team vs. Team this weekend. Usually every Saturday I organize a dedicated event but wanted to mix it up a little due to the A3 "Freekend" This is a Vanilla server and specific details are below: * Server Address: 64.94.238.213:2302 * Password: None * Date/Time: 9am PST (5pm GMT), Saturday May 17: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140517T09&p1=137 You can drop in and out as much as you like with the game mode and it will also control any bad behavior such as teamkilling etc to ensure a smooth experience. I'm also streaming the event live via http://www.twitch.tv/nashable if there are any other streamers out there that would like to take part it would be great to create a multistream from different POVs (such as http://www.multitwitch.tv/ ) If you want to stay up to date with events like these then join the Zeus Gaming group for people who wish to play Zeus DLC content: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/arma3zeusgaming#events Any questions please let me know!

Version 1.3 is now available via my website or via steam. Changes: [New] Players are now locked to a team when they join. If you try to switch teams you'll be kicked on spawn. This does not impact players who are kicked for stacking INDFOR (they can join BLUFOR fine) [New] Teamkiller Punishment. If a player team kills 3 times they are kicked. They will no longer be able to rejoin the game until the mission is restarted and their info is recorded in the server log [New] Improved End Game notifications [New] Defiance support for FATA [updated] HMG and GMG MRAPs (Hunter/Strider) have been made significantly cheaper [Removed] Unarmed MRAPs (Hunter/Strider) have been removed from their respective teams as AI kept deploying them due to their cheap cost and were redundant with the cheaper armed versions [Removed] Due to balance issues M4 Scorcher has been removed from BLUFOR. May come back in the future as an option [Fix] Fixed an issue where killing MHQ could sometimes award tickets

I currently support, Altis, Stratis, Chernarus and Takistan. It takes about 10 minutes to port to any map that has civilian buildings. If you have a specific map in mind please let me know (edit: and link me to the map/mod)