djfluffwug

Well my opinion of optimising it is: Balancing the texture resolutions. Why do things like leaves in a garden have pretty decent resolution when 99.9% of the time, the playing wont be focusing on a garden leaf. Then, the road textures have a pretty low resolution when you would be using them quite a bit. If you were to balance the textures out a little more, I think you could get a small fps increase. Also, if they were limit the amount of draw calls going on, you would get a better framerate (Obviously). So, if they were to implement PROPER occlusion culling that takes into account the depth of objects and others overlapping the geometry, you would get a much better framerate. Using something like UMBRA would really boost the FPS of the game. (I know, I mention umbra alot) Anyways, there are lots of other small methods that could be used to increase the performance of the game but I won't go on.

Reading that article then the comments was a pretty funny experience for me. Seems both the author and the commenters had no idea what they were talking about.

What is this Game2 everyone talks of?

I will go through a few of the aspects of ArmA and how I think it could be improved. World Now, we all know the worlds are large in the ArmA series. Biggest world I have seen in an FPS. But, the problem I see with the worlds in ArmA is there is not enough differentiation between areas around the map. Maybe a slightly different town layout but the area's just feel empty and plain. Also, when I see the same vegetation spread around the map it feels a little reptitive. What needs to be done is to really have differentiated environments around the map. The large cliffs with rivers cascading down the sheer rockfaces, the swampy marshlands with shrubs, harshly battered trees, and a stale murky water. The mountains covered in small vegetation and deep caves to explore. With a differentiating environment, players get interested in the landscape, and tend to explore it. Even when explored for 15 minutes, it still feels like there is more to be found. If this could be implemented, this would really add to the players immersion and ultimately improve players chances of enjoying the game and recommending to friends. AI Now, I think another reason people don't get into ArmA is because of the AI. I realise AI in an open world military game is going to be really hard to program but it should be a focus. At the moment, the AI is good at shooting and pretty good at using military tactics, but they fail to show human behavior. They act more like robots than humans. There voices sound robotic, their movement looks robotic and they seem to show no sign of being human. If this could be improved upon, I think it would be a great step towards improving ArmA and then I believe people would get into it more. Tutorials I know this has been talked about before but I just wanted to reinforce my view on it. As we all know, there are tonnes of controls in the ArmA series. So many aspects of the game require all these controls but I don't think they are explained to the players properly. The tutorials in ArmA 2 go over the basics (Sort of) but really don't explain them fully. I don't think the player is taught about how the inventory works for example. It may seem instinctive to you how everything works but the new players will feel threatened by the complexity of ArmA and without things being properly explained to them, they are likely to just leave in frustration. If the tutorials could properly explain the main aspects, it would really help the player feel more at home. Also, maybe while in loading screens, tips for features or controls could be shown. For example: "Did you know: Weapons can be modified for different situations by pressing Shift+M". Movement Now, before you light your torches and get your pitchforks, I am not going to say how Call Of Duty's movement system is superior since that game is aimed at fun deathmatch style gameplay rather than simulating war. But, what I have noticed in ArmA 2 is that there seems to be a slight delay between pressing a key and having something happen. For example, when I press W, there seems to be about a 20-30ms delay between actually the key being pressed and starting to move. I am not talking about speeding up, because I know you can't instantly start running at full speed, but it seems that there is a delay before something even starts to happen. I don't know if this is a bug or them trying to simulate reaction time. If it is reaction time, then I am slightly confused because we (The humans) are the ones with the reaction time and not the avatar in game. If I have reaction time and the avatar also has reaction time, it is just making double reaction time which isn't realistic. Anyway, I could keep going but that is just a few of my thoughts on how to get people into ArmA with improvements to the game.

Shame because it would add alot of immersion. Imagine being inside a bunker as an RPG heads your way or being behind sandbags as a tank drives over them :D I guess it would really take up quite a bit of CPU power (Which we know ArmA hogs already). And with this new island, there will be an even bigger CPU/GPU drain (All the geometry :( ).

