Sneakson

Well, to be fair not many games have good AI. It's an area in video gaming where we've seen next to no development in the last 10 years. ARMAs AI is worse than average though when it comes to doing the most basic things. Compare to how your Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare teamies will completely autonomously follow your lead, change stances, attack and take cover effectively. Not to mention the control over your teamies is bad. That's a game design descision. Again, in GRAW you can tell your AI to do basically everything you can tell the ARMA AI to do but completely without 10 menus full of commands.

I've never understood players speaking about "balancing" in ARMA. Aren't 100% of all multiplayer missions (other than the 5-10-ish preincluded ones) made by players? So balance is up to the players entirely... there are no set maps with set vehicles and weapons such as in any competitive multiplayer shooter.

Actually I was looking more for simulators than tactical shooters. You know airplanes, helicopters, tanks, submarines and what have you. I’ve played the SWAT4 demo back in the day. Definitely cool with great graphics for its time but it’s actually not that advanced when you really think about it. I heard multiplayer was great but never had a chance. It’s on my list of games to play “eventually.†I've already been through the original Ghost Recon on the highest difficulty setting (my first time) and that was a blast. I think the second or third mission in the game is the hardest though so I nearly quit for a little while there. I also love the GRAW series so a few more Ghost Recons area already on my list of games that I’ll get to when I have the time and so are most of the late 90s early 2000s tactical shooters you guys mentioned already. Anyways I'm already aware of mostly all shooters ever made since I've dug quite deep into video game history and shooters are common. I'm searching for something with a steep learning curve that will take some learning. One completely non-military example is the 7-day FPS programming challenge entry "Receiver". Check this video out: It has the most complex gun handling I've ever seen in any game. Even though the story is completely sci-fi. You use separate buttons to shoot, aim, holster, unholster, pull back the slide (to see if chamber is loaded or not), release slide lock, toggle safety, toggle firing modes, pull back the hammer and eject/drop the magazine. You also have separate magazine items that you have to fill with bullets manually and there's no ammo meter so you have to count your shots or eject the magazine to count bullets. If you reload and drop your old magazine any ammo still in it is naturally dropped. Without magazines you won't be able to load your gun too so you should be careful of what you drop. There's the 1911, the G17 I think and also a revolver that obviously works completely different. It will completely make you think of guns differently as you struggle to remember how to properly reload a gun as an enemy drone is heading straight for you.

Damn... I have an approximately $10 000 graphics card lying around a box somewhere here though. It's expensive but graphics cards have gotten a lot cheaper since the 90s anyways. Actually if I'm not mistaken Titans and the like do somewhat worse than weaker cards unless you're playing in XHD. And ARMA3 currently needs a better CPU anyways... doubt the Titan Z would make all the difference in the world.

He's not saying the game is unplayable though... Edit: Googling "box misrepresentation" doesn't give any significant hits :p

I've played the first few missions of the campaign and that doesn't sound correct. A stutter sounds like a HDD/memory issue... however it's probably a software issue somewhere. Here's my standard troubleshooting: Check CPU, memory and disk use using the Task Manager, MSI Afterburner for the graphics card measurements, heat using HWMonitor, update motherboard bios and drivers, update graphics card drivers... Try switching to dev-branch or uninstalling and installing ARMA3 again. Maybe try lower settings to see if that makes any difference. Also measuring your framerate while the issue is occuring to confirm that it's really a framerate dip could be useful maybe.

Damn... assembling mortars and turrets is counter-intuitive :p

A MSI Z87-G45 Gaming and i5-4670K is $360 on Amazon.com currently… that’s what you should go for if you can afford it. There are cheaper motherboards such as the MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate and cheaper CPUs too but the 4670K is very worth it. I’d upgrade that then see how well the game works. It’s difficult to say how it’s going to work because I haven’t heard a lot from users with a strong CPU and weak graphics card. With my 560 Ti (about the same as 7770) and an old CPU I was able to play on standard-high settings (see my signature) so you should be able to do at least that, very well… however according to a benchmark with a 4770K (=4670K) and 7770 you will only be able to use Very High settings in about 20 fps. That benchmark is based on ARMA3 version 1.0 though and some things have changed since then. If the game DOESN’T work as well as you would want by then I would buy a 760 ($270) or AMD equivalent. At worst a 660 ($190). Memories may also make a difference if you have about $100 to experiment with. For science I would love to know the difference between 1333 MHz memories and 2400 MHz memories if 1333 is what you currently have :p Again… you have tons of options. All depends on how much money you have. At cheapest maybe a G41 PC Mate ($88), i3-4330 ($130) and 660 ($190) could do well. That computer would be a step up from my old computer which I played standard-high on. At two-thirds the price of a full strength computer. Then again I would always recommend saving and then doing a big upgrade. Don’t be a cheapskate. In a few years those extra few hundred bucks won’t matter at all but your computer will be that much stronger. There’s also no rush to upgrade. It’s not like Half-Life 3 is confirmed or anything. ARMA3 will still be around in six months. I would also recommend waiting for next fall since there’s new generation of CPUs and graphics card coming every end of summer so around September is always the best time to upgrade. The newest stuff will be brand new and the older stuff will drop significantly in price.

