HorribleGoat

Throwing around wild ideas, but in theory you could make the canteen a class man unit, totally invisible except the canteen (that could be proxied in and aligned rotated as you want) and then when you use it your script creates the invisible-canteen-man, attaches it to your character, reads its pose and whatnot and copies it and then plays the drinking animation on both. 7am ideas are the best am I right!? ;D -> off to bed.

ZeeTutorial about SMDI sounds awesome! Patreon terms and all that sound little scary I concur, read them a while ago and gotta sharp when filling everything up. Im sure though that it will work out!

A ) Yes. Would be a great asset for those looking to take the big leap into Arma modding. B ) Are there any drawbacks from such move? C ) Yes! Patreon is great way to support artists and modders and the like!

Got the new 2 man crew version (V5) ready for texture edits and to test how the updated torso behaves when animated, I put together a power up/down animation for it. Idea is to keep it as low as possible for easier crew entrance. With couple of steps it stands up and is ready to go. Also got an epiphany how to keep the man-legs wandering off while there is no crew to control them. We can set the powered down stance to either unconscious or even dead and just use script to heal it when the pilot takes control. No need to start messing around with the AI behavior. This would also apply to when pilot dies or jumps out while the walker is standing up. We can make transition from active/controlled idle standing to non-controlled/static unconscious/dead standing animation. Again one problem solved! \o/

Thank you! It felt pretty good to get the effect to work like that. Could be better of course, but it works pretty well! We got loads of stuff cooking and heres another peek at whats on the table: Now that the walker weapon system works, we've had some discussion on the walker usability and put down couple features all of them should have. First of all we're changing the crew from 3 to 2 at least for the walkers of this size as the weapons can now be controlled by single operator. Second thing is that to increase the overall viability we ruled down that all walkers should have 360 torso turning. Except maybe in special cases, but thats a different matter. This affects the design of the WK-209 slightly as It was first designed as kind of frontal assault vehicle and the shape of the torso does clip in to the legs way too much if the torso is turned to the side and the torso is shaped so to accomodate the 3-man crew. Now that the crew can be cut down to 2 the design is much easier to change for the 360 turning. Due to the nature how the walkers are built by knifing Arma engine there will be some clipping, but with little redesign we can minimize it.

Summer holiday greetings! Quick wip sneakpeek on the Gunship cockpit I've put together! The light green interior represents the full awareness screen walls of the sealed cabin and there are some gauges and screens and spaces for switches and keyboards. The overall design may change after I've tested how well it works in game and If there arises a need for more gauges or screens etc..

DunDunDUUUUn! Im on vacation! :D Its MODDING TIME! :m: Been piecing the walker stuff together and thought to ask would you guys see the torso turning as part of the aiming with mouse, or would there be benefit from separate turret turning controls so that the turret could be set to certain direction and then precise aiming would be done with the mouse? We've decided to make all walkers have 360 turning turrets and thus this question.

It is a problematic thing for any indoor operations. Don't think there is any way around it either.

Unfortunately this is not one of the engine cabablities. The AI movement in houses is controlled by predefined paths so that AI does not get stuck anywhere and this means AI passes through anything when it is on the path.

structure -> topology -> split will as the command says, split the selection from the main object, if that is what you are after.Would highly recommend doing this in a better suited 3d-modeling software though. If you just want to make a new selection out of it you need to click on the selection with right mouse and hit "new".

Heh, seems that I should be away more often as thats when all the action in my posts happen! xD What Im providing here is the new skeleton that is about 10cm shorter that the man skeleton with altered proportions gleamed from A2 skeleton to be able to use those animations too. Preferably this new skeleton would of course have all full custom animation set with all the moves so it would work as the Arma man. Also I've set up the animation config files so that new animations are pretty much plug and play imported by just changing the animation file path and maybe tweaking the animation values a bit. And I've been mentally preparing to do that importing and collect the new animations that community will hopefully start making. That might just keep this joint development project organized enough to provide a working character! :D Probably will need to produce a animation move list that shows what animations are done and what are missing.

Thanks guys! I gotta remind you though the smaller frame skeleton has far less functional move/action animations than the default man skeleton so there is a long way to go before all those are replaced. (And I mean A LOT. All different stances, weapon holding animations (for vanilla AND custom weapons), different move speeds, get in/out actions etc etc...) I do have some vacation time coming up so Im hoping to be able to continue on this too! Maybe even push out the promised base mesh/config package for animating and development. :3 I did see another A2 civilian port I think not long ago on the forum. It was using the default skeleton so I don't know if there's deformation going on in there, but its worth to try?

Second that! Keep up the fantastic work Zee! Your work is inspirational!

The effect is more prominent in "reality" I think, the video packing eats a lot out of it since it is just noice to it. It will be tweaked though rest assured!

