doveman

Thanks JonPL, crazy that we have to manually edit a file to disable this annoying "feature" and BIS don't seem to have seen fit to explain this to us.

It's crazy though. It means if I phone or email someone in the USA or if one of my phonecalls / VOIP calls or emails even passes through there and what I say is perfectly legal in my country but not in the US, or even if the person I'm speaking to / messaging says something that violates some US law and unknowingly I say something that could be seen to be agreeing with / encouraging him (conspiracy) then I'm liable to US justice. So they only safe thing to do is avoid all communication with people in the US, as it's hard enough keeping up with the law in my own country, let alone being expected to know all the intricacies of US law. This seems like something that will only hasten the downfall of the American empire, as people become reluctant to communicate and do business with it. Whatever you think of FIFA, consider the implications before applauding such a state of affairs.

That sounds good, thanks. Another server option that would be useful to have is "show only self" as that would allow the player to see where he is and navigate and I think would be acceptable to most people, even if they find showing other units a bit cheaty. Mission settings should still take precedence though, so that designers can disable it where it doesn't fit the mission.

Never had a problem with this before. Playing online the other day and I found none of my controls were showing in the settings. Running on stable build, so it looks like whatever's causing the problem got copied from dev to stable with the last update, as people were reporting it was only a problem with dev build before.

That sound really useful and could add some nice realism to missions. Perhaps a config option for the server to completely disable unit display unless the mission designer has specified variables would be useful though, so that old missions don't need to be edited to stop them being shown. Some missions, such as where a friendly helo has to search and rescue some ground troops, would be rather ruined if their location was shown in Athena.

This is coming on in leaps and bounds and has the potential to be a game changer. Are you planning to allow servers to restrict the display of units, as some people aren't keen on that and it would be great if we could just use it for the inking function? EDIT: Another option would be to limit the display of units to players who are carrying GPS or in vehicles and only showing other units also carrying GPS or in vehicles.

Ah right, yeah I was talking about 1st person.

There's a team speak plugin called volume control which lowers the volume when anyone's talking. I find it invaluable when in vehicles. There's also a mod for ArmA which let's you manually lower the game volume when needed, I forget the name sorry.

Thanks, I'll try that. I was only on v.high anyway as I didn't think I'd be able to manage Ultra.

What are good object detail, view/object distance settings for an i5-4670k@4.4Ghz and 2GB 6970? As neither are bottlenecking, I wonder why lowering my settings would be necessary?

I've been monitoring with RTSS whilst playing on a server and noticed when my fps is low the frametimes are high, in the 40ms range. CPU is about 50% and GPU 80% (although it was around 95% at some points) so those aren't bottlenecks. I know from tweaking other games that high frametimes are bad and correlate with low fps. I'm wondering if the server could be causing this but other people reported much higher FPS, whilst I was getting 26-20. Any ideas? I tried dropping PIP down, even disabled it and likewise with shadows but only gained a couple of FPS, whilst GPU usage went down.

I'll have to disagree with you, I find it neither awesome or natural. ArmA3 is already much better IMHO.

Funny that GTA is mentioned. I was looking forward to the 1st person mode but it's terrible. There's no sense of having a body with parts that move as you walk, it's like being on rails and gliding about and there's no sense of which way your body's facing. Third person animations might be better than A3 but I never use 3rd in ArmA, as it would ruin the immersion.

Yeah, I bought the Samson SR850 for £30 and by all accounts they're the best choice under £100 and better than most, if not all, gaming/PC headsets. The lack of a mic was a problem though and I didn't want to spend $62 (+import duties) on a ModMic2, so I bought a Panasonic electret capsule for £2 and fitted it to the boom I ripped off a rubbish £3 headset. It's a bit quiet though, so I'm going to build a simple pre-amp with a transistor and a couple of capacitors to boost the signal.

