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windies

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Posts posted by windies

  1. Posted

    I think people are expecting far too much at release, remember it will be continually developed like Arma2 was and there will be further official addons released on Steam and the community addons will catch up. The original Arma2 was OK, it became great with the release of Arrowhead, British Armed Forces and PMC. Patience.....there are years of fun developments to come.

    Expecting single player content at release is expecting too much....

    I get they have their reasons, that's fine. But releasing something with the promise that it will come later is walking a fine line. It opens up the door later on for there not to be a campaign, or for decisions to be made to release half a campaign then a DLC with a full campaign so the contractual obligation to have a stock campaign is fulfilled. It's just not a good road to go down.

    Reviewers are going to eat the game alive if there is no campaign, I mean lets face it this game isn't BF3 or any type of mainstream multiplayer FPS. The multiplayer in ArmA isn't the easiest to get into. You have your choice of wasteland, wasteland, wasteland or domination with 20 people running around in their underwear with 20 M320's or GM6 Lynx's and 500 magazines in their Bergen Sack. You pretty much HAVE to find a group to play with on a closed server and that generally means mods. Even a lot of public servers require mods and again it just leads to a cumbersome environment of having to find what server you want to connect to, figure out what mods you need, either enable them all or go download them if you don't have them from a 3rd party site. Again it's something that people who are used to it, know what they are doing. It's a very cumbersome experience though for new blood that's not used to it and doesn't have easy access to websites of where to get mods and such. Also with the huge performance hits in multiplayer for pretty much having more than 5 people in a server or having more than 2 AI active in a mission, I foresee single player being the bread and butter of ArmA 3 for awhile after launch.

    I actually think our expectations have gotten lower with every release, because we expect more bugs and more missing content and nonworking feature's and we create excuses for it and justify why it had to happen and we just perpetuate the cycle. There's nothing like the age old, "Oh the community can fix that for you BIS!" statement every time a cut feature is discussed or there's some feedback suggested. It's reaching a point where some people start to ask the question "Why?" and there's really no good answer other than poor planning, poor execution, and poor management with a poor set of priorities. Development seems to get worse with every release more-so than it gets better and I think that is what people are starting to realize and question.

  3. Posted

    I don't think that this would be a good idea. It would result in player groups extremely dominating over the AI.

    Introduce AI supression and firefights will become longer.

    It depends, if they could get a good suppression system going, something like RO2 and the updated Rising Storm where your aim starts shaking and you can't zoom etc..., then having the AI be able to lay down good suppression fire would be extremely effective yet still let firefights play out longer and rely more on flanking and tactics. I'm talking from the perspective of AI firing at the player and the player being suppressed.

    I do agree though that AI should be suppressable, I'm not suggesting that their aim be lessened to the point they can't hit anything. I find though that they have the uncanny ability to hit you while you're barely peaking out of cover from 200m away within the first shot or two. Of course that depends a lot on the generic skill setting in the difficulty options.

  4. Posted

    Sbua16, I agree, firefights are over too quick, accuracy should be decreased to get longer lasting firefights.

    Agree'd. AI are waaaay too accurate even when set to lower skill levels. If you set their skill level too low however they become completely idiotic and almost stop moving or reacting to threats. I think more control over AI skill settings needs to be given rather than just 1 generic slider that controls everything.

  5. Posted

    +1

    I think this accounts for a good deal of what could be called the 'apologists' to be honest. Looking with broad perspective over the course of the development of Arma3, even the layman can spot that this almost didn't happen -at all. BI was ready to throw the towel in for sure and ride off with madbank DayZ with far less stress and effort. Frankly the way they rallied after the imprisonment, loss of original creative content (Greece) and programmers -it's a small miracle we have what we do. As far as Campaign, once your original creative plans go out the window and you need to make a whole new storyline - I was pretty sure the campaign would essentially just be filler anyways. It's not as easy as just switching out a countries name for another -more like trying to change course of small river. On top of that you have people who immediately after Bug #10,341 gets fixed -jump down your throat about bug #59 and "How the f*ck could you miss this BI! Are you blind!!! Do you even have programming experience!!!!!!"

    :eek:

    In my business we call them 'trainer drainers' and aren't shy about showing them the door. 4 programmers watching the AI thread -that's fucking bank.

    I see that a lot, saying that anyone complaining is calling the devs lazy or unprofessional etc...

    The fact is that I really don't see that except from a very select few. Most people who have voiced disapproval about this are more upset at the decision, the precedent that the decision sets, the ramifications of the decision and how they will affect the game on release with the general public and less about how the old timers who are beyond branded with BI will react, as well as all of the other cut and axed feature's that have been promised and we are now learning will most likely not make it until some far off date or not at all.

