oukej

I'd like to ask you to avoid discussing what player of this or that are like. Who's the most hardcore 1337 Arma player, who shouldn't have a say and how is Arma meant to be played. Pls respect each other and don't faul by dismissing other people's opinions based on what or how they play. ad KotH balance - we've contacted Samatra directly prior to targeting chances with a head's up that we may affect the balance in KotH and he can pass any feedback directly to us. He acknowledged it and has not passed any request towards us since. ad fully diegetic elements vs. game UI - It's meant to be diegetic, it's an internal part of vehicle, not a meta game helper...right, but it doesn't look like so ;) Which is also maybe something that can cause confusion (magic helper). We've mentioned right at the beginning that we prefer diegetic elements whenever we can afford them and if not immediately we'll try to make the elements diegetic later on. Whether we should publish these elements before we are able to make them purrfect is however a valid concernt. This approach allowed us to get feedback and perhaps adjust our priorities. Without it there might have been no CCIP and no plan for turning it into a proper HUD/HMD element. ad scripting vs. config vs. difficulty control over disabling CCIP - I believe the proper and consistent way how to alter these elements is only via configuration - you create a vehicle and you set how it should behave. As a player you learn vehicle's behavior. If you download a mod you know what you're doing, you know you can expect different behavior. Which is not the case when scripting. I'm not dismissing more freedom in real time over what happens inside the game. However if we were to create a script function to disable the CCIP why not request a script to disable the range measuring in other optics? Or grid or target info? Or maybe have a scipt to change physx configuration of a vehicle? Even if we ignored the technical difficulties of implementing that and maintaining it - what would be the actual benefit? Total freedom in real time customization? Wouldn't it come at a cost of a completely unpredictable game? Same goes for difficulty. It can be communicated via difficulty menu. But still something as specific as one part of vehicle's targeting systems would be way too inconsistent as a difficulty option. More than a solution to a problem it feels like a patch stacked on top of an unsolved imbalance. I hope most of the complains come from how the CCIP looks atm, how can get mistaken for a meta helper, how it's available in 3rd person and in full screen's range.

One can say a jet is a damn expensive advanced piece of engineering. With a sniper rifle you need to measure the distance and adjust zeroing accordingly. CCIP does it for you, real-time. At the same time when flying a jet you need to focus on many other things and learn them. That balances it out a bit. Nevertheless a jet should be a powerful asset. And I think that's well reflected by the KotH economy. Adding some kind of option to remove CCIP (or any other small feature bound to only some of the vehicles) on a scenario basis is tricky. How would you communicate to the players that here you have a jet with CCIP and there it is exactly the same jet, same weapons without it? Wouldn't it be perceived as a bug? #blameBI Without any supportive system this could make the game just less transparent imo. I don't believe that adding options for everything is a silver bullet. Perhaps there are other solutions - maneuverability, stability, speed, vulnerability, weapons, sensors... Maybe the jet needs a higher price tag... #blameSamatra ;) Anyway I'd wait a while before jumping on a solution. We may soon(ish) be breaking all-the-balances and turning them upside down.

In what sense? Is it the CCIP or the targeting pod that you think is breaking the balance? Atm I'd like to not make any promises as we're changing parts of the system. Work which will hopefully introduce more variety and much better possibilities to balance the assets.

You can check damage to the target unit by an EH and if it's more than 1 then reset it below 1 (so unit does not die) and run setUnconscious on the unit.

Correct, 50° means ±25°. Makes sense. We've also seen the two crosshairs cause some confusion.

