strelnikoff

Disclaimer: the following post contains my own personal experience and impression of the game, as seen through the eyes of someone that's been with the series ever since Flashpoint 1985 was announced in 1999 (or 98, can't remember anymore) and the story was still about NATO and USSR fighting over the last three islands left after WWIII. The newest part of the series has serious issues with the AI (and other stuff). Note that my game is updated to the latest patch. --------------------------------------------------------------- A lot has been said about the AI in the Opf/Arma series during the last 14 years and for me personally the saddest fact is that as the technology and tools advance, so does AI in BI games degrade. I still remember with fondness the AI from Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis demo from year 2000 (I think). The best example was a single savegame after which I originally got killed by an enemy that ran up to me for a frontal attack, halfway down the hill to the village from the houses. After reload I waited for him, but he didn't show up. I advanced and fell into his ambush a minute later. Reload and this time he attacked me with three buddies he'd brought along. Reload and he flanked me and fragged me from behind. That playthrough turned from simply enjoying the amazing new game to testing the AI of what it was capable of. And I was astounded. Oh, with all possible ways of doing (aka screwing up) things, Opf had 47 missions IIRC in the main campaign. - Then came Armed Assault, that left plot questions wide open and never answered. - After that Arma 2 that wanted to kill my computer, refusing to render at more than 8 fps what little it rendered and an expensive upgrade of the system to run (after I finally did it a year or two later and not because of Arma). Even then, with a computer that powered through the most modern games like Cryis and Far Cry on highest settings, she did under extreme protests sometimes, especially noticable online. Not counting memory leaks, of course. Then there were extremely unbalanced factions, one sporting brand new and future vehicles, weapons and equipment, while the other trodding around with stuff they got rid of 10+ years ago and stuff that either got rejected or is used in very small quantity instead of something that's been standard issue for last 10 years and more. Lack of optimisation in A2 was also something I had hoped would be corrected in A3, but wasn't. Next to imbalance and optimisation AND lack of Opfor campaign (Red Hammer was a blast, too bad it ran off rails halfway through plot-wise), the worst issue was AI which took a nose dive compared to Opf. We now had to contend with enemies that saw and attacked through trees and bushes. Which is a really big problem if your consider Chernarus... There were attempts to fix that, but never truly did. Led to a lot of cursing from players, can remember many colourful remarks online from players that got killed by AI through thick bushes. ACR DLC is best left untouched, there were very few people that I know of actually bought it due to it's problems. ACE, even with it's issues, inconsistencies and bias, at least put players on a slightly fairer ground towards AI than vanilla. God (whichever god you worship) help you though if you are in command of an AI squad! Even at x4 time it took the Lame Duck Squad from BAF first mission over 30 seconds to execute something as simple as getting into a measly extraction chopper! In Opf it took only half that time. The campaign also had a significantly less missions, less than a quarter. - While much better looking (4 years HAVE passed in the meantime), with new stuff like underwater operations (disregarding how little they are used online) and possibility to mod your weapons and chose your uniform and each of the other pieces of equipment - especially when used through the Arsenal system (BIS, for that I do give you a big high-five), Arma3 came not only with more issues, but sadly at the cost of some elements. Gone is the stuff we've gotten used to since Opf, like quasi-realistic hits-consequence (crawling if hit in legs, inability to aim if hit in arms or head, etc.), no campaign AT ALL at release (which is a bloody disgrace for any single-player game and developer and speaks more of a rushed release than anything else - - by now I've given up hope for Opfor campaign), gone is intuitive aiming from prequels (for example, when you shift your aim left, when you finish your move it goes back slightly) and so on. In return we get physics that have 4 ton armored vehicles jumping around like ping-pong balls, futuristic stuff that is used mostly on Life, Wasteland and some-other-mission-I-don't-care-to-remember, while "serious mission" servers rather use... well, mods. Optimisation is even worse than A2. The well-received and eagerly awaited mods and projects that either bring A2 content into A3 en masse or create familiar from scratch - best of them being RHS Escalation. Sadly we also get the AI that is the worst of the whole series and has no place appearing in 2013 and staying up to 2015. I can't shake off the impression of an unfinished game - even more than a year since release (15 months). Some