    It doesn't look good even to some people who have been loyal to BI for quite some time, so I'm quite sure they are right to question the ramifications of BI's decision to cut the campaign out of launch and how the game will be reviewed. I'm also quite sure that they payed just as much as I did, so their right to opinions and questions is just as valid as my right to opinions and questions, irregardless of positive or negative viewpoint or criticism/praise. The only people I see "Bashing" others are those who cannot view negative criticism as negative criticism and instead view any negative viewpoint as some horrible attack on the developers.

    I also see the developers leaning more and more on the community for content and fixes as I believe others do to. Cutting the campaign out of launch and then launching the game as fully completed and released is really a slap in the face to the community, mainly because they are putting the burden of their development on to the community to fix it for them in the interim. It's one thing to encourage modding and community content to supplement official created content, but it's entirely different to rely on community content and modding for the lack of official content in your game. It's not really right and it sets a bad precedent for the future.

  6. Posted

    arma 2 is the same story for me. some things play fine and great fps, but a lot of things don't. Can't even mess with mp over there (and don't bother except for coop over here). just fired it up again a few minutes ago actually to check it out with my new card. was getting 9-18fps on chenarus sp campaign (manhattan mission). same ole story. For me, A3 was the one that I was hoping would finally be playable b/c I never really could get into a2 due to performance issues. Just a disappointment.

    Don't feel alone, I had the same experiences with A2. That was why I was hoping A3 would really improve upon the series but so far it's just lacking.

  7. Posted

    You missed the point. HC is not used to offload CPU, it's used to offload network traffic management from the server.

    Also, AI's action's are known to clog the RAM. There is also the fact that AI cannot be distributed on multiple cores.

    I'm pretty sure it's used to offload the CPU since the game utilizes a server-client architecture and not a client-client-server, I.E. there is no offload of network traffic because even though the HC process's the AI it still is sent to the server and then from the server to every other client. It's not like AI network related traffic is somehow magically split from the server and sent to you via the HC, it all still passes through the server and from the server to the client. The HC simply acts as a client to the server with the locality of all AI in the mission assigned to the HC in order to offload AI processing from the server to a separate pseudo-server client. That's all it really does.

  8. Posted

    With the multiplayer in the current shape that it's in unless you are into playing on 5 player limit wasteland servers, Not having the campaign at release is a very huge blow. They might as well delay the game, no one is going to want to buy a game where the multiplayer portion barely works and there's zero single player content unless you feel like learning an entirely proprietary scripting language because to be honest you can only do so much in the editor without scripting, you can't even change unit loadouts without scripting.

    This is really the final thing to just destroy any loyalty I had towards them. I've said it before, but I honestly still thought that they could pull something off and really make ArmA 3 great and re-instill that faith. I get that they have their reasons for cutting the campaign out until sometime "down the road" but learning about it from what appears to possibly be an accidental leak of information ( it's speculation just like anything else but It seems like their hand was forced on fully releasing this information) just kind of makes hearing it that much worse. It's another LARGE chunk of axed content that seems to be piling up more and more. I'm honestly just thinking "What's next?".

  9. Posted

    So, I upgrade my GPU about every 2 years, and it was time. I just moved from a GTX 580 3GB, to a GTX 780 Super-clocked with ACX fan.

    Got everything set up, fired up Arma 3. Left the same exact settings as before. Fired up the helicopter showcase (a great place to witness the impact of the poor optimization/utilization of Arma. Do you think my performance changed? Nope. GPU usage tanks, as usual. And, I got 18-35fps on the helicopter showcase... as usual. Game stuck with a max of 2 cores of utilization (and not that efficiently, either, apparently)... as usual.

    The only difference is, I can play the non-bottle-necking parts of the game (i.e. empty map, and small encounters like the infantry showcase) at higher settings than before (basically adding in some AA and post AA).

    Same ole story. Arma's engine does a piss poor job of taking advantage of modern hardware. If I auto-detect with the new card, Arma maxes every single setting, and gives me a view distance of 3800. Which is far and above what I even play at settings wise. After years of this issue, does anyone actually reasonably expect this nonsense to get fixed in the next 2 months? Or, even after release for that matter... Especially given how quiet the normally interactive dev team continues to be on this fundamental issue. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if they will even fix the stutter that was introduced with Beta, and has been reported by others as well. Just waiting for official release, when there are no more excuses.

    Honestly I don't think it's fixable. I think it's a cause of too many issue's that are too deeply rooted in the engine to just try to band aid a fix. The engine wasn't built for current generations of hardware and things like 64 bit addressing and multi-threading and multi-core cpu's. I'm sure it could be implemented to a degree, but at what cost and at what gain? The engine might have to be rewritten from the ground up to make optimaluse of multiple core's, even though getting the engine currently to function across multiple threads and core's is feasible.

    It's probably the last BI game I'll buy, Having owned every title since OFP except CC:GM. Realizing that the engine is at fault and it's 99% likely that it will never change just kind of crushes your hope. I really like the game, but it's practically unplayable unless I want it to be ArmA 3 the Ultimate Sunset Simulator or ArmA 3 the Ultimate Land Mass simulator.

