kerodan

A bit offtopic but: Yes, I am fault tolerant even though I have some experience of the "good old days" and am very happy that we passed them. To this day, I still remember downloading a 21MB patch for Spellforce at 4-8kb/s just to install the damn thing on launch day. So much for the release of a fully finished product. You can be harsh as long as you want but BI will not dumped their current AI system in this stage of development. Way out of the scope of post-release development for an engine that may not even see a next iteration in ARMA 4. Improvements are the things we can and should look forward to. In my experience, this depends on the combat mode. If you group them up and put them in "SAFE" mode, they form up nicely and will reach their destination. In "Combat" mode this will - unfortunately - not happen.

For the moment, yes. Weirdly enough I noticed that changing the elevation of the vehicle (-> letting it fall half a meter) fixes many issues of the AI getting stuck on open roads. I totally agree with you on that account. I was also disappointed by BI reallocating their ressources. Especially if you consider how much progress was achieved in a short amount of time by a dedicated developer. However, I also believe that it is not productive to call the whole system broken. It is in many cases functional and servers a purpose but it definitely needs improvement. Although I hope that BI will refocus some attention on driving, I do not believe this can be achieved by stating that the AI is completely broken as this is no resonable base for a productive dialogue.

I did and I never encountered severe issues like that since the overhaul. Furthermore, I am not disputing the fact, that the driving AI has issues. In general, I am just annoyed that the term "broken" is thrown around every time something is not working as expectedly. In my book "broken" means that it is completely and utterly useless. Well, my comparison is situated in the realms of ARMA and in comparison to ARMA 2 my statement is still valid. Bumping does not happen in my convoys. They may take a weird turn here or there but they do not drive into each other. In contrast, infantry being killed by vehicles is happening and there is definitly room for improvement. But, in my experience, this issue is not very consistent and seems to be related to performance issues (i.e. the resources of the client who has ownership of the ai or the general server performance).

Can you please stop referring to the driving ai as "broken"? Based on my experience, especially if you remind me of the 1 year mark for the overhaul, the AI is driving better then ever before. Sure they sometimes still get stuck in certain places, circle around invisible obstacles on open roads or just stop entirely for no apparent reason but this does not justify to call the underlying system "broken". Also, most of these situations can be resolved by using Zeus if time allows it. So please stop exaggerating and report your specific bugs in a responsible manner. Exaggerations like that will not likely convince BI to shift its priorities.

Yes, people complain a lot about this issues but never mention the situations where they occur. I have been playing ARMA coop for over 4 years now (so A2 OA and A3) and never perceived a game-breaking flaw concerning these systems. In my experience, most of these complains could be easily resolved by setting up the AI configuration properly. So I would agree with you, that BI could invest more resources in making the AI configuration easily accessible and document the subskills in more detail (for example, I am still looking for a definitive answer to the question if the view distance setting influences the AI's visual spotting range). However, I would not agree on scraping the whole AI system as I am repeatedly astonished by what the AI can actually do given the unpredictable situations thrown at it. On a different note: Why is everybody calling the current iteration of AI driving 'broken'? They still drive far better than before work started on improving the driving system and I haven't noticed any glaring issues with the current version. But I still hope for further improvements, of course. ;)

I would actually argue, that it is okay to allow monetization for server owners as it guarantees the owners to cover their costs (although I am also skeptical if these costs actually need that big of a compensation). But monetizing the server should also entail paying the addon authors a share of the generated income. So, if you chose to monetize a modded server, every content creator benefits from the money generated by the monetization scheme. The problem with this concept is - of course - that it would need a more active involvement by BI to bring the different content creators to the same table...

Why not? A character's personality can change if you provide appropriate reasoning for understanding that change. It is a natural process occuring all the time. Bringing this crude example for yours back to the original topic: Bohemia provided reasons for using other assets and this is reasonable to many maybe not all. I understand it however and am very happy with the changes they made.

VBS and ARMA do not only have different developers but also use different engines/iterrations of the same engine. So this would be cross-company and cross-engine feature implementation. Along this line of thinking you could also demand that Spintires has deformable terrain so it should be no problem to implement this feature in Frontiers' Elite Dangerous (I am exaggerating of course).

I would suggest to keep an eye on the DayZ Standalone development and their devblogs. They are in the process of implementing a new animation system and it is very likely that we will see this system (or an adaptation of it) in future ARMA games.

Although I whole heartedly agree with you that naval combat on that scale is out of the question for a game like ARMA, I would really love to see some kind of naval asset which can be used as a base of operations. A place where I can store equipement and provide players with a logical starting/regrouping position to mount a submersible or RHIB. If it can also house a chopper and be moveable at the same time, all my expectations concerning naval-based operations would be completley satisfied.

I can only speak of my stable branch experience at the moment but I do not really see the need to provide extensive feedback as I do not encounter alot of critical issues. Small issues like a vehicle running into small objects or getting stuck taking a certain turn are still present in some situation but are these things to report? In my opinion they are not as I suppose that these issues are getting smoothed out over time and can not really be fixed for every difficult spot on any given map. They just implied one the last page that changes to tracked vehicle AI are coming at some point.

Not wanting to derail the thread but are there any game engines with such a feature? And I mean games which, like ARMA, do not work with some kind of voxels for their terrains?

Exactly this. Furthermore, you can try all the assets (except Tanoa of course) for free in virtual arsenal. I really do not get what you are complaining about? Do you want that the player base is split based on DLC content?

When I compare it to my experience in A2 it is a huge step-up! Maybe it is due to me playing mostly small coop missions (10-20Players max with 100++AI) but my FPS doubled in comparison to the FPS I got in the same kind of missions in A2. Futhermore, you are forgetting the Geometric Occlusion feature added with Eden which improved FPS in cities tremendously in my opinion. Of course you cannot compare it to the changes made in DayZ where some achieved performance jumps from 30 to 90+ FPS but do not sell A3s improvements that short...

Can you elaborate on how you came to this conclusion? The release of Apex was only a few months ago and entailed a lot of new issues for the devs to fix. In addition to the demands to fix this or that issue made daily on these forums. So it is kind of natural to have a "slower" period, although they still managed to pull of some nice feature additions to EDEN. Does not really look like they start "abandoning" A3 to be honest. We will know more when we finally get a glimpse at the next road map but for the moment this kind of seems exaggerated in my opinion. Concerning naval assets, I would also BIS to embrace their diving/swimming feature a little more. It seems to be tacked on and is not really useable for long missions (equipment constraints due to the rebreather, slow speed of submersibles etc.). Would love to see a naval asset which can be used as a small base of operations out on the sea but do not have the feeling we will get it anytime soon. ;)