of the features that were expected for A3, but never arrived in vanilla is for example a way to support a weapon on bipods or environment (even though many weapons have bipods on the models), even though that was already present in A2 with mods like ACE, so the BI dev team could've at least borrowed the mechanics from ACE and implemented it into their game, but haven't done that. Who knows, maybe the ACE team would've even given the code for free just to insure a better game. The same for the medical system from ACE, which was pretty good, light-years better than vanilla A3. Or, heck, kept the one from A2, it's still better having to crawl from having my knee shattered than just walk a little bit slower with no change in animation. AI now die much slower and take more hits. In A2 (replayed Harvest Red to confirm) it normally took 2 hits in the chest to take down AI, sometimes even 1 if you were lucky. Now at least twice as that. Coupled with the fact that until they're dead their combat capabilities are untouched. The fact that the AI's aim just twitches upwards for a moment upon getting hit, but otherwise appearing completely well, adds another element to the dissatisfaction. Hit/health system in A3 has a creppy Call of Duty feel to it that I can't shake off, where there is one hit-point amount representing the entire body instead of body-part hit/failure and you keep your combat efficiency until the very last health point. Then there's also clipping through the world and infrastructure. No notification in MP on rejection for the reason - which mods you are missing. No 64-bit support and thus no usage of all available RAM (for god's sake, this is 2014!!! even laptops no longer have just 2 gigs of RAM!). - Then there's the AI... Where do I start? Well, to explain, I got A3 only this Autumn, so more than a year since it was released, thus I am operating with a "mature" version of the game. Thus, my view of A3 AI is not sullied by memory of it's beta state. My first impressions of enemy AI were soldiers continuing to lie in the middle of a street even though they were being fired upon. That was not the worst though and not the reason that I finally got fed up and decided to write and post this. - Anyway, back to the worst: - driver AI was never a shining point of the series, it's still pretty bad - enemies can see and attack through the ground. Map Altis, enemies were in a 20m deep ditch, I was 100m away, laying down behind a small rock wall in a position where the ground was descending, thus making an effect of a small hill between me and the enemy. I got detected and KILLED by them through a 100m of rock, dirt and hill! - enemies can see through walls and attack with accuracy. I've been experiencing this from the very beginning up to yesterday night when I played this game last. It can be either a metal, concrete or a stone wall, it doesn't matter. Was moving in a compound with a solid metal wall last night - entered it through a side opposite of the enemy - when the to-me-invisible enemies started ripping out at me from 200m (position of enemy force). Other time I was on one side of a concrete wall and popped out to take out an emplaced machine gunner. Even before I could let out one single shot I was already dead, he was just waiting for me to look out even though I had gotten there by way of cover (out of his sight). There were countless cases of enemy AI letting it rip at the side of a house in which I was hiding. - enemy can see and attack through entire buildings. Got shot through the lowest story of a house by an enemy that by right shouldn't even have known I was there - enemies got eyes on the back of their heads. By 3rd person view I watched through a window an enemy laying down and facing away from me. Getting back into 1st person I popped out to take him out, but he, as soon as I popped out, in the space of one second, turned and one-shot killed me by a hit in the head at 70m! - the night doesn't hamper their superhuman skillz any. It's simply impossible to sneak up on an enemy and kill him from close range. These are just a few examples of superhuman AI skills that have brought me to the end of my patience with this game. So that no-one can accuse me of just criticising without providing a constructive solution, here it is: bring back Opf AI (or at least A2)! At least in my own opinion it would've been better if BIS were to transplant the AI from those older games into this one. - After A2 I decided not to buy A3, especially since the proclamations that A3 was to be more geared up towards wider audiences than it's old fanbase (which many time means making a game dumber, easier and more generalised - aka sacrifising it's soul for more sales), but this Autumn I broke down to persuasions of my friends who wanted to play online with me. Even though I waited for a Steam sale, so got the game 50% off, I regret not using that money amount for something better, worthier. Like 2 full tanks of fuel that would get me 500+ kilometers, days of glorious enjoyment on my bike and even possibly memories for a lifetime. Then just recently I saw an advert and a claim in a review of A3 that made me laugh in disbelief. Arma 3 the most accurate combat simulator ever? I think not!

