joostsidy

My two cents: - In your feedback.bistudio you mention that you want this feature because inf tend to go prone. I don't think this is a good reason in itself. A solution for that would be to prevent inf from going prone inside. You don't need a temp. turret for that. I use setUnitPos 'UP' for all inf scattered in buildings at the start of the mission. A BI solution could work in a similar way, with a kind of 'isInside' condition - I'm a little hesitant as proper infantry doctrine is to not stand immediately in front of the windows, but move a little into the building to reduce profile. If you scatter some infantry randomly into buildingPos of a building with doStop this and setPos 'UP', they can form a formidable defence. So a temp turret should not be sticking guns out the windows/leaning on the windows by default - Units looking directly out the window isn't always the best solution: In my missions, sometimes, a unit stands in front of a window (because buildingPos) but actually looks and shoots out windows across the room (because of random setDir), making a formidable opponent. I would like to keep this behavior possible in the future - I agree with 'It would likely suffice to have a select few deployment positions on each building, not every space where deployment could be possible for players needs to be an AI deployment point.' I can imagine some positions lending themselves for a machine gun / overwatch position. A temp. turret sounds great for that - I think my biggest complaint is units looking directly at a wall next to them! - I am in favor of any measures that improve use of buildings :-)

I don't understand this request. Explosions already have a sound delay. I think the wipeout sound now has doppler effect, which is not so much use for explosions, except if you or the explosions are moving in reference to each other?

Really weird argumentation. I don't believe many players will base their choices on whether their home country's military support certain assets. Everybody knows marines, landing craft etc. from popular media. I think the lack of ships is because they are somewhat on the bottom of the Arma hierarchy: infantry, vehicles, helicopters, planes, tanks, uavs/boats. I can understand BI not wanting to do large ships, like destroyers or attack submarines, because the BI terrains are in reality super-tiny and not suitable to medium/large scale warfare. The engine is also not so suitable for that kind of thing at the moment. But landing craft should be doable. The Burnes Mk10 is a nice example and proof of concept. But I believe there are some issues with it.

Thank you very much! Man, CSAT will not even venture outside anymore, they'll just stay indoors drinking coffee, reading the newspaper and working on their laptops (probably playing COD).. :-) As for news items, maybe a small wink to OFP times? Like drug/weapon transports intercepted to/from Nogova.?

LOL, I went from thinking APEX missed an opportunity to have a water-plane instead of the 'standard' civ. plane, to suggesting a new plane in a thread that focuses on water assets.. I apologize sincerely.. :-) I would pay many bucks for a - modest - Sea DLC which contains: - Two types of landing craft for the main factions that can carry vehicles as well infantry. With black, arid and jungle color scheme. - A 'cardboard' destroyer. No functionality, just like the Tanoan tall buildings. Didn't OFP have a cardboard destroyer? - Functional wooden boat based on the Tanoan wooden civ boats that you see everywhere on the island - Some random shit so BI can add another bullet point to the advertisement. Example: Vindex's idea: harpoon gun :-) I like Vindex's suggestions: another asset added like an oil rig or some kind of water unmanned vehicle and I will upgrade my offer to big bucks

> small things A water plane would be cool! You know those small/medium size propellor planes with ski's. Good for civilian or rescue purposes and even some (historical) military purpose. But probably it requires a lot of work because it needs a new fly-boat class.

I forgot if I asked this before.. Perhaps you could make some (coffee) mugs in the future? I think these could add to a paperwork/computer work atmosphere. Whether it's a 'liberated' mug sitting in a FOB, or the personal item of a drone operator at the command base. I now use the water bottles or the paper cups included in the Helo DLC, but it's just not the same (maybe I like coffee too much?). :-)

Sometimes they're stuck somewhere so that 1-6 'return to formation' does not work. If it's your own mission and it's SP you can make all units playable, so you can UnitSwitch to them ingame and unstuck them.

I agree black hole darkness should be possible in the game. Making some types of object reflect less light will help this. In a pitch black night, you would never see that red car so clearly, it should be a darker gray (less colour) outline.

Good example. And it doesn't occur only at night. Many man-made (?) objects (cars, houses, uniforms) reflect to much light, they reflect light that is not there if you look at the surroundings, making them look slightly luminescent. If you take a ride at dawn on Altis in a white guerilla offroad, you see the same thing. Ok, there is some daylight, but the car is shining like a beacon. The car stands out just like your example and the whole thing looks 'off'. I agree with alwarren that is has something to do with dark vs light tones being compressed or exaggerated.

