-Coulum-

Yep it was definitely one of "those features" that made arma 3 stand out from the pervious iterations of the game. I think what they had was pretty awesome on dev. Devs said it wasn't up to par with what they wanted though. I hope that means they want to add even more rather than there was issues under the hood. I noticed in one of the recent dev updates there was this change: Could this possibly be in preparation for fatigue related changes...?

Mods were an absolute necessity for Ai in arma 2. In arma 3 they are not. Arma 3 Ai is, overall, better.

But maybe more hitzones could be added to planes besides hull. For example if you had a left wing, hull and right wing. The wings would act similar to wheels on a car. When they are destroyed they disappear. Add in some special "Parts flying effects" and it might look like the planes wing has broken off when it crashes wing first or has its wing shot up too much. Maybe. But yeah it probably isn't as simple as that. I don't know how much flying vehicles are handled differently from land vehicles.

Yeah I find the ai to be pretty balanced as well. But I still think that the precision slider should have more of an effect so players that disagree with me and want less accurate ai, can get it. Right now the slider doesn't have enough weight.

I think the current skill sliders are fine.If friendly ai is supposed to be better than enemy or vice versa, the mission maker should be the one to make that happen. But having skill sliders for friendly and enemy does nothing to make this more of a tactical shooter. Precisely. All that being said, the precision slider doesn't have enough effect on ai accuracy, as mentioned in the ai configuration thread.

Thank god someone can test and report accurately rather than conjure up exagerated stories of long past firefights gone sour. Not saying the ai are perfect cause their not, but they are much more "human" when it comes to spotting and shooting in arma 3. Key word is more. They still aren't close to human. But they are enjoyable if you fight them for what they are. Arma 3 is worth getting imo. You could probably live with playing arma 2. But hey if you like the arma series, arma 3 is the best iteration so far. So why settle for anything less (arma 2). And things will only get better with time. Both from the development wise and mod wise. It may not have been the perfect game everyone wanted it to be but it is definitely still a game worth buying.

Yep I agree.

I think what he is saying is that if you don't want the group indicators all you have to do is go into the addons folder within @sthud and delete the stgi.pbo. This will disable the hexagons but keep the rest.

Great work I am liking the new group hexagon indicators. Any chance of getting names of the player displayed under those hexagons when within a certain range, or after looking at a group member for some time? Would make this addon absolutely must have for me. Thanks for the great work!

How do know that there is no effect? Are you just judging it by how accurate ai seem to be when playing. Or are you using other means? I am doing it by monitoring the aimingshake and aimingaccuracy of a unit and I definitely see a difference when using different precisions. Using bullet tracing scripts I also see a difference but it is quite hard to notice. Basically precision isn't a simple multiplier of the ai's ability to shoot. So setting it to zero doesn't necessarily give you poor ai shooting. For example: If you place an ai with an editor skill of 1, at skill 1 and precision 1 you will get a the most accurate ai possible - aimingaccuracy and aimingshake 1. But now if you place an ai with an editor skill of 1, at skill 1 and precision 0.5 - you would expect the ai shooting to be half as accurate. But this is not the case. The ai will have an aimingaccuracy and aimingshake of 0.9 which is still extremely high. Even if you set precision to zero you will find that the ai will still have an aimingaccuracy and aimingshake of 0.8. Once again, very very accurate. This may lead to you not actually noticing that there have been changes. You set precision to half expecting the ai to be half as good but they are only one tenth worse. Maybe this is what you are experiencing? The precision definitely does something. Just the effect is not as big as one might expect. Unless there is an issue privy to you alone though... I am unsure why BIS has made precision have such an odd relationship with the ai's skills, or even what exactly that relationship is. I will wait for the oprep. Hopefully they will explain things a bit, and their thought process behind it. Because right now the precision slider doesn't seem to give you quite as much freedom as you might want - at least from the bit of testing I have done so far.

It does work but you will have to restart the mission after changing precision to see the effects. I am interested to know how precision effects the ai's aimingaccuracy and aimingshake skills. I see it does have an effect but it certainly isn't a simple multiplier. What exactly is the relationship between the two? Also interested to know what the skill setting effects. Is it only spotting and turning speed or is it other things? Does it actually effect how "smart" the ai is? I am looking forward to the oprep. Keep up the good work guys.