Sweet. Thanks for the comments again. I mostly use Unity for my game dev so there is heaps of tutorials but I always find the subjects very localised and not good for applying to a broad number of categories. I guess I will have to get a uni degree in game design to get more broad experience. Will check out the VDC link.

I can make a photorealistic scene in my own developed game engine. One problem though, it displays at 0.0001 frames per hour. But, like, it's still a game... A very slow game...

I never see the need of getting overly powerful power supplys. 850 watt would be way enough. I would think something like a 600 Watt PSU. I am running a GTX 560ti Golden Sample, 4G of RAM, I5 750 quad core processor, 1TB HDD and other various things and I am on a 550 watt PSU. I wouldn't waste the money on getting a PSU if you aren't going to use the watts.

Merry Christmas from Maleny, QLD, Australia, Earth, Milkyway, Universe #1 :D A present to you all :) Al_y-v7qcjg

Again, thanks everyone for replying. Will check out that C++ tutorial series. I have also just bought a book on C++ and am currently reading so that will help hopefully :D I figure C++ isn't much of a language for game design but would be good to start with. Also planning on learning Java afterwards. I have been using Unity3D for about half a year now stuffing around but my biggest limitation is lack of 3D and 2D resources. Hopefully sometime soon I will learn 3D modelling as well. Anyways, thanks for all the fantastic resources so far :D

I like Avast! since they take security seriously and don't use it as a marketing tool. Well, they do sort of since they offer pro security, but they still don't do stupid things like what you have noted above ;)

Instead of using norton, use Avast! Antivirus ;) Much better.

Thanks for the replies so far :)

^ Is that an example of music to not include? :D

Does anyone else find the title slightly misleading? :p

You do realise that a camera is different to an animation right? :p I think what people are trying to say is that the animations blend well in Battlefield 3. Yes, they are arcadish, but just because they are like this doesn't mean the integrity of the animation blending should be pushed aside. In ArmA 2, the animations feel slightly robotic and un-human like. I think what people are saying is this could be improved to match the fluidity of blending that a real human has. Now, before the entire thread gets derailed from its topic, lets move on and try and contribute to the discussion with your own thoughts on what could be improved for MP.

Well, there seemed to be so much hype and everyone was talking about it. Now it seems to have died down.

I read in the forums for Terraria that redigit was adding a pvp mode but seems it was not yet implemented in 1.1. Apparently it was going to add castles on each side of the map and would be a very pvp orientated map. Sounded really cool.

Hey, since I have gotten over minecraft due to way too much time spent on it, I found another sandbox type adventure game called Terraria. I am sure some of you know it well already but it looks like a nice game :D Edit: Azq5IOrFtEI Here is the updated trailer (Thanks NodUnit :) ) What are peoples thoughts on it?

Hmm, I just noticed that not much is actually happening with battlefield 3 anymore. Seems like marketing pop-games these days are just a bunch of hype :P

I hope a player named CIA wasn't in this clan. I remember about a year ago, some player called CIA hopping into a black hawk, then taking off and trying to be cool by flying in between the hangers on the runway near chernarus. Well, it ended in a flaming wreck near a hanger and the whole thing actually collapsing I think. Anyway, I still remember the player to this day and hope he never plays ArmA again for his horrific piloting skills :D

For that, couldn't you just have a collider inside the vehicle, then if the player is inside the collider, check the x,y and z speed of that vehicle, then save that to a global variable, then apply that variable as a speed to the player (Plus the players current speed)? Plus also, if the current speed of the vehicle is way higher than the players speed, you could just ignore that so they fall out. Or would it be more complicated?

I would love with the new use of physx for the rotors of the helicopter to break into pieces when hitting the ground. It wouldn't be to hard to make and it would add alot of immersion to helicopter crashing flying.

I preordered this game but still have not bothered to install it after playing the beta. I just didnt think it was worth the bandwidth :p

Seems strange it's just 4 people talking about this game so far :D As for the time spent playing this, I think I would have done at least 40-50 hours of this game xD Not as bad as my 170 or so hours playing garrysmod though.