ShotgunSheamuS

Yeah definately better, but there are some issues that bug me, for example the great suggestions like better mid range textures, and blending enemy in the distance better, this is a huge issue since the the first OFP and till this day, so many great suggestions and yet we still see nothing in BETA, I was so sure this would be done in BETA, but as it stands, in less than a month, will we see it? Will we see the fixing of popping textures and models, will we see better AI improvement, and more other requested features to really make ARMA 3 feel more complete than it's predecessor? Thing is there are a great deal of good ideas, however some things should just be standard in the vanilla game, not depend on the community to do certain must have things, because like for example different servers run different mods, and also some mod implimentations arent always as great, and sometimes buggy etc.

I rate this is definately needed. Why not just include a testing sample in BETA and let people try it before knocking it down... Right now people are just bitching about BF3 mostly, yet there have been some insanely good alternate suggestions. Only real way to finalize it is to actually try it, and see... Maybe half the rambo guys bitching about it may not really even be making a big deal of it, though there will always be that one guy...

Proposal for a new Game Engine I just want to kick this off to say to the devs, that this post is in no way intended as a message that I am dissapointed in ARMA3 at all, I still love it! and it is a huge step forward from what ARMA2 was which is great! However it is not a leap forward like what OFP was back in the day. And also I am rather sad that some of the below mentioned things werent added or similarly worked on, but ARMA3 is in BETA, I suppose some things can maybe still happen. However this is targeted at future development, in a positive way. Right, so moving on, I havent found anything on the subject really, but have noticed some people complaining about the dated engine, and how every iteration of it still presents the same limitations and more sloppy cheap work arounds. So maybe it is time to consider developing a new engine from scratch? Why? Browsing through the tickets and requests from the ARMA3 tracker, it has become apparant that quite a bit of things are limited or not possible due to the current engine limitations, and also does leave the product feeling somewhat incomplete and outdated, especially since it is essentially a reused/recycled engine spanning as far back as OFP and has only been receiving upgrades and addons over the years. Perhpas it is time for a fresh start on a new engine that is designed to better take advantage of new and current tech without limitations and even be able to do more to push ARMA and the engine to new limits into the next generation! This is semi motivation and highlights of things to take into consideration when developing a new engine. For the most part, this should be obvious to the devs since they work with the engine, and know it's weaknesses, but from the community side, perhaps we can highlight the most important bits and pieces to consider when developing a new engine, after all, we the consumer know what bugs us, we know what we want to see improved and we know what we want to see ARMA do in future itterations? First things first, The new engine should be ale to better use our CPU's and it's features, properly utilize more cores, and also, for a real ultra layout, use more than just a limited 4gb of ram, so I guess an optional 64bit version? If this is possible, dont think I have ever seen or heard of a game running 64bit, but theres a first time for everything? Overall, we want a hardware friendly Engine that will use every bit of power and resources we have. Current tech to improve. Animations Animations dont seem to always blend well and look natural, not to mention you always feel like you are limited and restricted, and not really even there. Things such as sliding when you halt after running, and you slide forward a little, or when you run, it looks like your feet sometimes are confused, and not in sync with your motion, walking into water, the transition from walking to swimming is pretty iffy, and then objects in motion can sometimes look verry choppy. Also natural things such as lack of a falling animation from low or high altitudes, no door animations on cars, and the ghostly building doors opening by the power of the mind etc can leave much to be desired and feel like arma is incomplete. Here is a little something to look at perhaps? This is probably could also aid with making AI seem and act more realistic, as well as improve the current bland ragdolls. (Here is something user generated.)This, THIS will make ARMA awesome beyond any other shooter, and this will make it look and feel even more realistic. and I would even pay extra to cover the licensing of this technology and I am sure everyone else would. Point is these little details really break immersion and make it feel unnatural at times. Guys, you need to make a plan. Physics Physics have been introduced in ARMA3, however it still feels very limited, and hopefully will be improved, however I doubt even at full release, we will see all objects being subjected to physics properly. Some nice touches would be vegetation reacting to physical bodies, wether effects like rain affected by wind, better physics simulation of particles, etc. Basically the whole environment should feel interactive. PIP (Picture in Picture) Nice addition to ARMA3, but quality is severely limited due to performance issues! Pretty self explained. AI Yes, AI... Been a long time issue, especially in terms of immersion, we want and need better, smarter, more naturally enhanced AI blessed with things such as common sense, also considering AI should not be so resource intensive. I'm thinking maybe a learning neural network kind of implimentation, where the game learns from the player?? Terrain Big deal this, because ARMA is pretty much the ONLY game that provides huge vast terrain without borders and limitations, but, there are a few horrific limitations. For one, view distance, and this brings up issues like LOD and texture morphing (popping) that can be distracting as hell! Seriously needs to be taken care of. Also limited viewdistance for most since it is heavy on resources, so better optimization for the lower end machines. Essentially, 2km of clutter should be the minimum for infantry (taking sniping into account) without major performance issues, and that is just for infantry. Aircraft should have a view distance of around three times that depending on hight. Helicopters can do with up to 4km and planes perhaps 6km since they generally go higher than a chopper. Perhaps something like a trigger based on altitude that would alter the view distance, and at the same time scale down model detail to balance out the performance? See tesselation for this further down. The horrid warping/sinking ground effect from parralax mapping. Needs to be better performing and optimized. If parralax mapping continues to be used, then an option to adjust the distance of the effect so that we dont have to have the warping effect if we can afford it. Also apply it on other surfaces other than just the groud. And then also allow us to be able to disable it without lowering overall terrain detail and complexity, and