I actually don't think the ai's accuracy is too high compared to what a player with a scope, ingame, can achieve. That being said, I do think that players are too accurate in the first place, and agree with WhisketSixx as to why they are too accurate. The effects of the battlefield don't effect a player realistically. And these effects should ideally also effect ai. Their accuracy needs to vary depending on their equipment and situation more. Ironsights = less accurate. Underfire = less accurate. Shooting at a target they have only just acquired = less accurate. Shooting at a target they have had LOS for a while = more accurate. And so on. This is what will make the ai seem less botish, and more human, as they will appear to be reacting to the environment around them more. And of course if it is done for the ai IMO it is only fair to do it for the player as well. But thats another topic I suppose. But as is, the ai is definitely playable against with their current accuracy. Use cover and don't stick your head up for more than a few seconds at a time. When a bullet snaps by its time to duck down. Sitting behind cover is not good enough. You have to use it as well. Doing that and the ai will rarely, rarely, rarely hit. Yes I agree. If a platoon sized firefight actually took a realistic amount of time - or even half that - I would have no need to have ridiculous amounts of ai and wonder why my performance is bad. If only. Things have improved over arma 2 though. And I am sure it will only get better.

I don't think ai is "too complex" or has too many choices and too many variables to take into consideration. I think its more that its priorities are out of whack. Right now the ai is very much so caught up in shooting the enemy. And then staying in formation. and then finding cover. And then following orders. And then doing things like healing buddies. Add some seemingly unavoidable wonky pathfinding and you got the current "clusterfuck" you guys describe. But I disagree that the ai is trying to do too much at once. Because they don't. They tackle one thing at a time. Its just it is trying to do things in the wrong order. And bad path finding. My opinion. It would be nice to have player created orders take more priority in ai decisions. Ie. more so than ai's individual need to shoot at the enemy.

Ah, the final instalment of arma 2 "must have mods" has made its way into arma 3. Great job Robalo, thanks for the hard work.

I think sway is pretty fair. When most people complain about it it is at long range with high magnification. It should be expected that your weapon isn't perfectly steady. Sniping shouldn't be something that everyone just picks up and does. And in the end hold breath is there and allows for good solid shooting in any stance. It just requires a bit of planning to make it useful. Hold breath time is pretty good as well imo. Too me it doesn't really represent literally holding your breath but rather focusing, ensuring sight alignment, controlling breath, tensing up the muscles etc. I can hold my breath for over two minutes in reality. But I can sure as hell tell you that at the one and a half minute mark I am going to be shaking more than if I would if breathing normally. When you shoot you don't literally just hold your breath. Its more like you should try to have your shots coincide with the small natural pause between the end of and exhale and the start of an inhale of the respiratory cycle. You can extend this pause by holding breath, yes. But the steadiness you achieve will quickly be gone if you lack oxygen. Just because you hold your breath doesn't mean your aim is steady in reality. So the whole "In real life you can hold your breath longer" is a bad argument in my opinion. Yes in real life you can, but in real life good shooting is not achieved by just taking a deep breath and holding it as long as you can. In fact that is bad shooting and just ridiculous. Anyhow I am not really sure if this is what the OP was talking about in the first place. There is a problem with the sway of the scope and the misalignment animation that plays out when prone. It leads to the crosshairs pointing one way but the gun pointinng another when using the 2d scopes (SOS) and similar inaccuracies when using other scopes. If you let the animation play out (don't touch the mouse for a second or so) the gun will stop pointing to where the crosshairs are pointing. You can see this clearly if using bullet tracing scripts. You will have your horizontal alignment of the crosshairs in line with the target yet the bullet will go left or right on occasion. This has nothing to do with sway though, and is entirely due to the prone head animmations (I believe).

Hmm. I think this is another one of those .50 cal myths. I am sure the small wave that the bullet creates will not feel pleasant if you are hit with it, but I seriously doubt it would "rip your face off" or even break skin. Or mealt it for that matter. And to get hit with that wave with full "supersonic strength" you would need to be millimetres away. I can only imagine it would dissipate quite rapidly after that. I am by no means an expert but I do not believe that a near miss can kill someone. Certainly not a miss of 20cm.Best I have to back that up is mythbusters did a test and a 50 cal. was unable to damage thin glass cups with near misses. If it can't break a glass I doubt it would break your face. 12.7 are still relatively small, light objects. They don't have magical abilities.