BI chose the current assets to refresh the game look and feel for marketing purposes as well as for their own design team. They didn't want to recreate blackhawks, A4 and Humvees all over again. The fictional names are to avoid licensing issues. In the beginning I was a little bit disappointed. In the past you could gain a lot of real world knowledge by playing the game (identifying RL weaponry). But over time I have learned to embrace it more or less. OFP and Arma have always been 'quirky' with strange things going on in the game. Now the game assets remind you to take it not so seriously. As long as the assets are there to create tactical gameplay with some combined arms, I'm happy. Of course I have my own wishlist of things that I would like to see improved. To steer the topic a little more on-topic, I must say this thread has at least been helpful for my motivation. Ive decided to post my current WIP mission on Steam (prob next week or so). The working-for-the-community mindset of the OP has made me feel a little guilty, that I never share the stuff I make :-)

Creating missions is creative work and this type of work is difficult to stay motivated for all the time. My couple of cents: - First do it for your own enjoyment, if others enjoy it, it's a bonus. I'm a little extreme in this as I haven't shared any of my 20 or so missions yet. I might upload one of them these days to see what it does. - Take brakes from the game, or work on two missions at the same time, so you can swap when you are fed up with one. Play a whole other genre of games, like an isometric strategy game for a while. - Set goals for yourself. Many times I'm fed up with the concept of the mission, but 'the fun' is then to complete the components in editing: configuring the convoy, managing the defence. Dividing mission building into subtasks increases the chance of finishing the creation of a mission. Usually when I finish a mission I'm quite fed up with it because of all the testing, but I know that I'm going to like to play it in a couple of weeks. - This one is really important: don't be over-ambitious. I sometimes can't believe what I'm reading in the modding section of this forum about people working for years and years on projects. Many times giving up after a long time. This is very unhealthy and bad practice as project management goes. I tend to want to create very dynamic missions for replayability reasons, but nowadays, my missions are more linear (only a little dynamic). There is always random stuff going on in Arma anyway and if I haven't played a mission for a while I tend to have forgotten the linear parts so it feels fresh. - Try to work within Arma's limits. I can't tell you the times I spent hours tweaking a particular helicopter landing, because it would be 'realistic'. Now I tend to let Arma do its quirky things and go with it. As long as the main goals and feel of the mission is correct, it's fine.

In general I have a good time with the AI. I play exclusively SP. I do use some measures: - I try to make missions a bit lineair, with a couple of paths to succes, but not totally dynamic. Arma 3 temps with the illusion of super dynamic missions, but these usually fall flat with AI vehicles getting stuck in ditches etc. - I help the ai out a bit by switchunit to the AT guy or the Grenadier and I give explicit directions very fast: you stand there, you stand there, etc. - I give the AI the more boring simple tasks like ambush and overwatch while I'm clearing rooms - With specops I turn their skill to max to compensate for their AI blunders, you might not do house clearing with this, but street clearing is fun and they shoot a lot of enemies in houses from the street.

I took a look at your scripts, looks very nice! Much better code and commenting discipline than my stuff :-) Have you thought about passing existing units to your script instead of spawning them? - If you use pre-created units (placed in the editor) you can customize them in detail (for instance with the Virtual Arsenal) and pass them to the script - With pre-created units you can re-run the script several times: I'm currently building a mission in which a platoon attacks, then retreats with a convoy to a fall-back position. They defend this position, after which they board the convoy again to fall back for a second time. It's a lot of fun playing as one of the platoon soldiers. A suggestion to add to your system: One thing I did to increase realism is to do an 'infantry scatter'. Normally, squads that are finished with their waypoints just stand around in their perfect wedge formation. I make them scatter in a randomized circle pattern* with some units taking a knee. It looks really nice I must say and adds to the atmosphere. * A random degree with distance multiplied by unit number in squad to make sure they never end up too close to another soldier.

I think this is a long standing bug (has been there for 2 years?), that I can't explain yet. In the middle of a mission you turn around to find out one of your squad mates has decided he will continue the mission using only his pistol. He has a rifle, he has ammo, there are no enemies in sight.

Yeah, It's so shiny that for some time I thought it was done on purpose, a custom 'bragging' rifle for thugs. But that makes it useless for soldiers to use it. Other rifles are too shiny as well so the shiny-ness is an important issue. On the other hand, a couple of black weapons do look good, the smaller ones (SMG) like the Vermin, look black and matte (not shiny), so that proves it's doable.