rather have decent high quality normal maps instead. Other than that, see the new tech section below that covers tesselation as an alternative to this method. Being able to handle terrain complexity better, better optimized I guess. Dont like the hovering objects in the distance. Better textures on terrain, most notably the mid range terrain texture. This is VERY IMPORTANT because alot of the action happens at mid range! There has been some pretty neat suggestions to improve this, but now is a great time to design an engine with this in mind! Make it scale better over distance. Water (Ocean) This has had some pretty cool improvements, but some issues like the shoreline... looks horrid, and can be improved! like a broader shoreline, and perhaps also some waves. and also visual effects on water, just really looks unnaturally layered over the water, and doesnt feel like part of the water. make the water interactive in a way, make splashes look like it's part of the water, and ripples around objects in the water, and make it look like it is a part of the water texture itself, and not just a particle hovering above the water etc. Destructive environments This doesnt have to be fancy, but the current method of having an object thats destroyed sink into the ground and replaced by another "damaged version" model. It's a sloppy way of doing it. admittedly not bad either, you probably could get away with it still, just add more particle effects to not make the sinking and replacing NOT so obvious. But also, some propper destruction would be nice with some physics, like a wall being weakened and chipped off by repeated gunfire, a door blown off to chunks of wood, propper ditches in the ground from grenades or bombs instead of that horrid layered texture hovering over the ground. This does not have to be "everything can be destroyed piece by piece", just some level of destruction can be a nice touch with some added game play functionality... Also this can also be carried over to vehicles, some propper damage models, and not just damaged textures. Lighting and shodows Another one of those things. The new dynamic lighting is pretty nice, but also needs to be fixed, effects such as light being cast through objects, when objects should be blocking light, and casting shadows respectively. Currently it is doable since Sun light and Moonlight already do this, but again, limitations of the engine and performance, this needs to be in mind when building the new engine! The new soft shadows still arent satisfying, shadows seem to have an LOD system as well which does kind of looks crappy at short distance when having the setting anywhere below ultra, and the self shadowing on objects have a horrible jaggy'ness on them. Also what would be a nice added effect of shadows is sharpness based on hight, the closer an object is to the ground, the sharper the edge of the shadows, and then the further away from the ground, the softer the edge of the shadow. Sound In a game like arma, sound is probably more important than graphics, visually the game is presented very well enough as is, however sound just can never be good enough, so better sound is always welcome! New tech to consider. Tesselation Tesselation can be used well for so many things! For example smoother transitions of LOD which would be almost unnoticable to the eye! Also could replace POM (Parralax mapping) on the terrains which would eliminate the warping sinking effect on the ground and details can come to life! And it could add some pretty nice details to models to make it look even more detailed than it currently is! Read more about it here http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html or watch a video about it This is pretty much a must, I am shocked that ARMA3 did not have this feature, but by the time ARMA4 releases, I think everyone will be running a DirectX11 or OpenGL4 and up capable graphic card at least to support this, so no excuses. But also must be an option to adjust, as well as disable if necessary. 3D support It seems quite a lot of people want this, not surprised since screens and TV's are all going 3D and surely it will become a standard feature in the near future, so this should be an optional kept in mind, also great for the immersion! Cloud Computing This is a long shot, but I would guess embracing cloud computing could do a world of good since cloud computing is becoming a big thing for next gen. It can be used to aid with AI perhaps? , so perhaps allow us to setup dedicated AI servers to offload the work to the server? whether it is locally on a LAN at home to make use of our old scrapped rigs, or a shared server on the net for those running a server like domination etc. And even more of a long shot this, but create something like adaptive AI, the learning neaural network of unique personalised AI, essentially learning how a player plays, and adopting our play "style", mimicing how we move, how we cover, how go between objects/cover, how we engage our targets, how we return fire, how likely are we to engage if we are spotted, or not spotted, and so amny other variables etc, and basically it just adapts by learning how you play, and generates a profile, (like a virtual you??) which can be uploaded and shared among other AI servers, and then even further can be mixed with other profiles to create more unique profiles (personalities). This mixed with the basic core scripted AI, can create AI which be mistaken for real players perhaps? Yes, I know, very far fetched, but I am sure it is do-able with ARMA, I have heard of other next gen games doing something similar like http://gamingbolt.com/forza-5-developer-best-explains-cloud-technology-create-ai-agents-to-win-for-you, so keep this in mind when developing a new engine, might not need cloud computing right away but can show some promise in the near future. Crossplatform compatability This isn't necessarily a request to bring ARMA to Linux and consoles (but yes I would love ARMA on Linux), but the engine itself, which can then probably be used to license to other developers, much like Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Fox Engine etc. Mixed with your other self developed tech and probably more other tech to come, it could easily be used for other simulator games, indie games and other AAA games. This will benefit both us the consumer and community and the developers, the dev can cash in more money to work on better quality products and hire more awesome talent, and we get better quality products, and a better engine capable of pushing ARMA into the next gen. As for the engine being licensed out to other devs. I would imagine any improvements/enhancements and optimizations made on the engine itself (excluding their own self designed technology) by other devs could save BI devs a lot of work as well. Well I'm done for now, I can't really seem to think of anything else revolving around the Game Engine itself, so perhaps if anyone else has anything to add, go for it, and leave a comment. If it is related to the engine, I will add it here and keep this updated, if something can be described in a better way than I did, or I am wrong about something, please correct me! And while we at this, perhaps lets treat this as a petition as well maybe? So even if you dont have a comment, you can text your +1 vote to this. Unless you guys have an alternative way of doing a survey/petition/vote.