Well, okay. If you are not holding a grudge what are you doing? And how is it helping anyone? I am not saying that your criticism isn't correct or inaccurate. Its just that much of it is, imo unnecessary. Do you really think BI needs another person telling them that they need to make less bugs. Or fix performance. Or put in bipods. Or whatever else. Yes I am "extrapolating" off of your critiques. But this is the kind of "criticism" that people are constantly giving BI. And after a while it stops becoming constructive. This is the idea I am trying to get across. Yes criticism is fine. But much of the criticism I see now days, especially that towards their business practices in the past during alpha beta and release, is imo overkill and just becomes negativity that can only hurt the game. And there is a very big reason for that. They make the more money. Don't take it personally. Its business.

No Windies, I am not saying its just okay. What I am saying is, to me the whole "I feel betrayed! BI has done me wrong! yadayada" is just getting beyond pointless, and I am guessing even counter productive. How long is one to hold a grudge for. Isn't it time to move on? Yes I am doing exactly that. Please don't think I am targeting you personally in that last paragraph. I am just discussing (or rambling) about how I perceive the situation. You never said they lied or stole your money, but other people have. And I am expressing my feelings about that. I don't believe I ever said you said anything that you didn't say:). If I did I apologize. If you want me to focus in only on you? Okay. You say that "how that information was released and the timing of that information" was wrong and upsetting as well as "find(ing) out from a 3rd party source". Fair enough, it wasn't a smooth process. But now what. What does being upset about it now, months after the incident, do to benefit anyone? Haha, not sure I understand that first bit. Sorry. You must be a lawyer. As for business vs personal. Tmpression I got from you is that you are taking it personally. You seem to be upset that you had to hear of cuts from a third party and how information was passed down to you. Is that not more personal than business? Yes thats more how I see it. They made a game. You bought the game. Transaction complete. Nothing more, nothing less. The game is in playable state. Further more they are working to fix gamebreaking bugs if they exist. I see no poor ethical behaviour. You are buying a product, not a service. See the only thing I see wrong with your logic, is that we are not paying customers. We are customers that have payed. BI is a company that has given us our product. We are not entitled to much more than that. There was no service in this purchase. No its not like the devs are going "hey lets just not work on arma 3 because of all the criticism". They are still working on it. Its just that some of that passion/motivation for the work maybe is lost due to the negativity. And passion for ones work is what makes games (or any work for that matter) great. Definitely possible. But when I see a string of posts like this I certainly get the impression that there is alot of negativity. Glass is half empty rather than half full. But then again things have gotten better than they were a while ago. Make arma not war. Dayz. Appreciation and shoutouts in news blogs. Encouraging and supporting modding. Hiring modders. Me personally, I have never released a mod, so there is no need for thanks. But I do believe that BI appreciates its modders. Indeed! Damnit this post is too long. Nobody is going to read all of it.

Yes there are definitely alot of unkowns. And that video is by no means supposed to be "proof". But, it does go to show armour does work, if not in all scenerios, than definitely in some. It does save peoples lives. And when combined with videos and documentation of armour tests in more controlled settings (which have been posted in this thread), where AR500 plates are able to stop 7.62 rounds, it kind of gives you that idea that you know what, getting shot 4 times in the centre of mass with an armoured plate on might not lead to me instantly dropping. The video is more food for thought though, than proof. agreed Yes but that being said, the effects don't seem to be that drastic until you get to extreme ranges. Ie. the difference between 50 and 150 metres is pretty negligible. The difference between 5 and 1000 is exponentially larger. At leas thats the feeling I get in my tests.

I can't really tell whether its lack of passion or their increasing size that limits them from really expressing that individual "passion". Or maybe its a combo of both. But one thing I feel very strongly about, is that if there is a lack of motivation, I this community is not helping. Its only making things worse. I like when my work is appreciated. When my work is appreciated, I feel good and I want to do more of it. I don't like when my work goes unnoticed and unappreciated. When this happens repeatedly, despite hard work and improvement on my part, I begin to become unmotivated. Why should I try to improve things when no one will appreciate it and instead continuously point out weaknesses? Which one sounds more like our community right now. If the devs are anything like me, I don't blame them for not being too gung ho. There have been improvements lately in the game. How much did people care for them. How many instead just complained about the weaknesses. How may are gong to reply: "Pfft, improvements! what improvements? you mean the teh FPS loss!! Yeah thanks alot BI!!!" And I think the whole "if we don't whine they won't change" mentality is twisted. Yes giving construction criticism, so goals can be set, is good. That is what the feedback tracker is for. But for most issues we are past the point of "constructive criticism". We are beating a dead horse. BIS knows what issues need to be fixed. Now its a matter of time (and alot of it). But whining and being negative rather than appreciating the little improvements that are added is not going to make that time any shorter. In fact it is going to just make it longer. Anyhow that is my spiel. But would you not have bought arma 3 if you knew how it would be on day release? People use the "they took our money before they told us the truth" card alot, but really they didn't. They made it quite clear what you were buying when you bought it. whether it was alpha beta or campaignless official release. I personally think that for the most part people are just frustrated with the lack of features/fixes they expected to be implemented. Probably not you in particular. But I don't think anything BI said, no matter when or how, would soften the community outrage to, say, no 3d editor. Okay I can understand that its frustrating. I was very disappointed when beta hit and I realized "this is it". But what do BIS have to do to show you that they want to make things right. They are releasing a patch every single day. Is that not enough? No offence, but to be honest it just sounds silly when people say things like "They lied to us! They stole our money! We had to hear from a 3rd party source!". Its far to personal for the simple transaction that is buying a game. And in my opinion people are holding it over BI's heads for far too long. Even if you took it personally, some time you gotta learn to get over it.

