Maystor

Don't know what's funnier, the entering/exiting the car or the move command :D Fantastic video.

Would reverting to 1.60 LOD system also remove instant LOD switching for scopes that was introduced in betas? I'd kinda miss that.

For what it's worth, just tried doing this with latest beta and it seems to be about the same to me: VQinSipH_e8

Oh I see. I only tried civilian vehicles and assumed the caret is always invisible. Voted.

Hmm, just tried it on Expert difficulty. Not having a cursor kind of defeats the point of the new driving system and is just as awkward to use as before. In my opinion the best way to do it would be to, regardless of the crosshair setting, completely disable horizontal freelook in vehicles when steering, it's not needed. Vertical freelook could be disabled too, but having it optional would be even better. Because sometimes I do want to adjust my view up and down just a little, depending on the vehicle. Just do something about the sensitivity please ;)

I'm still kinda confused. Driving with a mouse has never been closer to OFP than it is now. In ARMA1 it was changed drastically, because of the controls left over from OFP elite, the Xbox version of the game. They tried fixing it with by adding the "more right/left" but it was pretty much unusable because it was hard to drive in a straight line. In ARMA 2 it was much easier to center the steering wheel and driving with a mouse was fine as long as you could see where the actual steering wheel is pointing. Of course, it depends what one is used to but really, driving say a motorcycle with a mouse was the most awkward thing ever before these latest betas. The new system changes things by centering the wheel when the vehicle has turned in the direction the cursor is pointing to. It took me a while to realize what people thought when talking about a "look into the turn" feature because with the new system you rarely ever need to move the cursor so close to the edge of the screen to activate horizontal freelook. I fully agree Y axis movement is way too sensitive though. So, by "the old way", we're referring to drive right/drive left, basically the mouse doing the same thing as 'A' and 'D' keys, right? I just tried assigning the controls that way and the up/down freelook is there but not the left/right one? In which case we pretty much all agree that Y axis movement should be toned down and/or optionally disabled.

Ya, but options like that are quite rare in this game so it's probably not very likely. I hated the mouse vehicle control since ARMA 1 came out, now it's probably your time to suffer :D One thing though, the Y axis of the steering cursor is for some reason very, very sensitive. That's the main thing I dislike about the new system.

I disagree, I like the new driving system much better. In the old one, moving the mouse left and right would control a steering wheel which most of the times you couldn't see, which was disorienting. With the new one, you don't actually control the steering wheel but rather point the cursor in the direction you want the vehicle to go, similar to what it was like in OFP. A big improvement IMO.

Yep, it literally turns the game from fairly smooth to laggy for me, and yet everything that is annoying about the hdr impementation is still there. I imagine it might not be an easy fix as it sounds but yeah, I completely agree. For example, the whole reason we have a RMB zoom is to compensate for the lack of screen size and resolution vs what it would look like in real life. And yet the difference between normal and zoomed in view is night and day. Literally, because by zooming in you usually remove that bit of sky that made the whole screen dark and now everything is very bright. It just doesn't look right at all. I think we've all been outside and can confirm that's not really how our brain sees things ;)

I usually have it set to normal. Anything higher than that and I experience a pretty big performance hit with very little visible difference. I'll experiment some more but so far the tone mapping in 1.60 looks a lot better to me from the gameplay point of view. In these betas, I find myself resorting to using "tricks" to fool the hdr implementation such as moving the camera around until no sky is in the view just to see something which I should be seeing at that time of day. I do have a properly calibrated monitor with a decent IPS panel so that's not the reason for the loss of detail either. Hopefully more tweaks will be made before the 1.61 patch is out.

Don't really like the new default tone mapping. It's too dark in general and the loss of detail is pretty bad when coupled with the standard HDR effect behaviour in ARMA. I was showing Day Z to a friend of mine yesterday and he kept asking why does the brightness of my monitor keep fluctuating so much! I do realize HDR and tone mapping are two different things but these new changes do make the perceived brightness fluctuations a lot more noticeable to the eye when the goal should be the complete opposite. It's not so much that darker nights bother me but rather afternoons that feel way too dark now. It really does feel like day becomes night at times in some areas.

Yeah. Only recently I started playing with betas and was really surprised how much worse it has gotten. LODs are blending/morphing and popping all over the place. Affects the gameplay big time in my opinion.