All right, well I'm getting pretty tired of having to keep trying to be positive about the subject, When DM keeps being negative and justifying why he is happy with ARMA as it is, so fine, he is happy with it as it is, he isn't bothered by it's current state and limitations, so I will not try convince him otherwise. Moving on, Insanatrix, you made some pretty good statements worth thinking about. But also, I have been seeing some trends coming up, seems almost all major game engines will be getting a military simulator equivelent, CryEngine has one where $57 mil was spent on it, apparantly to replace the outdated VBS, but from reading, it seems both are in use, and it seems as of end of last year, UnrealEngine also got as similar project for the US military. So really the competition is there, and not only that, but it seems those engines might be able to do what VR engine does, maybe not the 20km+, but then again, really now who needs more than 5km? Which the frostbite engine is capable of already. 5km is more than enough, on 20km+ you are really wasting resources for a very detailed back drop anyway. Point being, If any of the above projects decide to go with a public license or convert to a public game, which given their current state look like it got more attention than a simulator needs, and seems to appeal more to gamers with its high quality graphics and design (I think thats an obvious hint), and they know there is a market because ARMA owns that market, then ARMA will have competition. Both those engines are equally supportive for modding as well, so... Maybe as you said, BI are wanting to move away military simulations, and play with other new IP... Is this perhaps a precaution because of these other projects? They probably know they don't stand a chance, so they don't want to be completely dependent on ARMA alone. Still, they should compete even if there is no competitor for ARMA yet, but they should treat those products as competitors for ARMA! (they probably are in terms of VBS though), So really, even if they do have their 200 employees split up accross different projects, get them together and work on the engine, that will benefit all their projects. Then split them up and continue to make new IP and stuff.