Haha so true. Pretty much realism is out of the picture right now. And it never really was, even in arma 2. Now it is, exactly as you say, all about getting the right balance for enjoyable gameplay. Just an example of how body armour does work. Hit in the body armour 4 times and once in the helmet by 7.62 (apparently). No permanent injuries to speak of He didn't even seem to be physically incapacitated at the end. Of course, he wasn't calmly firing back at the enemy either... Personally I think the protection system is actually at a reasonable state right now. Any less effective and body armour isn't going to be useful anymore. I personally have adjusted my approach to fit it. Mainly get in closer and unload the clip on em. One benefit is it encourages manoeuvring and getting close, which imo makes things interesting. I do hope BIS is able to improve the simulation aspect of it further, in the future however (ie. plate cover the correct areas, not the entire hitzone). Right now, one simply improvement, not so much to protection, but to hit reactions, is to make the ai aim decrease longer. Right now it decreases drastically for maybe a tenth of a second. This should be extended to 1 to 2 seconds.

Bingo. Only thing that has really changed is the ranges at which they spot and engage. In arma 2 their vanilla spotting range was around 100 to 200 metres. You could be running around in circles, shooting at the sky full auto and they wouldn't see you at 250 metres. Now with more realistic spotting ranges however, its just easier to find the flaws with the ai spotting mechanics - mainly that concealing your self via camoflauge or partial cover does not effect the ai (at least not enough). But this was the same for arma 2. Things have only gotten better since. Remember in arma 2, as soon as you killed an enemy, the entire squad knew exactly where you were. This has been improved significantly make "sniping" a bit easier.

Until they can implemnt proper fire gemotry for plates and helmets, and proper hit reactions, realism is not possible. Right now (unfortunately) we are going to have to settle for "balanced and enjoyable gameplay". I think that the current headshots are pretty well balanced and enjoyable. Yeah I definitely wouldn't sat they are "linked". I am by no means knowledgeable on the subject but I get the feeling that armour has more room to improve than bullets, in the near future. I mean hell you could always just slap on another plate. Where as bullets have been optimized for years and years and I don't believe that there is much more that can be done to improve them. But really I have nothing to back this up its just the impression I got. Anyone have more knowledgeable predictions?

No there are 556 weapons in vanilla. Two of them I believe. Independant have them and Blufor Rebel types have them... But regardless, there is an issue now, recorded and everything. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?152866-General-Discussion-(dev-branch)&p=2605868&viewfull=1#post2605868 To be honest it seems to me it has only become an issue after the latest patch (ie before OP), but maybe it was always a problem and has just increased in occurance due to other changes in the patch? Anyone who has come across this have any idea what caused it?

I think all that Maturin is trying to point out is that a "sniper" shouldn't get some magical bonus because "he's a sniper". A normal rifleman even lacking the ghillie suit should be able to conceal himself for quite a while, while firing as well, given the he sets up the conditions right. This is the main problem with ai spotting. It doesn't take the enough varies into account (albeit it does take into account many). Ie. right now it basically depends on the units movement speed, stance, distance, whether he is shooting or not, and to a very limited degree, what type of terrain he is in. There is so much more that could make for better stealth mechanics such as camoflauge compared to the terrain, the amount of objects around that can confuse the eye, how much of the body one exposes, hidden silhouettes etc. Of course I am just talking in a ideal game but those are the problems with spotting right now imo. Basically just because your a sniper doesn't mean you should be harder to spot.