Kindling

Six Updater is a great tool, but have you considered releasing a Lite-er version? Perhaps switching to GTK or QT and pure Mono/.NET? It is pretty clunky, it uses multiple languages and the UI is pretty confusing. The Launcher, although it sounds great it refuses to run under Mono or WINE and seems very focused on DayZ from what I saw using a VM. Rsync/zsync is definitely the right direction, but perhaps you should ask BiS to help integrate a solution into the game. With each modder having a digital certificate, this could make things much easier for a player - they could simply choose to download any mods that are required for a particular server or use an internal 'mod market', even if it was simply an embedded browser window that synced (or even just downloaded and extracted a zip) from a modder's submitted list of 'official' mirrors?

Just remember not to delete the original files - ramdisks are, as the name suggests, stored in RAM which is volatile (everything in it is lost if you turn your computer off, your computer crashes or when you restart your operating system) - be sure not to mistake it for a main storage disk :) EDIT: There's also another Windows program called FancyCache which has been mentioned, it apparently helps speed up your computer in general by using RAM or SSD space as a disk cache. Watch out with such programs, though - be sure to disable write-caching unless you can bear with losing a cache's worth of work in case of a crash. It's a 90-day trial and it seems relatively easy to use. A useful way to ensure your >= 8GB memory doesn't go to waste on 2GB hardcoded 32bit applications :).

You can also use a ramdisk if you have a couple of gigs of RAM to spare. This speeds up loading times and FPS immensely, it's available as a native feature in Linux and can be done on Windows with utilities like this one. All you need to do is create a RAM disk of the desired size, copy over the most-used files (eg. chernarus map, character models, animations etc.) to an Addons folder (R:\Addons) and load your ramdisk as a mod ('-mod=R:\', for example).

It would be good to have a pre-Alpha for modders and testers with a faxed & signed NDA (no-competition clause, of course) and private bug tracker. That way, the 'community alpha' can be oriented around forum members and interested parties with an 'open beta' for the public, to ensure this really is the 'most polished' release. Perhaps the pre-Alpha only for those that can 'talk shop' and are familiar with ticketing systems. This avoids the most common issues - feature requests vs bug tickets, failure to check known issues, incorrect preconceptions etc.

I've actually just found PlayOnMac - this seems much better than WineSkin. You can download multiple versions of WINE and have multiple prefixes at the same time - I suggest grabbing downloading PlayOnLinux-wine-1.4-rc4-raw3-darwin and PlayOnLinux-wine-1.3.27-rawinput2-darwin and trying them out - they might work better than the hack at that forum. Download section - choose amd64 (64bit) or x86 (32bit) darwin, download the packages and install the version of WINE (I'd start with the raw3 one) then click Install in the app and choose 'Install unsupported package' in the bottom left. You should be able to install Steam through this (be sure to create a shortcut in the menu) and ARMA II/OA through Steam.

Updated with a mod-downloading script and a few tips for getting CO working.

Should be native, builtin. That looks like a really hacky patch. I did a little reading about OSX, and it seems that this is a well-known issue using Wineskin with certain games. I can't really help with that, sorry - I don't have Mac OSX or Wineskin. I'd probably try to get the guys there to help. You could always install BSD/Linux or Windows in a second partition or with parallels, if the issues are truly game breaking. :)

What other patches are you using? Have you tried a vanilla WINE with only raw3.patch? Did you make sure to ./tools/make_requests before you compiled? Do you have xinput2 for your X11 implementation? A few other ideas would be trying a virtual desktop and different Windows versions under WINE, ticking 'Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows' under winecfg -> Graphics. As for the dump, I saw a very similar crash a couple of times using 32bit WINE on 64bit BSD (though not on 64bit Linux with 64bit WINE). I installed xact with winetricks, and overrode x3daudio1_6 in winecfg -> Libraries. This crash only appeared to happen within the game, however, so it may not be the same issue. Try running Arma2OA.exe without any switches or with ARMA2's location specified manually ("-mod=C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ARMA II" for example). You might also want to try passing various startup parameters - for example your video memory or amount of processor cores - to Arma2OA.exe. Another good idea is to check out the list of useful WINE registry keys - I have StrictDrawOrdering enabled to get around a shadow issue and have also specified the amount of VRAM my graphics card has. MouseWarpOverride and DXGrab are registry keys also worth looking at, for your ARMA2 mouse issue.

