rawalanche

Hi, I am looking for a way to make environmental effects such as wind, waves, etc... a lot louder. In default vanilla game, these sounds are incredibly and extremely unrealistically quiet. I've created a new scenario in Eden editor where I've cranked wind settings to absolute max in intel window, yet volume of the environment had not changed. If I am out in a windy that, wind is quite loud. I really miss Operation Flashpoint 2 Dragon Rising's ability to adjust environmental effects independently from other effects, such as vehicles and gunfire. I remember cranking up environment sound 4 times louder than rest of the sound, and the game felt incredibly immersive. So I am searching for a way of either maybe editing some files or using some mods to crank up these ambient sounds. Thanks in advance.

So they tend to ignore this part of the forum? :|

Hello, control scheme of ArmA games has always been on a bit clumsy and unfriendly side ever since the complex modal zoom/optics mode was introduced in Armed Assault. Especially in multiplayer matches where every millisecond counts, a delay caused by ArmA figuring out which zoom mode to activate based on user input would lose you quite a few firefights. Luckily, in ArmA 3 it is especially easy to fix this by changing mapping to a more rapid mode, which immediately aims down the sight upon pressing RMB, without introducing delay required for decision between zoom and aim down the sight mode in default setup. Moreover, this alternative mapping is even included in a two default shipped presets with ArmA 3. Industry standard and ArmA 3 alternative. The small problem is - it does not work as long as you ever encounter a vehicle which can fire. This bug was first introduced in Armed Assault published in December of 2006. That makes this month a whopping 10 year anniversary of this bug, and a good time to bump it again. In 2013, I've reported this bug (it has wrong date, shows the date when database was migrated to new tracker) https://feedback.bistudio.com/T82903 and ever since then, for over 3 years, it's still "assigned". Now, obviously there's no hope of this ever going to fixed, so I would like to take advantage of this 10 year anniversary to at least ask developers here to explain themselves. Why keep dragging us around in circles and pretend it's something you are working on.... for 10 years? Why don't you simply admit it's an engine limitation. Why remain so silent and ignore this. Don't you think this should be somehow addressed? Look at it this way. One of the strong selling points of your game is vehicle combat on scale unsurpassed by other games. At the same time, you are also shipping official, more attractive control schemes in order to attract players who claim ArmA 3 controls feel heavy handed and unfriendly. And these two things do not work together? How does one make a choice between being able to interact with the game in a comfortable way but having to give up using significant portion of the vehicles (which are often crucial to completing given mission) this game can offer, and the opposite?

Unfortunately i can not. The dropdown button in betas tap of Arma 3's properties on steam is frozen. I can't click it and select dev branch :/ EDIT: Nevermind, probably a steam bug. Doesn't work when clicked, but if i tab through to the button and use cursor key to swap the option, it works. ---------- Post added at 10:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:40 PM ---------- Okay, so while i was very sceptical about this being magically fixed in dev branch, because even though it remained unfixed not only since the birth of this game, but also since the birth of previous one, i still went ahead to waste my time downloading and running dev branch. And of course BIS did not let me down, it's indeed still not fixed in the dev branch and i doubt it will ever be.

That's really not an option. I use that exact setup to make target acquisition as rapid as possible. I found out that if i map my controls similar to battlefield games i often play, i get a LOT more competitive, and game becomes lot more fluid and feels lot less clunky. It makes difference between being able to to take out 4 vs 20 AIs on my own, or being able to take out about 4-5 times more players in multiplayer matches during one spawn. It makes that much difference and makes me that much competitive, which of course ends as soon as i board any vehicle with gun optics. The entire point of this is being able to aim down the sights of your rifle within fraction of a second and return precise fire.