I have written a lot of code on dynamic convoys, motinf attacks, mechinf attacks, transp. helo attack etc.. It is one of my favorite subjects :-) My dynamic scripts are elaborate and not so user friendly, so it's very nice that someone releases a script that can be easily used and practiced with. > more than one vehicle Because vehicles have problems driving in convoys and attacking in group formations, I choose to fire scripts for individual vehicles with markers that are close together. So it appears they drive in convoy and attack together but they are not grouped together. In Arma3, vehicles groups easily become a big mess.. If its just trucks on the road you might get away with it ;-) A simple thing that maintains attack cohesion and avoids vehicles clashing and driving over their own infantry is to limit their speed. Limit overall speed, or just in the attack phase. Just the command _veh limitSpeed _x will do this. When I get home I will take a look at your script, I'm interested!

I am wondering if rifle sounds are still subject to improvement. - I like the Spar rifles very much, but it's a shame that the Spar 17 has the same sound as the Chinese rifle. I would prefer a new sound for the Spar 17. Maybe based on the Spar-16, or even the same sound as the Spar-16. - I like the original heavy caliber sniper rifles very much (M320, Lynx), however I feel their sound is a bit underwhelming. The sound is too short? I hope this can be improved in some way.

Just flying around in a helicopter on my own and enjoying the scenery is one of my favorite pastimes :-) But having said that, I still think there are problems and I am seriously interested what you think about the following: - I like Altis and Tanoa very much, but I am not happy at all about the lighting on Stratis. Do you play on Stratis? What do you think of the lighting there? If not, will you try it and see? - I still think the lighting on non-natural objects is too bright. So the terrain of Altis can look beautiful, but things like traffic signs, bricks, uniforms, weapons, cars etc. look too bright, almost luminescent. Especially if their textures contain white or light colors. What are your feelings about this?

I have made promotional videos for games and education. Nr. 1 rule is: keep it short! 7 minutes is really long for a video about game settings. A simple game promotional video is ideally 1 or 2 minutes. An educational video explaining one concept should be under five minutes ideally. This is if you care about the content and the video is not so much about you as a person. If you also want to present yourself, go ahead, it's your video. But online, many people just want the facts as quickly as possible, they are either going to click through your vid to hurry up or worse, go to another vid! I hope you see this as friendly advice. People like your video now, but maybe you can reach even more people if you experiment once with a really to-the-point video in the future. :-)

But then you come home and test it and it has a thousand bugs? :-(

Is the visual upgrade and/or config system for the maps still being tweaked? My current settings look ok for Altis and Tanoa, so they are optimized for my screen/eye. But after a long time returning to play a mission on Stratis, I was surprised by how bad Stratis looks. Especially at close to medium range the terrain seems to consist of blotches of weird color, mostly yellow and green that do not look natural. From medium distance, terrain sometimes looks like yellow/green moss covered rocks rather than patches of dirt/grass. Trees and bushes seem 'stuck on' instead of being part of the landscape. When I first started playing, I started on Stratis, because Altis seemed overwhelmingly huge at the time. Stratis was a little Island, consisting of compressed beauty. I would very much like to get it back.

At the beginning you said this was going to be a no-nonsense, no fills guide to get the most fps for competitive play. After that you could have started explaining the settings. Instead you rambled on for two more minutes about what this video is not about. The first settings screen starts at 1.55 min! I understand that you want to create a kind of atmosphere for the video, but I recommend cutting the fluff down to just a few lines. People differ in their preferences, but I like true no-nonsense, no fill guides!

I generally agree with you. A couple of points: - All the vehicles look brighter since the visual upgrade, definitely too bright and not like military (camouflaged) vehicles - I don't mind the lack of dirt too much, but you are right that most of them look factory fresh. It's a bit weird. - However BI does add wear/dirt details to vehicles. I think the planes and helicopters have exhaust debris on the hull. The light strike vehicles have dirt on their tires. I'm not too happy about this because if you drive such a vehicle on Altis, you see Tanoa's red dirt on the tires. I BI at least darkened the vehicles a bit like before the visual update, I would be a lot happier.

'Recently things have been happening'. A very true statement. 'There are some things at stake'. Why do you make such a vague post? It doesn't sound trustworthy at all. I'm going to ask my Nigerian Prince friend what he thinks of your post.