  10. Posted

    Why not create a CEP around the Known target that gets smaller and smaller the longer the AI focuses on the target and it could also be affected by precision skill? This could simulate focusing of muscle control and breathing control. What I would really like to see is some form of suppressing fire for targets that are behind cover.

  11. Posted

    I don't think you're going to get the same experience from ArmA as you will from the DCS series for which you are an SME for. The scope of the game is not centered around the Air frames and their exact modelling or replication. They're there to offer simplified solutions for mission making, either CAS or transport. I'm not saying they couldn't be improved, in fact I would say you could get DCS level modelling in ArmA if you simply wanted to spend the time on that and only that. You would end up sacrificing so much though from every other area of the game though, it wouldn't be worth it.

    As to your OP, I can't say I have noticed much of a difference in the Heli's except that for some of the obvious things from the patch notes. I can still do the same things I could before. I'm also not trying to induce vortex ring states or auto-rotations etc... though. Mainly I'm just using them for their intended purposes, simplified CAS and Transport roles.

  13. Posted

    I'm sorry, but I don't understand what quote was twisted, raped and taken out of context?

    Same, I take what Pettka said to basically mean if ACE, or any other mod, can do it as good as we can, why should we waste our time on it. Problem with that is it's going from mods improving things about the engine and the game, to mods fixing things about the engine and the game.

    It's good to hear from Jay that someone is looking into the AI, I just hope that they can at least make them a little better before launch.

  14. Posted

    About the only really good addition in ArmA 3 so far has been the animations and the fluidity of them. That alone though does not make a game. There are nice graphical additions and the PhysX is nice but I could do without both if it meant that core issue's would be fixed, one's that have persisted from ArmA and OFP.

    I feel the same way, that they are getting kind of lazy in development. Coupled with the statement in the "Axed Feature's" thread that they don't want to do improvements and or fixes that the modding community could do and they would rather leave it up to them, it just kind of seems like they want to create a sandbox environment and leave the content heavy lifting to the community. I can understand for missions and smaller mods like weapon addons and sounds mods and such, but when you start leaning towards mods to almost be a requirement for a fulfilling experience and also fix issue's within the game like the AI and such, I think you're leaning a bit too hard on modded content.

  15. Posted

    Damn I feel so sorry for the devs. Whenever they try to explain stuff to give us the "communication" we want, we twist their every word.

    Nouber Nou et al, I totally understand your frustration though. Its not that BIS is out right backstabbing us and totally changing the core of the game or anything, but it seems their plans for the future no longer really coincide with the community's (well the older community's) vision for the future of arma. This is frustrating to say the least, especially since there is really no other place for us to go, and so many have dedicated tonnes of their time to the series, only to find out that they are going to have to do it all other again for Arma 3.

    Yes indeed. The problem is, what some of the community considers a fix, BIS now considers an improvement.

    I'm not twisting their words and I'm just saying that it's becoming disconcerting because it seems like actual fixes are being viewed as "improvements" that mods should fix. That's the exact same thing you yourself just said.

  16. Posted

    Depending on what one is trying to argue, it can be, and as you yourself stated, it seems like a plain ol' disagreement over what's "core", or rather what "some of us" consider key/"core" vs. what the devs (or the decision-makers among them) consider key/"core"... though I'd dare suggest that underneath it all is "what can we achieve by release date" and the opportunity cost in time/resources/effort.

    So what are you saying exactly, we should be happy/thankful with what we get even if it's below ArmA 2's core standard's or not improved over them? I'm confused whether you have an issue with the fact I might have implied intent that they rely too much on modding, or that they do/don't rely too much on modding.

  18. Posted

    Whoa buddy, that's taking things way out of context, we don't know the full story.

    I'm going off of this statement here,

    You got it a bit wrong - Arma 3 is a sandbox platform. We provide the core and features we are able to finish in certain quality. I believe that our improved radio protocol is more than enough for most of players, why would we even bother to spend our resources on something if we could just say "Hey, use ACRE for that"? If the community is able to provide anything better, we would like to promote the content and make it as accessible as possible within our resources (missions on Steam Workshop anyone?)

    So tell me exactly how it's out of context? As someone put it, it seems like they are trying to rely too much on modding. I think it boils down to what BI consider "Core" feature's to the sandbox experience, which is where some of us disagree.

  19. Posted

    It's kind of disconcerting to hear the developers state that we should focus on mods and the free work of others to get a good vanilla experience from the game. I'm not against mods and I appreciate the time and effort it takes to create said mods. That doesn't mean that mods should be the answer to the game moving forward from one iteration to another.

    Case in point being things like the first aid and wounding system, vehicle damage systems, the AI and things like weapon resting. They all increase the sandbox/vanilla experience like others above me have said.

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