Just what the title says. I took a 6 month break from Arma2 only to come back to an almost dead community, a far cry from April. All of the Arma2 ACE servers I played on just a short time ago are now dead, either taken down (TWC, OCB, etc.) or empty (TF47, etc.). After being traumatised by the Arma3 online experience (have been killed by team-mates more times than by enemies, besides the problem of finding any server with a good amount of players that isn't either Life or Wasteland - both issues making me wonder whether no old Arma/Opf players play Arma3 with it being populated only by Dayz and CoD screaming 9 year olds) that I decided to go back to A2. Registering the game with Steam because of the 1.63 patch, the vile concoction that that service is, led only to so many crashes, error reports, refusal to do even the most simple tasks that I finally gave up. So, now I'm looking for servers that are still serving the Arma2 that wasn't ruined by Steam and still run the 1.62 patch. Help would be much appreciated! Thank you in advance (in case I forget to say thanks later)!

Thanks for such quick replies to you both, stagler and Ronin! :) From the video? I'll try. :) Got a question though (haven't watched the teaser yet - it IS almost an hour long): there aren't any "heavy" sniper rifles and other non-SVD systems right now, which are sorely missed. Russians have MANY different sniper rifles, like SV-98, KSVK, OSV-96, VKS / VSSK Vychlop, Lobaev SVL, MTs-116M, ORSIS T-5000... Are any of these planned for future releases (not talking just about 0.3.5)? - Another question (yes, I know, sorry): the long braking distances/somewhat weak brakes of vehicles (like the humvee) are these intentional? Does the AGM mod interfere with the settings? Or is it a bug? I appreciate these are cars at least twice as heavy as normal everday vehicles, but normally brake systems are adjusted to that. Like scooter brakes vs Fireblade brakes. :D

You can disagree all you want, can say I'm wrong, but fact remains I still died and there was no AI anywhere in line of sight and no other enemy AI unit within 600m. You can draw any sort of conclusions you want from that, as will I. :p Possible. Or maybe there were some issues with the rendering of the terrain and it wasn't as bullet-resistant as it should've been. Fact is, I died and there were no other suspects. Um, yes, they do. Their ability was very noticable in A2 for example on Chernarus. And through buildings... does that mean in your opinion everyone that has, in this and other threads, confirmed they were spotted and attacked by enemy through walls even though they had not been in enemy's LoS before that, is wrong? Yes, *nods vehemently in agreement*, 360 degrees. Yes, I would call that ridiculously high. :) Your reply comes across like you've taken on the duty of disproving and negating everything everyone else, who has had issues with AI, has ever said on this and other threads. ;-) It's a tough one, one I don't envy you, so let me wish you the best of luck and happy winter solstice holidays. ;-)

Where can I find a summary of those features? EDIT: checked on FB and there's talk about 0.3.5 (a teaser) not 0.3.1?

I tried to integrate this mod into LEA, but not having much luck. Has anyone successfully done it?

I tried to integrate this mod into LEA, but not having much luck. Has anyone successfully done it?

When IS the next release or even fix? :)

A theory stops being a theory when it happens. Then it become empirical. There was no other AI around and I got killed by gunshots from AI. Just because you yourself never experienced it doesn't mean it hasn't or can't happen. Which I guess means you're still either regarding me as a liar or a fool. :icon_rolleyes: Well, I guess you're pretty lucky then, because many people HAVE been. Just look around, scroll through the forums and talk to players on servers. I have and I've long since confirmed through personal talks and listening to others talk among each other that it's also happening to them. Otherwise I wouldn't have been making these claims.

Sure, call me a liar, why don't you? :( Which wasn't as frequent as the all-present superhuman AI in A3... It happened, but not every time. Enemy combat AI in A3 is tons worse than in Opf as it's evident from other threads and even from the posts of people in this thread. Frustration with stupid pathfinding (re the time it takes for squad to board a chopper in A2, many times ending with them standing around uselessly because even in A2 they are basically saying "Can't get there!") is a different type of cake than combat AI of the enemy that can and will sour the game with already-mentioned superhuman abilities. Like the first parts of the Medal of Honor series (which took place in WWII) where a German sniper would kill you from 1km the very first fraction of a second your first hair peeked out from behind a house as you turned that corner for the very first time. IIRC most of the early MoH games were notorious for ultra accurate and fast AI. There was also the Delta Force series by Novalogic, which I otherwise liked, where they would hit you with an RPG head-on at 300m, but just wouldn't see you when you were standing in front of them. No joking, I actually tried it in Black Hawk Down part - located an enemy in an alley and rushed towards him, stopping about 1.5m in front of him and waiting. What did he do? He continued crouching and looking around for enemy, took him more than 10 seconds to get a clue I was getting into his face. and even then he didn't care to terminate me with prejudice, rather taking a few haphazard pot-shots in my direction. You can get around friendly AI pathfinding problems by eventually just leaving them at the starting position or letting them get slaughtered and then finishing the misison by yourself, but you can't get around AI spotting and attacking you through hard cover considering that contact with them is the very goal of the mission and thus unavoidable. I personally find AI killing me in every possible and impossible way much more frustrating than a friendly AI that doesn't want to cooperate. Either I leave him there or simply shoot him in the head to save myself complaints about being too far and loot his body for weapons; but AI that's slaughtering me every step of the way doesn't leave me much chance to dealt with except for eventually giving up. Agreed. To each his own. :) I personally loved the challenge of adapting to varied terrain and conditions. Got more thrill out of devising tactics for new situations and then executing a perfect assault, using every advantage and then finishing with no casualties, than the fast-paced combat of CQB. If I had a wish for that I had America's Army and CoD to fulfill it. Well, of course it was inexistent in Opf, what with urban environments consisting of 5-10 houses sparsely thrown around and the maps being mostly rural or wilderness. :p :D