Well, looks like i am done with ArmA for good. That bug has been reported more than 2 years ago and still isn't fixed >:(

Hi, I've tried to map my controls to be more like battlefield for faster aim down the sights in multiplayer. The problem here is that once i have mapped Hold RMB as Optics (temporary), Zoom (temporary) and hold breath, as soon as i enter any vehicle and use optics, it immediately zooms at the max possible level, and becomes stuck there. Not even using NUM - works, not even accessing optics via any other hotkey, and not even exiting vehicle and re-entering it. I will be very thankful for any solutions.

Upgrading GPU may raise your FPS by a few, but no matter how good GPU you have, ArmA 3 will never run optimal, especially in object and AI heavy places. This is simply because ArmA 3 engine's renderer is tied to simulation. New DayZ engine won't have this limitation and hopefully same engine will be used by next ArmA game :)

No, sorry but you completely misunderstood and took it out of the context. If you read further you will see i was not referring to designating soldier groups, but to launching command macros. So for example. Imagine regular situation when firefight ends, and you very quickly need to move with your soldiers to some remote locations, and you don't wan't any of these incompetents to stay behind and then bombarding you with "where are you?" queries. So often you do following keyboard dance: All, disengage - All, stand up - All, stay alert - All, fall back into formation. 4 time consuming orders that are no fun to do. So you could for example hit shift+1 (just for example, i do realize shift+1 is already assigned to something) and that would initiate macro recording. Then you would issue all the commands, and once done, hit shift+1 again. Then whenever hitting 1, recorded chain of orders would be executed. This way you could create following interesting macros: One button order for sniper in your squad to find cover, lay down, and watch your direction, or scan horizon One button order for all your soldiers to enter danger mode, lay down, find cover and engage at will. Good when being ambushed One button order to pick them up after firefight and make them follow you rapidly, as in example above One button order to make the board the vehicle you are in Etc...

I don't think wheel should/could have more slices. It's reliable 2 axis control for both consoles and especially for PC. It would be quite a pain if it had to be navigated using mouse cursor. The beauty of OFP2 one was that you could very easily memorize sequences for certain commands, such as right-right-up, and you could execute them very rapidly. If there were more than 4 slices, then imagine fragility of having to press say top and right (W and D) at the same time to hit top right slice of the circle. It would mean there has to be some timeout in which it decides if one or two keys are pressed at the time. The timeout would mean slower responses and therefore slow down order issuing. For objects out of line of sight, it could be as simple as performing orders on some map. You would put your cursor over an object on a map related to your order, and context menu would change appropriately. And all the objects you know of would be listed on the map. Of course it's nice to be able to do that while looking around on battlefield without map in your face, but at the same time, sometimes it's a bit problematic as there may be for example two vehicles of the same type, and you do not know which one of the two is the one you are ordering to. IMHO there is way too much flexibility right now. Sure it makes it feel like simulator, but it ruins big part of immersion factor. What you say about circular command menu accommodating for ArmA3 complexity, there are numerous design solutions for this, for example: Let's assume on Root circle, down is command for Move. The comand is cursor sensitive, so if you point at a car, then it changes to board. If you hit just down, they will get issued order that says "board anywhere", as in current number menu. Now, we have already one modifier key - Ctrl, used for stance adjusting. In circular menu, this key would be modifier too, and the bottom slice of the circle would be color coded, by for example yellow color, indicating it has modifier options under it. So in practice, if you aim at car, open command menu and quickly hit down, soldiers will board the car randomly, using board anywhere command. If you open menu, but hit Ctrl+Down, it would go to sub-menu, with options like driver, gunner, commander, rear, etc... It could be refined further by allowing for color coded modifier indicator to be present only when one soldier is selected, as you can't order two or more guys to take commander or gunner seat at once. This adaptive menu I think would be very intuitive, instead of constant keyboard orchestra we experience now when using numbered menus. I had even more complex and interesting idea the other day. You know how you can assign unit groups in RTS games by designating them using Ctrl+1-10 and then recalling selection by hitting 1-10 keys. I thought of something similar for ArmA, where you could customize sets of commands, which then could be recalled using single key press. So for example instead of often ordering your soldiers to go stealth, find cover, and hold fire, you could just create sort of macro of these commands, name the macro yourself and assign it to a key.