More about the AI in general and detection can be found in https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/150499-ai-discussion-dev-branch/ (primary A3 AI discussion thread evah ;)) Several detection improvements have been done prior to the Apex. Mainly detection of sounds, detection at night, in fog, under water, target recognition and target tracking distances, detection in foliage. Few quick notes: AI doesn't see through terrain or objects. AI can see through semi transparent objects, esp. if they are closer to the AI than the target. It depends on the alpha. https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/checkVisibility should help you verify whether you have your foliage configured well. Vanilla vegetation has been tested and should work well. Grass affects the AI vision in two ways - by an artificial layer created above terrain that blocks the AI vision - and by reducing the target's vis. signature depending on the surface the target is positioned at (so a standing target in high grass is much less detectable than the same target on a road). Same as with vegetation atm we can vouch only for vanilla grass. Once the AI looses the line of sight to the target it may still decide to fire at the target's estimated position for next 5 seconds or so. AI can hear you. Especially if you are closer to the AI than ~30m you should think about moving carefully. The AI may learn about your position from your footsteps. At the same time the footsteps don't reveal the allegiance of the target. So the AI will first check who is making those footsteps. However if target opens fire the AI will automatically expect an enemy. AI in vehicles can easily be more efficient due to the alt. vision modes and sensors available via the vehicle. On the other hand the AI's vision is limited to the field of view of the vehicle optics and sensors and its hearing is usually...next to none. Vehicles equipped with radar (depending on its configuration) reveal more or less immediately every active vehicle in the radar's range. There are new config options being recently introduced that should help with limiting and balancing it. AI prioritizes targets according to their types, roles, ranks. Squad leaders, AT soldiers and similar tend to be magnets for the enemy AI. To maintain reasonable performance the AI detection updates happen in matter of seconds. If you hide the AI may not stop seeing you immediately in the next frame but only after a second.

It can be affected by the difficulty and AI's skill (morale). Also usually it only happens only if the helicopter's crew doesn't have any chance to immediately look in your direction. We are aware of it, it would be even better to revise fleeing. However I'm sorry to say we can't give it a priority atm.

Correct, it doesn't. Radio only affects players, sounds and subs. AI will always have "a radio". Redesigning radio and commanding is out of Arma 3's scope.

I've just checked Arma 1 and the fleeing looked the same even there.

Wow, nice! This will take some time to process :) Thanks a lot for all the notes and re-reviewing your previous ones!

The "freezing" is actually fleeing. Happens also when helicopter gets shot at from unknown source. It ain't perfect, true. Atm I can only suggest disabling it via https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/allowFleeing

Useful for ambient compositions and saving performance. wiki - disableAI https://feedback.bistudio.com/T77398 AI driving feedback topic setConvoySeparation - allows to set separation between a vehicles in a convoy vehicle setConvoySeparation 20 //vehicle will keep 20m from the one infront So it should be now more useful for perf. optimizations within scenarios. AI driving feedback topic This relates only to weapons that the AI uses autonomously. AI driving feedback topic Improved underwater detection and detection across the water surface. Detection should be now correctly limited according to the angle between observer on the ground and the water surface (i.e. if the angle is too shallow AI won't see the diver, however directly under its feet (hypothetically) the AI can eventually see as far as 20m deep) One more tweak incoming. Testing and feedback is welcome! :)

Currently we have no list of cover-friendly/unfriendly objects. The creation of cover positions around edges of map objects is fully governed by an engine algorithm. We are aware of the issue that sometimes the cover positions get created on rather inappropriate places (traffic signs, fences).

More work on the targeting is planned and it may include some re-balancing of the vanilla assets.

Edita and Mrs.Hlavac know the game better than you think :P ;) We've been well aware that the system needs some rethinking - not just small changes and adding commands on top of the system. We can challenge the balance, interactions, details like nametags, but why should locking beyond vis. be a problem? Why not have BVR combat in Arma?