The problem is that IRL gun shots are much louder than footsteps and environmental audio and considering the detrimental effect, even temporary, that gunshots will do to your hearing, you're probably not going to be able to hear footsteps and environmental sounds that well anyway half the time. So BIS can either make the sound very unrealistic, with limited dynamic range, so that footsteps are much louder than they should be and gunshots much quieter, or they can make it realistic with a wide dynamic range, which appears to be what a lot of people have been asking for. You can pretty much achieve the former by enabling the Loudness Equalisation on your soundcard (I presume that's available on all Realtek onboard soundcards), which will increase the volume of the quieter sounds and reduce that of the louder sounds, so maybe that will give you want you want and then BIS can keep the wide dynamic range in-game for those who want that, although it's hard to see how anyone could really want to have it so that gunshots are deafening, or alternatively that they have to turn the volume down to prevent this and thus make quieter sounds inaudible.

Not true for me. I use Razer virtual surround with my Samson SR open-back headphones and struggle to hear any directionality or have any sense of a soundstage larger than my headset, whereas with four speakers I have no problem and the soundstage seems much bigger than my room.

From what you've said I understand that you intentionally have Ctrl mapped to freelook. I use Alt for that, so I don't have anything mapped to Ctrl (certainly no view controls anyway) and still the mouse moves the viewpoint all over the place if I'm holding Ctrl. Most annoying when you're trying to use the mouse to fly and you press Ctrl to transmit on the TFAR radio, only to have your view move to some useless position that causes you to crash!!!

The car interiors seem rather unimpressive but maybe this is considered unimportant in racing games. I suck at them so rarely play them!

I'm pretty sure it does as I ran without it the other night and was shocked at the low fps (19-25) I was getting, when normally I see around 30-35.

Yeah, disable the pagefile. I have 16GB RAM and A3 seems quite happy without one.

I think it's important to bear in mind that in addition to any problems there might be with paid mods for single-player games like Skyrim, with MP games like ArmA they have the potential to cause issues within groups (some people wanting to use certain mods, others not feeling they're worth paying for or just not being able to afford them) and generally divide the online community by preventing players accessing certain servers unless they're willing/able to buy the mods it's running, or inversely mods being used less as server operators try to avoid this problem. This is surely not something BIS would want to risk, considering their commitment to promote the use of user-created content with ArmA3.

I tried out the various settings and didn't find anything using the stick/pedals that worked for me driving wheeled vehicles. I find I can drive fast and stick to the road much easier just using the keyboard and mouse. I tried binding both my joystick (MS Sidewinder FFB2) Y axis to forward/backward and the X axis and my pedals to car left/right. Whilst this does give more control, as it dampens down both the X axis and pedals, so using one alone doesn't steer much and you have to use them together to make anything more than minor adjustments, it just makes it far more complicated than using the mouse and keyboard. I might try with my Xbox360 gamepad later though, that might be better suited to wheeled vehicles. I tried the same with tracked vehicles and it seems a bit more suited to those but it's still probably going to be easier to use M&KB or gamepad. I think there needs to be separate tabs for wheeled and tracked vehicles (I think UAVs should have a separate tab as well, so they don't have to use the helo mappings), so that for wheeled we could map the pedal toe brakes to accelerate and brake/reverse and the joystick X axis (or mouse) to steer, (Y axis wouldn't be used), whilst for tracked we could have the toe brakes unmapped, the pedals mapped to track left/right and the joystick Y axis to forward/backwards. Forward/backward is confusing terminology, as is having left/right together with left/right (analog). I think of all stick/pedal axis as analog, in the sense that they're not simple binary on/off controls, so it would be natural to map my stick or pedals to anything labelled (analog) but then we find that anything mapped to these doesn't control tracked vehicles at all. We shouldn't have to map two inputs to reduce the sensitivity of both and use both inputs to have decent control and there should be sufficient settings in-game to be able to adjust the sensitivity, etc of each input. We could probably do with separate settings for the various types of vehicles, as we might need one set of sensitivity/deadzone/saturation settings when using the stick to control wheeled vehicles, another for tracked vehicles, another for helos and another for planes.

I think WWAIMenu let's you do that from its menu, opened by Numpad 9.

I haven't noticed this happening to me (although I'll have to test further to be sure) and I haven't bound my SW or LR additionals to anything but I do use Ctrl+End for LR transmit, so maybe that's why.

Great, thanks. Looking forward to trying Tinter's port.