Any of the ones with 'raw3' in their name should work, eg. this one for 64bit. :)

Actually, there is support for NVIDIA cards at the nvnews forums - they simply don't support using Xen with PCI Passthrough (presumably they'd prefer people that want to do that to buy their Quadro cards). It'd be nice if BiS were willing to put some time into Linux support, though - even if it's not native Linux support. Valve are porting Steam and L4D over to native Linux and many of the latest Kickstarter-funded indie games are looking to support Linux as one of their main platforms. By supporting their products on WINE, BiS would be opening themselves to several new markets (Linux gaming enthusiasts, European/Eastern countries that are moving to Linux from Windows for military and government use, Mac OSX and BSD gaming enthusiasts) which could provide an additional boost to ARMAIII and DayZ. True native support would be better, of course, but this would require a rewrite of the game engine to render with OpenGL. Though this could be something for the future, as OpenGL is being much more widely adopted, especially for smartphones and tablets. Maybe in the long run, DirectX could go the way of Adobe Flash - all the more likely when you consider that MS Windows 8 is made to be a tablet OS.

I've updated the thread with another bug (ARMAII:CO crashing if you move your mouse on menu screens) and my new system details (AMD FX-6100, 16GB RAM with the same GFX card and FreeBSD). Good news is that it works on FreeBSD too, this suggests that it should work just fine on Mac OSX with WINE as BSD and OSX are pretty similar. I'm thinking of getting a 6950 (when my bank balance allows :)). I've not heard of much success from the AMD side, so it'll be interesting to see if I can get that working. I'll also be happy to test ARMA III if I end up getting in the much discussed beta, though obviously in that case it may need to be in some sort of private forum or similar (depending on details of NDA) even if I do get that opportunity. Note that PlayOnLinux has rawinput-patched precompiled WINE packages. It's really simple to set up on any Linux system, check here for more information - I'd be happy to create a PlayOnLinux script if there's any demand. I've played with IOMMU/Xen/Passthrough with mixed results - though NVIDIA support is limited, I managed to get it working with a few Xen patches for a while. I had to connect another mouse & keyboard and pass through a USB controller to get input latency to an acceptable level, but it certainly gives near-native performance. For anybody going down that route, make sure to use an LVM partition and not a file for your virtual disk - ARMA II really relies on disk performance. I switched to FreeBSD because I'm not really willing to buy Microsoft Windows and have a whole other OS installed just for one game :). I'd love to talk to an engine dev about the remaining issues. Just looking or walking around causes many textures to flash between acceptable and very dark - I don't know enough about DirectX/graphics programming to make a hypothesis. If this could be addressed, perhaps alongside the issue causing entities on the map and certain UI dialogues (ie, the player profile screen) to flash constantly and the issue causing guns and shadows to draw strange dark 'trails' across the screen when StrictDrawOrdering is not enabled the game would be 100% playable on patched WINE. By also adding an alternative input handling system, the BiStudio games would be deserving of a 'Gold' rating in WineHQ at least (perhaps even a 'Platinum' rating) and Bohemia Interactive could benefit from a new audience. :)

The CPU is probably going to be your bottleneck - I think that graphics settings should be fine, but you should really be looking to upgrade that CPU if you're looking for this to last you into ARMA3 - many laptop CPUs are perfectly upgradable. You may have difficulty with battles in which there are large numbers of AI. Another important factor is your hard disk - at the very least, you'll want SATA (not IDE!) and an SSD really helps. You've got quite a lot of RAM, though, so you may be able to make a ramdisk to store the most-accessed resources (your favourite islands, the character models etc.) as this really helps with your fps. I think it'll be playable, but best to tweak things a bit to get some more juice out of your hardware. EDIT: Larger (higher quality) textures require more VRAM (video memory, of which you have plenty) and - secondarily - a fast GPU. I wouldn't worry too much about the higher quality textures, I think your system should be fine with them.

I think that the great thing about using Java is that it's a directly transferable skill - learning enough to script in ARMA 3 could provide an entry-point to Android, desktop or even embedded applications. Now, that's a bit of a simplification - there are many unique traits to Java applications on each of these devices - but there are not many languages that have Java's versatility. Apart from, perhaps, C - that can compile on anything. But C has a pretty high learning curve beyond the most basic of applications.

