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Real Armor Mod v0.1.1 >>Ongoing Documentation (Post)<< :deal: RAM v0.1.1 Download Mega Download Dropbox Requirements CBAImportant Clear your @RAM\Addons folder when updatingChangelog Removed Bohemia vehicle and weapon config edits--- An update on RAM, RHS and the many months of research that's been concluded. We set out to improve armor and researched everything about and related to it, what we've found is shocking: Penetration values are wrong. Stock 9mm bullets can penetrate almost 10mm RHA while anti tank warheads rely on splash damage with no penetration potential. Armor values are very wrong. Be it a flimsy metal shed that provides 20mm RHAe protection or the +600mm RHAe side armor on a Merkava (Slammer) tank, it's all completely bonkers. Vehicle hitpoints, wtf. This is by far the worst thing we've discovered. It seems that no current employee of Bohemia has any idea how it should be set up and to make matters worse mod makers simply follow their example. Olds typed up an entire wiki page on the subject https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3_Damage_Description Infantry special case. For reasons infantry use a separate armor process and cannot rely on regular object armor protection. They rely on HP buffs as an arcade and crude attempt to simulate increased protection. Damage inconsistency. Due to the inconsistent nature of object armor and health weapons have been configured to do damage against specific targets without much regards for cross compatibility between soft and armored targets. The frustrating thing is that the RV engine has proven that it's capable of doing it all and more. We used information gathered from experiments and other sources to create a set of formulas for damage and penetration values. Armed with the formulas we proved that the RV engine is extremely consistent and much easier to configure than previously thought, the reason why it's such a pain to configure anything is because of the extreme inconsistency across assets. We were able to fix or work around some of these issues with the ongoing work in RHS and the work done by Spartan, however fixing only half of something means that it's still broken. We've hit the wall and the rest is up to Bohemia. What does it not do? Destroy your FPS - the performance impact is minimal! No changes to soldier damage No changes to air or sea vehicles (not yet anyway) WARNING: does not play well with modded Missiles/Rockets - these need to integrated into RAM in order to work decently. License See Documentation post.--applies to RAM config changes only. CBA & Bakerman's contributions (all scripts) are subject to their own licensing terms(!) I recommend you PM me for assistance if anything is unclear in the documentation. Support our bug list :) Please click on these links & upvote them if you agree! Missile & Rocket ammo breaks when you try to use submunitions. You should be able to set the speed of ShotDeploy ammo. Missiles & rockets don't use caliber for penetration like other ammo types.

In between work on the Real Armor Mod, I'm in the planning stages of a much bigger effort: NATO-Pact Realism Mod (aka "NAPALM") ("No more obscure & future crap! Tried-and-true equipment for the big guys!") I'll keep this initial post updated with an outline of planned features. Your thoughts are welcome as always. And if there are any NATO-Pact-history-types out there, fire away with obscure historical data now! Summary: the feature set will be along the lines of Iron Front... lite: updated vehicles, factions/squads, and weapons. Initially just realistic versions of A2 ports. My interest is more with realism than re-skinning. I will do the later as there is time, but the former comes first. The target time period is 1985: so equipment and doctrine will reflect what was in use from the late 1970's-1985* in the European theater (i.e. not today's equipment). Everything will be sourced and documented with a minimum of arbitrary crap. The mod will also incorporate and improve on the armor/weapon realism enabled by the Real Armor Mod ("RAM"). I'll start small and hopefully build in layers from there. If you'd like to speed things along by helping out, PM me! ETA: months... this post is totally premature :rolleyes:, there's been nothing more than planning and laying the groundwork with RAM so far.*8 Planned Features: (WIP obviously...) Factions & Squads: Correct squad composition and armament for US, Soviet, FRG, UK, NL mechanized squads and tank platoons. A template mission with tank & mech companies arrayed for each faction (for use in your own missions or ALiVE). Stretch Goals: add/enhance other NATO nationalities (France?, etc.). [*]Vehicles Convert A2 vehicle ports to realistically-armored historically-accurate variants (using RAM standards). Stretch Goals: [*]Weapons All weapons will have the correct historical ammo (especially important for tank rounds and ATGMs). Stretch Goals: add proper handling of HEAT weapons (ATGMS, etc.) to the armor system. [*]Misc. ALiVE compatibility of course! Integration with the Community Upgrade Project Detailed Features! Browse and comment! Still being updated! L7-105mm: DM23, M833 [*]ATGMs [*]NATO FRG Tank rounds? ATGMs [*]NATO UK Tank rounds? ATGMs Add key equipment not in Arma 2: Leopard 2, Chieftain Mk10, Challenger 1, M60A3, T-64B, AH-1F Cobra, Marder 1A1 Add ERA & composite armor handling to the armor system.

If I understand the question: "hit" and "caliber" are independent in RAM (& RHS)the first tells you how much damage the weapon does to a component (hull, track, etc.) IF it penetrates armor the second tells you how much armor the weapon penetrates Caliber--and another config value called "airFriction"--are very precisely estimated for each weapon to give very close to real-life weapon trajectories and armor penetration (based on the speed and angle of the impact). For your own weapons you can make these values as accurate as you like (if you need help with estimates, let me know). Reading this might help clarify. Determining "hit" values on the other hand is as much art as it is science. But Bakerman and I understand it as well as anyone does (maybe better than Bohemia :lol: ). I'll add a guide to doing it to the RAM wiki when that's ready. For the time being, read this if you're interested.