Thank you for mentioning that as I completely forgot about one very weird problem I had 2 weeks ago while playing Wasteland. I don't know how, I don't know why, but there was some conflict between A3 and Teamspeak. End result was that I had absolutely no sound in the game from the start, which I started with TS already running. Only when I closed down the game and steam and restarted both, then reconnected to the server did I have sound again. Absolutely puzzling. Now that you mention it, last night I played on a server (I won't say which for their and my protection ;-) ) where, after the end of the round a pilot complained about having been shot and killed by a ground AI with a rifle while he was flying. I've never played with him before so I can't say whether I believe him (it does sound pretty unbelievable), but the others who know him did. Then again, with what I saw online after I wrote my last post last night, it is possible. And I can remember my own experience in A2 about being killed by an Land Rover mounted SPG on 2 or 3 km while flying a Cobra perpendicular to it at 190 kmh - those deadly accurate SPG's had me cursing a lot in A2. One can imagine what it was like having to explain to the ground leader (who was also the community leader) that their only CAS has been killed by an unguided rocket. I read recently (I think on this forum, another thread) a good description about AI: it's got only two modes: aware and combat and nothing else.

Will try, the problem is though I'm quickly running out of hard-drive space and since I play online it will mean letting FRAPS (with it's gigantic filesizes) record for hours on end in hopes of catching that single moment. xD Thing is though, from discussion just a few hours ago on some server, it's obvious exactly these AI superhuman abilities have been noticed by other players as well since there was a lot of anger over being shot through walls when the AI shouldn't have even known they were there. The problem is I'm playing online and the servers themselves don't have these mods. :( The bigger point, at least from where I'm looking at it, is, that it's not modders (players) job to fix these bugs, shortcomings, flaws, etc., but that of developers. They are, after all, getting paid for that and it is, literally, in their job description and contract. For the last few years I've also been getting the impression with the increasing number of devs that they consider us players as not just buyers, but also beta-testers that are paying to beta-test and also free fixers of most of the bugs at the same time. Thus, free labor that is on top of it paying to work for free... Then there's the fact that free demos are a thing of the past what with payable Alphas and Betas, second-hand market is being systematically destroyed or disabled and I'm not sure I like where everything altogether is heading in the gaming industry. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is something rotten in the land of multimedia. Don't worry, this time it's not up for discussion or debate, just an expression of my PERSONAL OPINION. :) Agreed! Not to repeat myself, I'm old fashioned in the regard that think Betas should be free demos and released games should also be finished products with as little bugs as possible. I still remember time when bugged-out games (for example SIN) were an abberation and exception rather than the rule and the demos were free to play, rather different to how it is nowadays. Personally, I would rather wait another year for a game to be released, than get an unplayable, unsable or "unfit for purpose" product. :) Sadly I have to admit I am of the same opinion, I don't see the game reaching a satisfactory state for years yet. It HAS been 15 months since release (and more since it became open to public with payable Alpha - has nobody noticed these problems in Alpha and Beta already? how did the game even get through the bug-searching stage and get released in the first place?), which is a lot of time for something to still be in such a state, and we still have this situation. The best temporary, ONLINE, solution for the AI problems would be large-scale TvT (please note I'm not talking about Life or Wasteland or anything like that, but more along of Domination, etc.), but until a suitable successor to ACE arrives (I know for example that a certain community is waiting to see what will happen with the Veterans mod - VTN, that they consider the biggest potential right now) the biggest TvT A2 communities will wait with moving over to A3 and still continue to play A2. Until then we can only hope that the devs will instead of giving us nice, but not urgent candy like shooting from the back and vortex ring effect (for minutely realistic flying there is DCS which provides realistic simulation for REALISTIC and real-life aircraft instead of futuristic aircraft for which I at least am not even sure if it should act like that), rather concentrate on the truly pressing issues, problems and bugs. I'm not saying this game is a steaming pile of dung, there's a lot of good stuff in it and stuff I like, sadly it just has issues, long-standing and ignored issues, that in some situations can become game-breaking. After all, how long would anyone want to play against an opponent that sees and kills through walls before the player can even make a bit of difference, before getting to the point of giving up and walking away?