Fine, my bad, did a quick google on crytek that didn't prove useful, so here is much more accurate number for Crytek. "GamesBeat: How large did your team get on this project? A couple of hundred people? Yerli: Counting absolutely everybody, probably 250. It’s not any bigger than Crysis 2, though. Crysis 2 was actually a larger team, because we were building so much content for the console versions. We had no console experience at that point. A good 100 people or so were there to simply make up for that lack of experience. When I look forward, Crysis 3 has the kind of team size that I would expect for our next-gen games in the next five years or so. They’ll peak at 250 people, tops." But I'm more of an Unreal Engine fanatic, hence my numbers were better portayed here as I am far more interesed and up to date: "Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's revealed that around 40 people at the developer are currently hard at work on the new engine. Sweeney told IGN in September that the new engine wouldn't "see the light of day until probably around 2014," and a month later Epic President Mike Capps told Develop of Unreal Engine 4 on the next generation of consoles, "We need to be there day one or very early. That's my primary focus." But it was unknown exactly how many of Epic's 153 employees were working on the engine, until now." Still far from your estimated ~600 man team. Now Bohemia coming in on a hefty 200 (taken from their linked in profile) I would say theres no excuse,

"compared to the ~600 man team at Crytek" Actually they have small amounts, check it out, 45 at Crytek Budapest =) Plus, seriously most triple A companies dont really hire more than 100, except when they miss a deadline, and the publisher forks out the additional funding. But ARMA, we dont see an new iteration of ARMA for years, just new content and some updates. Surely if they decide to really go for making the engine the centre of their attention which can only benefit their future, they could easily step into the world of AAA companies??? I mean really after all these years with an awesome franchise like ARMA, why are they still making AAA games with outdated B-grade quality? Sure they do improve with every iteration, but really it seems like they hold themselves back... They could litterally dominate the FPS milsim market with ARMA as opposed to CoD and BF... The difference is obvious, better looking games that arent as resource intensive as ARMA, and yeah arma does 200km levels with no loading time, and that is their selling point (ONE OF THEM), but not good enough honestly when you can barely see past 2km with a fairly decent rig, and on top of that you have shitty distractions like LOD popping etc, and the sad part is there is technology like tesselation that would fix that! made for problems like that! and there is also shoddy animations, or lack of animations etc. Quality mate, thats what we all want. ARMA needs those details.

Very true that, and the thing is it is not just ARMA, it now is DayZ as well, and it could be more, much much more! Other devs could begin to use the engine, fuck the next Elder scrolls could be on Virtual Reality Engine, seriously... ARMA will just be the poster child of the VR Engine. The more platforms it supports, the more appealing it will be too because pretty much all devs want to target as many platforms as possible, which WILL accompany a bigger audience, and if it is up to date and can offer almost accurate realistic God Like simulated elements along with utilizing the latest technology, it could easily compete with CryEngine and Unreal Engine, and Frostbite and the new Fox Engine etc. So why not do it??? This really will benefit the devs as much as it would their customers??? But thanks for the optimistic response.