Yes, we turn them into kinetic penetrators. As a bonus you can also identify them as HEAT warheads and make them respond to anti-HEAT armor if you've bothered to add such to your vehicles (e.g. RHS vehicles with chobham, ERA, etc.). P.S. Before anyone asks again, vanilla vehicles and weapons are hosed and frankly if/until BI releases their full configs to the community, they will stay that way. Personally I don't care b/c I don't play Arma for the fantasy setting anyway (hence RHS, CUP, etc.).

Hee hee, sorta back - work schedule has kept me away but thanks entirely to Bakerman stuff still happened! We've put a lot of RAM into RHS vehicles but there's so much content there that it's a bit slow to overhaul. I think the upshot is that if you want to build realistic armor and penetration dynamics into your weapons/vehicles, PM me--or, more effectively, find me on Skype at "Olds RAM". It's not too hard to do and frankly you should be doing it to make your content clean even for purely vanilla action. As I think Bakerman made clear, if you build vehicles or HEAT weapons according to the Arma "conventional wisdom", they will be utterly hosed. I plan on cleaning up the RAM wiki and linking it on the front page so people can get a proper how-to (along with some of the other insights we picked up in the process of researching RAM).

It will work to a partial extent. Though not with the kind of detail you can make with modded content (RHS, etc.). No, it's a good question. BI vehicles will work better than they used to because they have been "cleaning up their act" with regard to armored vehicles (at least). Modded content will always have the superior potential however, because it can implement all the features and recommendations--whereas we have no control over what BI does. I'm not too worried about the discrepancy because the BI vehicles are in a future-fictional setting. So what does it mean to quibble about "realism" there? However, if you want to make a sim-accurate historical vehicle (an M1A1 firing an M829A1 sabot, or a T-34/85 firing a BR-365, etc.)--we are giving you have the ability to do so.

Apologies for the delay everybody, but we ran into some unforseen problems with the way damage is handled in Arma 3. Surprise surprise! :D Actually a lot of people think this feature is broken--but after a bunch of testing, we figured out how to make damage consistent. The basic guidelines for doing so have been added to the Biki. Anyway, this delayed our damage and hitpoint standardization process and we are still getting things back on track. Once we've reworked the formulas, we will be releasing as promised. Just at the moment both Bakerman and I are also low on free time so the answer to progress is "slowly but surely".

In general, I think everyone's trying to avoid causing breakage so players can use multiple mods wherever possible. But Pufu is right, we shouldn't jump the gun as ACE is in early stages. Let's wait and see.

What Fennek said--a huge amount of work with little practical payoff. Watch people playing Steel Beasts Pro--which has much more highly detailed and working interiors--players spend barely any time there: they are in optics view or unbuttoned. (Just my personal opinion here, not an RHS one).

I take it he means "e.g." (= for example)

Not currently--our approaches are quite different. I'm guessing one or two ACE modules will end up incompatible with RAM (& RHS)--so Hydro's suggestion is a good one: simply remove those and use whatever else you'd like from ACE. We'll post specifics once we identify them.

FYI RHS'ians: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?171586-Real-Armor-Mod&p=2936112&viewfull=1#post2936112

The upcoming version of RAM in the not-too-distant future will synchronize damage behavior between RHS & vanilla vehicles for you (armor, anti-tank weapons, and large calibers). So you will be able to mix and match vanilla with RHS if that's your thing. This will undoubtedly take at least 1-2 more passes before it gets properly polished for both RAM and RHS, but it's progressing. :)

Nerdwing FTW. No other posts are necessary.

I don't know about, say RHS or CUP, but it's not possible to do with stock vehicles even if we wanted because we don't have access to the unpacked P3D's.

If all goes as planned, Chairborne--and any other mod-maker--will be able to make their vehicles and weapons compatible with the RHS armor & penetration system once we release the new version of RAM. That being said, IMHO modders working on these types of vehicles should seriously consider working with either RHS, or CUP, or both. I don't think it makes sense to have, say, a dozen M1 Abrams mods... but maybe that's just me. Regardless, much respect for the work that has gone into these. I have a soft-spot for the BRDM. :)

We hear you guys, believe me. This process will come in fits and starts--you know how hard it is to standardize across mods. RHS will be a big step forward as it has such a large content database, and they are really dedicated to adding stuff. Bakerman is planning the new code carefully so that RHS and RAM will stay compatible. That is to say: if you have a RAM-compatible mod, it will seamlessly work with the slightly stripped down version of RAM RHS uses internally.

I haven't dug through his PBO's, but from the wiki it doesn't look like AGM interferes with anything that RAM does... yet. I suspect it carries quite a risk of compatibility problems b/c it messes with lots of things, though. We will review this in more detail as we proceed with the new version as there are certainly people who play with RHS + AGM.

:devil:

The whole crew-damage issue is on the research agenda. But that won't be until after the new version is out. ;)

It is Z, we're just testing the new version for network performance.

Not yet as far as I know--any recent breakage appears to be related to PhysX (which does not affect RAM). I haven't tested it properly though as we're pretty busy with the next version. :blush:

If you are interested in potentially testing an upcoming release in multiplayer, please PM me.

As we build toward a proper release, I'm going to remind modders to look at all the updated material in the Arma Damage & Penetration Description and particularly to the Armor Recommendations Section This should be of great interest to anyone working on vehicles--especially armored ones. The information there applies to all vehicle creation, whether you plan on using RAM or not. RAM-specific information is being moved to its own brand new wiki where all your questions will be answered!

Thanks for everything kju - your work, your support, and your unswerving contribution to a civil ethos among us modders has been invaluable.