Very good news, thank you. Was there any word on when the update is out? I haven't been around any and 134 pages is quite a lot to go through for one piece of info. Until then, do you perhaps know of a tutorial on how to write those CfgWeapons.hpp and other Cfgxxx.hpp files? I might just give it a shot myself.

Anyone who plays on a server where other mods and vanilla stuff are used as well?....

If you can't figure that out yourself, then I can't help you, sorry, mate.

I wonder how many of you guys, claiming how amazing this game is and so on, have gotten into the series only with A3?

First off, fantastic work, you've really outdone yourselves! Second, two comments: 1. please ramp up armor points/protection to be competitive with other stuff, for example vanilla. Right now Russian uniforms, vests and backpacks have some of the lowest/worst characteristics in terms of protection and load and thus if you chose it over vanilla stuff you shot yourself in the foot, you only get to look nice and feel nice, but die much much faster. Hence not much use online when other stuff available. 2. don't know if AGM is at fault, but I play with AFRF on Russia War and Russia Freedom servers. In any case, used RGO grenades against an M2 on a high tripod standing on a road. 7 frags thrown, 5 detonated within 2 meters of the enemy, 2 detonated right under the enemy's feet. He was still alive and unhurt. When I peeked out from cover I was met with a .50 bullet to my brain. :( That was not the only time RGOs proved ineffective. Like I said, can't confirm if AGM at fault instead. x Aside from that, doesn't anybody have a LEA script for stuff we get in AFRF? I would like to namely add uniforms, vests, guns, accessories and so on to LEA, but keep getting config error reports. Thanks!

Nice job on the addon. I was utterly gutted when you announced years ago that you stopped development for A2 and instead turned to A3 (that wasn't even out or Alpha at that point IIRC), but didn't really have any choice but to accept it. But with how A2 multiplayer just died away (except for dayz, life and wasteland - then again, they're not really A2 multiplay) I'm glad RHS survived and is now in A3 where it can do much to improve the multiplayer which is sadly centered on Life - who knows, maybe RHS can be one of the basis' for A3's version of advanced multiplayer like ACE was for A2... Anyway, just wanted to ask something. Is there any advantage to the folders lacking the "@"? Will I cause any bugs or issues with my game if I rename them to @afrf for example? Reason I'm asking is because my preferred mod launcher doesn't detect non-@ folders and the other launcher that does... well, it's definitely not as good as the first one. Thanks!

I want to create a custom face from a photo. Have never attempted anything like this before. Searched for tutorials, but found nothing useful. How do I even start? Thanks!

I want to make a custom face. Have a wire-mesh template and a face-on photo of the person I want to make a face of. I checked all possible tutorials, but not one mentions how to apply a photo of a real-life person on that template or stretch that face or whatever. Can anyone point me to a tutorial that I haven't found (even though I've been searching for quite a while now)? Thanks.

If you can give me a little more to go on I might be able to come up with it. Like how many missions? Did it use addons? If so which ones? Time frame...very early, like 2001-2002? Or later? That's the problem, it's been so long ago my memory is pretty hazy. I *think* it was around or more than 10 missions. One mission, soon after D-day invasion, had me standing on a road, next to a stopped convoy as a HUGE "artillery barrage" (aka, scripted explosions) was going off further down the road. I would definitely say it was before 2005, probablyeven before 2004 (didn't start getting user made stuff asap after getting the game). No addons that I can remember (again, can't be 100% sure). The details that stick extremely firmly in my memory is the fact that the author was a British former Lieutenant, that the missions were very detailed and had a lot of work put into them and these two specific missions. I know it's not much to go on and it's quite possible ragequit's suggestion was it. Thanks.

No, I meant the "ruined" part being subjective as in being my personal opinion/impression and is about more than just matchmaking/Gamespy or servers, much more is meant with this statement and goes deeper than on first look. ;-) Have to say, that was until now an unknown concept to me (don't spend much time on forums), so thanks for explaining. Thank you, that's what I wanted. :) Yep, did exactly that and get everything from immediate CTD to error 0x0000072 or something like that. I have a relatively slow connection and it took me more than 1.5 day to download everything from Steam (even though I had all the patched-up games, DLC's on the hdd I had to redownload everything - which did nothing positive for my mood nor my impression and opinion of Steam services) and then spent quite a few hours trying to get it to work. For naught. With servers it's the exact same thing on A3, Life outnumbers every other kind with a great margin.

Not sure if it is (because the campaign I have in mind deserved a much better score), but I'll definitely try it out. Thanks!

That's subjective and there were other options, but just to make this clear: you responded just to push forward your point of view instead of trying to help with teh request? Not to be an a-hole, but the topic is a request for help and not an open invitation for debate. ;-)