Evening! This time I'd like to show something new I've sidetracked to work on. First testrun of a optical camouflage mechanic Extensive experimenting with Arma materials and shaders has proven The effect we want to produce to be out of our reach due how the materials handle with static objects (where it works) and men and vehicles (where it seems not to work as we intend). This is first testrun on alternative method of applying the effect on moving man with still keeping the silhouette somewhat intact. I dare say with some honing this could provide quite nice optical camouflage effect. More of my thoughts on the material in use can be found here: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/191975-optical-camouflage-material-research/

Now that the thread loads and the extra duplicates I managed to post while the sqf server bugged are gone. I'll reserve this slow for additional update and images. Slight changes to the RVMAT can produce quite cool results. The effects still work on the few objects listed above. On that front there is still a lot to do. Also a progress update! Made my own static cube with hiddenselectiontexture and the whole shabang and the refracting material does work with it. But when the same cube is copied into a man character it too takes on the white sheen. So the material/texture combo works! All thats left is to figure out what causes that white sheen. I think its the same with any vehicles too, but have to make a test to be sure. Vehicle test: Tested it out with vanilla Ifrit and pilot. As you can see the texture is not see through as it is on the cube on the background and the small cube on the test man model in front of it shows the contrast quite well. Makes me think moving objects are drawn different from static ones. CONCLUSION With quite extensive testing and fiddling with the .rvmat values I am now quite certain that the "refract" shader is a remnant of some past idea and as it is not used in any BI asset. Because of I dont think the effect can be applied anymore on men or vehicles as Kiory demonstarted in his video. For this reason I've put together alternate method much like the ones that use refracting particles (and this probably could be done with those too) Basically this is combination of a simple mesh object that the effect works on and a custom man character with extra animation following memorypoints that allow the attached meshpieces to move with the animations.

Hmm. I used "optical camouflage" in mine. Could it be the space or length of the tag?

Made accidental double post just now because of got spooked by the error message and hit back and sent the post again just now. Both are corrupted.. :P

You are right theres no much anything to do to evade a shot at short range. But thanks to Arma we are not bound to short range combat and I may have forgotten to clarify that part of our concept. The evasive movement we are considering is for longer ranges and we aim altogether to encourage long ranged combat since at short range its just about who happens to fire faster. Hit from a missile - BOOM - youre dead. Good shot from a AP gauss penetrator - boom - youre dead and so on. So in order to survive, mobility would be a key. At long ranges that is, at short ranges, you'll have to try to take advantage of cover and most importantly not to walk carelessly into conflict zone. Even if we explain better armor with advanced composite matrials or something like that our goal is to have realisticish health and damage handilng on all vehicles. Yes that is one main thing we think sets tanks and walkers apart. Walkers can cross terrain tanks have difficulty with and they trade the lower profile for far better reach around difficult terrain and obstacles that a tank could not cross.

Looks fantastic! Keep it up!

Heh no way this is discouraging! I wanted to hear well structured opinions and you delivered and we will definitely consider your points too. Its great to hear from someone with actual experience with how tanks operate. What nudged us to consider mobility and evasion was this video: Interesting concept if nothing else and considering the height problem with a walking tank something like this would definitely make such weapon more usable and that is why we want to find a good believable balance for it and perhaps expand the usual/common mech experience. We want walkers and regular tanks both have their own roles in our game universe so we will be putting a lot of thought into this. Crouching is definitely a feature we will have and we can take advantage of Armas pose system for this. (Since the legs are a man) also side peeking/leaned stepping sideways from cover and back is easily done with Arma mechanics and this is one place where the firecontrol system comes in handy. If you sidestep around the corner only so that the other side guns are out, you don't have to fire the obscured side into the wall you are behind.

Since my last question regarding HUD visibility in land vehicles got positive answer I decided to give it a go and laid down a basic HUD config and tried it out. With a little trial and error I got it to show up and got it set up so that it is on the helmet and not on a screen. After the initial success I noticed that out of the 3 men crew only 2 see the HUD. The driver and the commander see it, but the gunner does not. For starters I thought this to be a gunner issue (which it still might be) but just now I realized that the commander is a gunner too and the HUD is visible when on that seat. And now im asking here if anyone has an idea what could cause the gunner to lose the HUD, but the driver and commander (another gunner) sees it. Both the gunner and the commander have pretty much the same config, except for weapons and primaryObserver and primaryGunner attributes. --UPDATE-- When I wrote the last sentence about the differences I realized I had not tried switching the primaryGunner attribute around. The "commander" is both primary observer and primary gunner due to the seat being the commander seat and it having missile weapons that require proxies to show up (show only on primary gunner) and it seems that the HUD also is tied to the primaryGunner position. Issue kinda solved itself, except if someone knows how to get HUD to show for other than primaryGunner and driver views. This might lead to losing the commander seat altogether, but that might be the simplest solution and something I have been considering for the particular vehicle.

Could used HUD/MFD class be determined individually for each crew member? maybe something like hudPilot/Driver = pilot/driverHud (classname in class MFD) hudGunner[] = {gunnerHud01,gunnerHud02...} (classnames in class MFD) hudCargo[] = {cargoHud01...}; and if not given it would default to no hud This said could we get class MFD hud for the gunner too?

Googling on the matter got me nothing and the WIKI page is not very descriptive on the subject so I'm hoping someone could say if I might have a chance with this or if pursuing it is waste of time. So as the topic says. Can a land vehicle have HUD/MFD?

I've understood that MDF picks its position from memoryLOD and shows the same in all LODs?