Well, that's certainly interesting! I wasn't aware that VMWare had any graphical acceleration capabilities - I'm a qemu guy myself. I didn't even think ARMA II could run on a Core 2 Duo with a 9600GT! I've not tried the BiStudio tools yet, feel free to do that and post up some results. I'd love to hear of any benchmarks or tweaks for the game, too, when you get it working! Unfortunately, Armed Assault doesn't seem to render any icons properly. I've been planning to mess around with that when I have some time, as other WINE denizens have reported that the menu does work with previous versions - a little regression testing there might bear fruit. Best of luck!

Great, thanks again Operated! I'll try building a new version here, and if there's a substantial FPS boost I'll build new binary packages. EDIT: No substantial FPS boost, 19fps before and after on the same system as before! Might be your kernel or/and the driver change giving the FPS boost. Jury's still out, though, so if any other guys are getting a performance boost I'll build a new one.

I suggest the tutorials, some single missions to mess about with, maybe make your own little mission or two (it's really easy), the singleplayer campaign then a downloaded mission or two (sandbox-style missions are best to prepare with), then you'll be ready for multiplayer, mods and the such. I recommend that you read the stickies, there's some great guides there, and look up a few videos on youtube to see how others play. When you are looking at mods, just download SIX Updater - it's the easiest way to manage them - it can automatically download whatever mods you need to play on any multiplayer server. A note for when/if you try multiplayer - try to stay away from vehicles at first, stick to infantry. It can be very discouraging to fly a helicopter or drive a tank as a newer player, as many things are expected of you (voice communication and excellent skills), and more experienced players often get pretty annoyed when the limited assets available in ARMA II missions are underutilized. Even more so when in some servers they can be permanently destroyed by a small mistake! If you haven't got the original ARMA II, download ARMA II: Free - this will come in handy when you want to play multiplayer. If you have got ARMA II installed through steam, make sure to pick 'Play combined operations' when you start the game, so it loads the ARMA II missions, too! If you get low performance, don't worry! Read up on the forums for plenty ways to improve performance. Enjoy, and feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

You can use software RAID since Windows 2000 - Start -> Run -> compmgmt.msc, choose Disk Management and right click on each disk and convert them to Dynamic Disks, you can then right click on a volume (partition) and click 'Add Mirror' to mirror it to another disk. But certainly moving some of the files to another disk will make things a little faster, though maybe not as fast as software RAID as described or a RAM disk. RAM disks are really worth it if you have over 2GB of RAM (or maybe over 3GB if you use Windows Vista or 7). Linux has LVM/mdadm and tmpfs/ramfs for similar functionality.

I've not had any problems with playing multiplayer in popular servers, so I assume that BattlEye is working just fine. :)

Thanks, Operated! Now I wonder, are there any ATI catalyst users willing to post up some results?

I'd suggest allocating around 2GB to a RamDisk and moving as much of the assets as you can to it. This will give you an idea of whether a faster HDD would help (though you may just be better off getting the extra RAM and creating an ARMA 2/OA RamDisk). If you do get a new HDD, get an SDD (Solid State Disk) if you can afford it, they're much faster. Unfortunately, laptops are not ideal for gaming, especially resource-heavy simulation games like ARMA2. That said, you could try some configuration and graphics setting tweaks! For now, I'd suggest trying the RamDisk idea and getting some sort of resource monitor to tell you what part of the system is maxing out - if it still runs slow with a RamDisk then it's either memory, graphics or the CPU. Note: I'm presuming the 6GB is system RAM, and that you have dedicated graphics RAM.

Thanks very much for the contribution, Operated! (This is Endotic, by the way.) It'd be great if you could mention the driver version you used :)

Well, that'll be why, then! :) Thanks for the info.

I'm using a GeForce 550 Ti (2GB), but that reminds me - make sure to get the propriety drivers for your graphics card if you want to get good performance! To check if you're using the right drivers, try: lsmod | egrep 'nvidia|fglrx' If this returns anything, you have the right drivers. If not, the ATI 'catalyst' or NVIDIA drivers should be available through your package manager. Problems are pretty rare with the Linux NVIDIA drivers - they're pretty well supported. ATI problems are more common, but I hear that people are having more success with ATI on Linux lately.