There are already threads both for buying new computers and for low performance... Anyways you should upgrade your 1) motherboard and 1) CPU... everything else is “OK.†After that I would upgrade 2) graphics card and maybe 3) memories… I assume you have 1333 MHz memories and ARMA has been shown to benefit from quicker memories (try 2133 or 2400 MHz) on newer CPUs. Should run better then. Depending on how much money you have to spare we could recommend a mobo/CPU. Amazon.com pricing is about $300-$360. ---------- Post added at 21:20 ---------- Previous post was at 21:19 ---------- Don't forget new motherboard.

Well, can't give orders when remote controlling so that's only half useful.

Hey, I just started using Zeus singleplayer and one thing that bothers me is that if I die then everything is wiped. I thought I could get around this easily by creating multiple playable characters but then I noticed that when my first character died I lost the ability to Zeus. So it seems if you have multiple playable characters only your first can Zeus by default. So that sucks. I would like to create some dynamic Zeus missions to play but naturally I don’t want it all to go away if I die once so how do I get around this? Can you create playable characters in Zeus? Doesn’t seem like it, right? What’s the easiest way to create some sort of respawn? The best way to play I can think of right now is to create a Zeus character somewhere safe and then have a bunch of other playable characters that I actually use separately and can die with without having to worry but sooner or later I would run out of guys to play unless I made some sort of supply of playable guys hiding behind a bush. I’m really not experienced with the editor and to me it’s great to see how intuitive Zeus is because I like creating random small missions just to have something to shoot at and Zeus lets me do just that but currently not being able to create new playable characters is sort of a limitation to me. Thanks.

That's not true. Graphics card do make a difference up to a certain point when there are too many AI and there's a CPU bottleneck because of bad optimization or w/e.

Have you seen any heavy AI benchmark to confirm your beliefs or are you just guessing based on your own computer?

Try spawning some guys at the Stratis gas station and tell them to walk to the airport... they'll walk in a biiig circle around the gas station before going along the obvious, unobstructed road leading there lol... Zeus really shows a lot of problems with AI walking all over the place, helicopters and aircraft not attacking and even men not doing anything at all when ordered to. Still, a lot of the time it works well. I like the way the AI leans around corners quite often.

Vsync?

@Krazybee: do some troubleshooting. If you have some sort of graphical glitch in all applications including the desktop then it's clearly not caused by a game anyways. Make sure everything is plugged in OK, update your drivers. When did the problems start? Old computer, new graphics card? Completely new computer? If everything is installed correctly, updated and you can’t detect anything special using MSI Afterburner to check temps and so on then it might be a graphics card hardware defect. I'm definitely not under the impression that graphics card doesn't matter. Which seems to be what you are saying. Which is dead wrong naturally.

I don't know... what's the remote function lol?

Yeah, that was my idea... but I also want to play the action. I don't just want to sit in the sky and watch the battles. If I have a distant Zeus I will still need a supply of playable characters near the battlefield that I can't let run out. And if I suddenly decide I would like to control a helicopter to attack the enemy I would have to have spawned a playable character at an airfield in the editor before starting the mission since there’s apparently no way to create new playable characters to jump into. I think… currently haven’t tested Zeus a ton.

I'd buy a 4670K under all circumstances. $100 over the i3 is nothing over the course of two-five years.

Okay, so today I used the empty controls setting to clear all controls and then bound my own manually again. I have tried binding “Look†and “Freelook†to “Left Alt†and whenever I hold “Look†my mouse stops moving my character’s head around and whenever I click “Freelook†my character’s head freezes until I click again. What am I doing wrong? In airplanes I can look by holding “Left Alt†bound to “Look†as usual… it doesn’t work as infantry.

Oh, look and aim are different bindings? I'll have to look into... hah... look into that. Edit: right you are. Now everything works fine. I hadn't bound "look <direction>" to mouse <direction, only "look" and "freelook" to various buttons.

I'm able to look around, by aiming. I'm not able to turn my head independently from my weapon (look/freelook) :(

It's possible that your specs are too weak... the i3 is one of the weaker Haswells, which I would guess means it's comparable to previous generation CPUs. Also 1600-1866 may not be significant enough. Maybe next week I'll have time to order some 2400s and do a 4770K (or disable HT and viola: 4670K) test with both a 2013 Haswell and 2013 graphics card :p Not sure what to hope for but at least RAM is cheap :)

OP lol.

Well, yes... because I'm able to look around without look/freelook :s It's the strangest issue. Seems my character's head is 100% locked in position unless I'm in a vehicle. I've tried binding both look and freelook (one at a time) to alt and some other keys and tried binding them the way they're supposed to be by default. I've copied my settings file so I may revert to default controls soon and see if that helps.