Can you please elaborate on this? LOD blending has never been worse for me than it is now: https://dev-heaven.net/issues/35234 Can anyone else replicate this? Also experiencing it to the same degree in 94364.

OK, I'll upload the mission later with all the other necessary info.

Made a short video to compare LOD swapping in 1.60 vs latest betas. The delay is really noticeable and it's an issue not only with RMB zoom but when turning around as well: VQinSipH_e8&hd=1

Instantaneous LOD switching when using a scope is perfect! RMB zooming is the other way around now though, way too slow. Making it so the LOD swap occurs during the actual zooming would pretty much solve the whole issue with vegetation LODs.

Aero glass will be removed in final version. Microsoft want to blend the classic windows look with the new, awful Metro one a bit more because they are currently two completely different looking GUIs. In the end they'll just make the regular interface too flat and plain. I like Aero personally but I have no intention of "upgrading" to a tablet optimized OS so I don't really care either way.

Just upgraded my E6750 CPU to an i5 2500k and wow, my FPS in towns has nearly TRIPLED. Those 14-15fps scenes discussed earlier are now 40+fps. And that's at stock speed. When I get a decent cooler it will be even better at 4.5Ghz :) The only bad thing about it is that the game runs super smooth in other areas so even 35-40fps which used to be great feels choppy in comparison now. This game really needs both a powerful CPU and a good video card. Having just either one doesn't cut it.

When you are walking or driving everything around you is moving as well so LOD blending in those cases is not really an issue IMO. It's when you're zooming in or using scoped weapons that it becomes really noticeable and distracting. The way I see it, perfect solution would be making the blending occur while zooming so by the time it's finished the LODs are already switched. For scoped weapons, use instantaneous switching with no blending, like in OFP. I'll do some testing but I think I'm experiencing stuttering as well. That's pretty much the only change I've noticed so far regarding this LOD fix.

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but can anyone tell me what has changed in latest betas regarding LOD blending? I'm not sure what kind of improvements am I supposed to be looking for? I was kind of hoping vegetation LOD blending would happen during the actual zooming and thus not be so distracting but I don't really see much difference to be honest. LOD blending on static screens, ie after zooming in has finished has quite a big effect on gameplay imo. My eyes still get distracted by movement of vegetation every single time.

Just tried it on mine with your settings and in the exact same spot. The lowest fps I get when moving view left to right is 14-15fps at 1920x1200. At 1680x1050 it's 16fps. Dropping the resolution to something ridiculous like 960x600 gives me a further 1-2fps gain. Damn, I really need a new CPU.

I should have mentioned mine is dual core but at higher clock speed. Overclocked to 3.4Ghz vs stock definitely helps but my minimum frame rate is still too low. In some areas on Chernarus I'm getting <20fps and that's just me alone on the island. With added AI it gets quite worse but I imagine a quad CPU will fare better in that respect at least. Leon, what resolution and settings are you running at? I've scrapped the idea of getting an i3 and I'm going with an i5 2500k. Really hoping once overclocked it will help with the minimum fps issue as well as allow me to use somewhat higher settings than everything set to normal.

Leon is right. I upgraded from a similar video card to an HD6850 and have a similar performance CPU. The game runs well and bad at the same time. You will definitely see a noticeable performance gain in most scenarios BUT your CPU will really hold you back in some cases. For example, in Chernarus areas with lots of buildings I still get unacceptable FPS and dropping the resolution from 1920x1200 to like 1280x800 does pretty much nothing. For smooth gameplay this game really seems to need both a good video card and a good CPU. Wish I knew that before before doing the video card upgrade.

Just tried overclocking my E6750 and 3.2Ghz seems to be giving me a 5-6fps gain. It doesn't sound much but 16fps vs 22fps makes a big difference in gameplay. Unfortunately, the fan noise in idle is too high. Buying a good cooler isn't an option as it would cost more than my CPU is worth. If I were to go over my budget, which processor would you say does have a good price/performance ratio for ARMA 2 right now?

i5 2310 is exactly 50% more expensive here, that's too much for me right now. Wouldn't those cheap pentiums be only marginally faster than my C2D though? I'd probably be better off saving for a faster processor but that will take time which kind of makes this graphics card upgrade a mistake, at least as far as ARMA 2 goes.