Skip them personal comments pls ;) Will try to quickly respond. Radar issues - we're aware that the current implementation is not ideal. What you're describing sounds like bugs. Can you pls do simple repros and tickets on FT? Visibility - we need to scale everything to fit the game viewdistance and environment. Both tanks and AAA have the same zoom levels, CAS airplanes have weaker magnification via their TGPs. Can you please share some pictures showing the detection range discrepancy? Armament - this is a matter of damage and HP tweaking. Here a bit of off topic. More info/details via FT would be welcome. That's goverened by the OpticsIn class. You can either have discrete zoom levels by adding several classes with the same values on init/min/maxFov or you can just add one class with continous zoom (different min and max values). Example:

Added https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/A3_Targeting_config_reference#class_pilotCamera; let me know if that helps or needs better description. Here's some kind of a quick-made list

The algorithm for searching for a suitable landing spot has been optimized and should no longer cause noticeable perf. issues. After the AI finishes the weapon reload it's aim will now deteriorate more than previously and it will take longer to stabilize the aim back on target.

The vanilla CAS airplanes don't have the laser designator (yet). All you need is a configured laser designator in the airplane's weapon's list (plus some batteries ;)). crewShake property in anims

It's a little bit off-topic. What you're describing are some basic camera effects we have (G-forces for swaying, speed for FOV changes). The strength of the effect can be adjusted. Tilting or other FPV/camera effects you may know from other games are currently not planned.

If you're creating repro missions ideally just do it as simple as possible, on Stratis or VR, using minimum units. Only the stuff which is necessary for the reproduction. Also make sure you're running a pure vanilla game* otherwise we won't be able to check your mission. Then just pack the mission folder created by the editor (don't .pbo it) and share it with us. (*Unless you're an actual author of the modded content and you need help with it - but then you should report it in the editing section on our forums.)

Many good points here! Affecting game balance and economy of some of the competitive game modes has definitely been a concern since we started working on this. Let me put it into some perspective first. Despite most of the new targeting aids being an UI element we consider them to exist in the game's world and to be part of the vehicle systems (making them fully diegetic is still something we may pursue later). Because of that we also removed the old "AT auto guide" difficulty option that allowed players to "lock" more targets on lower difficulties. The problem is that changing the actual ingame systems by difficulty options may lead to more confusion rather than to a better and more flexible game. While stamina is a general simulation concept that applies to all infantry, targeting is a mixture of several features and it would be hard to decide which should be affected by the difficulty and how. It would be even harder to clearly communicate the effects to the players. Moreover, difficulty options usually allow players to increase the difficulty by making the game more authentic. Inconsistently the opposite would be the case in this case. Anyway, the lack of challenge is a valid problem. I belive that competitive Arma modes don't necessarily need a different game balance or less authentic sandbox than the rest. Actually they are probably the best balance benchmarks for us. We'll be facing similar problem once we add the TGP lasers and "self-designation capabilities". Maybe I'm too optimistic but I think the problem can be solved by improving the game balance. And perhaps even authenticity at the same time. (Reality can often be the best "game balance inspiration" after all). Lot's of words...let's give some examples (no offers, no promises...just thinking out loud ;)) - remove air-tracking sensors from CAS airplanes (but hey... then we don't have any interceptors...is it a problem?) - make the air target acquisition more difficulty (ranges, angles) so you can still get a pipper but you need to work harder for it - adjust the flight-model so we relay the challenge more into flying and energy management - ...I'm sure you've got some ideas too ;) Preemptively about the laser :P: TGPs aren't 360deg, you have gimball limits, which makes it difficult too keep the target lased and succesfully bombed. You fly fast so you don't have the time and resolution to find, ID and paint a target with ease. Not to mention you have to go full screen and loose flight awareness... In the end we hope you'd still always prefer to have a JTAC on the ground. #teamwerk As for the IFF and nametags on lock markers - we currently don't have any other system to represent IFF so we can't just remove it. I think I've already mentioned in this thread that we're not purrfectly happy about it but it's all we've got atm.

What would you exactly like to disable?

Yes, it has been. APC has no sensor to track the air assets. #gamebalance ;)

What are the repro steps, please? Does it look like an anim. loop bug or is it the situation when AI switches to rifle to move in order to keep formation position?