Yeah I guess so... Seems like it is a much wanted request. I never used the term "from scratch", however I can understand that you would assume I meant that. Throw away everything they worked on and start all over with nothing. Actually CryEngine 2 was a complete overhaul from the original, which technically makes it a new engine kinda. Likewise with Call of Duty using the quake 3 engine, but it has had so much removed from it and replaced with new tech that technically it is a brand new engine known as the IW engine. Thing is I am not saying throw away what there is all at once, Im just implying phasing out the current things that limit the engine, and replace it with new code that does it better and more efficient. Because currently, it is still the same code, for the most part, just getting more and more complex with it's upgrades, and outdated, when you can use new clean and more efficient code to do the same things. I dont write game engines, but I am sure that makes enough sense to have merit. This one perhaps is on me, I meant Physix, prior it was a more limiting way that physics were pretty limited and basic. If I am not mistaken, they had their own physics code to do all of those in previous versions, and now using nvidia Physix to expand on it? Besides I never said physix should be added, just taken further. None, of course, not even arma has 20km+ view distance, max in arma3 is 12km, arma2 was 10km i think. Still, not many people actually set view distance to 12km because most of it is unnecessary since you play infantry 60% or more of the time and wont really see much beyond 1.5km except if you sniping. Still though, not an excuse to not rework it or replace the code for it, which I am sure CAN be done. Anyways, nice signiture =) ---------- Post added at 17:17 ---------- Previous post was at 17:12 ---------- Never said it had to depend solely on the company, private servers set up for private use or public use by community or ISP for cloud? So it will die off like anything would when it gets replaced and updates for it stop. ---------- Post added at 17:23 ---------- Previous post was at 17:17 ---------- Well I think back then BI had the relevent funding for it, however of course the reason why completely rewriting from scratch is time, and time = money. But that said, as I mentioned to DM, I never used the term "from scratch", they just have to rewrite portions of the engine, and replace it with the current, gradually phasing out the outdated code which would keep it up to date. Hence all my examples I have. Much like the example of Call of Duty, based on quake3 engine, however it has been so overhauled, that none of the quake 3 code actually exists, technically making it a brand new engine, and even the new ghosts "next gen" engine, is based on the very same engine, though also not really the same engine. And they managed to do a complete new engine, technically without killing their business and still releasing CoD games yearly.

My bad, did a quick search, and didn't find anything. But i understand it will cost them, but as mentioned with the cross platform decision and licensing the engine out. Could make up for it, and make it worth while. Could see much more games utilizing the engine, and their own added tech. It is being done with engines such as unreal engine and cry engine and the frost bite, so it could really lead to success, especially in terms of an engine purely designed for absolute realism and simulation. Could see loads more simulators use the engine, not to mention other serious games, because it would be THEEE game engine to use for such produCts. Imagine surgeon simulator 2020 running in virtual reality lol -joke-

Here is my impression so far. THE GOOD * Runs pretty good, as good as ArmAII I would say. * Love the AI, seems more aggressive and less retarded than ArmAII. * Awesome content, especially love the creativity of future warfare. started getting cancer from all the modern warfare, over and over. * Love what they did with the view distance, looks a lot better now! * Everything really looks pretty stunning honestly, considering it is an alpha. THE BAD * Dissapointed that I am not able to run ArmAIII smoothly given I do have above recommended requirements as stated by BI, The game does need optimization, and hopefully it will be optimized greatly by end of BETA. I just can't stop tweaking! * Shadows are a bit crappy when it comes to distance, theres that border line of low/high shadows that still bugs me. Set shadow distance to around 70 and it becomes almost unnoticed. * Popping of objects detail a bit too obvious if you set object detail to high or lower, which is very distracting when trying to spot other players in the distance. Either need to work on a better transition effect to blend in naturally, or optionally allow being able to keep object detail consistent over distance, instead of dropping detail over distance. * No benchmarking scenario/showcase for testing and configuring? * Trees and brushes look horrid, the grass can look better as well. Though I believe these are all only placeholders, I refuse to believe this will end up as final product. THE UGLY ( IT'S ALPHA ) * A good few things to mention here, but It's an alpha, cant complain too much about it. Just be greatfull =)