Very useful. Thanks a lot!

I did not mean that current engine somehow prevents AI improvement though. Current engine mainly cripples game performance wise. But it's very modular. Of course AI system would probably have to be somehow modularized to be replaced with a better one. But even something as basic as replacing numbered menus with something simplified similar to OFP2 Dragon Rising command menu would be a huge step forward. Sure Codemasters got most of the OFP2 wrong, but commanding UI was one of the few things they got quite right, or at very least significantly better than what we have in ArmA series.

Actually i don't. I believe ArmA community members are mature enough to objectively answer questions without personal attacks, and are aware that no one is born ArmA expert. Of course, except a few individuals like you. I play ArmA series ever since original OFP, and i play very actively, but ever since i got a time consuming job, i was unable to keep up with the development of the series, so i don't play ArmA 3 that often and can't get into the game completely. Main reason i asked is because i played fair bit of ArmA 2 OA, where zeroing was introduced, and from what i remember, zeroing worked on a fair amount of scopes there. So my initial thought was that mechanism of this feature somehow changed in ArmA. Now, all of the people above you gave me some useful answers, that make sense. So big thanks goes to them :)

Hi, i've been playing through campaign, and i have hard time using zeroing on any of the weapons i got so far. I try to press PgUP or PgDOWN keys, but zeroing remains the same. I tried already several weapons and and also tried to remap the keys to be sure they work, but so far no luck... Basically, here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Vm1o0Ng.jpg (508 kB) There's zeroing indicator on the top right corner of UI, which seems like first intuitive indication of that it should be adjustable. But most importantly, looking at the scope mouted on my weapon, it seems to have screws for both horizontal and vertical zeroing. Considering level of simulation BIS puts into their games, i would expect scope that has modeled zeroing mechanism to work with zeroing. Anyone has any idea what am i doing wrong?

The AI being terrible and AI UI being terrible are problems closely tied together. Large part of the reason AI is so terrible is because command UI is so terrible and vice versa. The reason why things like stand up, crouch and kneel (not exactly named this way) are in UI is that AI doesn't know when it's appropriate to stand up, lay down and kneel. And the reason AI does not know how to properly use these stances is because it is present in the UI, expecting player to tell AI when they should wipe their butts after they've pooped. It's circular problem. As long as UI is not simplified, AI can not be improved, and as long as AI is not improved, UI can not be simplified. You should never be telling your soldier what stance should they take. They should decide that on their own based on three factors: 1, If they are under fire 2, How is the terrain around them (are there any covers nearby)? 3, What are ROEs set by player (keep stealthy, move fast, etc...) I've already described how it should work in some older thread, but basically the entire formation based parody on the commanding system should be replaced with set of order that you could imagine saying to real soldiers on a real battlefield. If you tell them to stand up they won't keep standing up if they are fired upon. 99% of time, they should not hold some geometric formation, but move according to the terrain surrounding them, from cover to cover. If you have a mission to ambush a convoy, and you find out the easiest and most efficient way to finish the mission is by sending all of the AI soldiers somewhere far away from the point of conflict, and finish entire mission on your own, you definitely know something is terribly wrong with the AI. Unfortunately most of the posts in this thread are thoughts inside of a box. They refer to slight improvements of the current system, while only real solution to the bad AI problem of ArmA 3 is thinking completely outside of the box, and creating completely new system, instead of iterative improvement of current one. Polished, gold painted excrement will remain to be an excrement. You can see the same with ArmA engine. Believe or not, but ArmA 3 still runs on the very same engine original OFP (ArmA CWA) did. And you can see it being stretched to it limits and not being able to catch up by observing all of the performance problems everyone complains about still not being resolved.