Directions relative to what?

I have to many times now wondered from what relative position the directons left, right, front, back is meaning. (Strange sentence)

If I am at one location with some AI and they say "enemy to our right flank", what is right then? I can have rotated a lot and I can't look at everyone to see who said it and take a relative right from his stand. So from what possition is right in that example. Now I find myself rotating nuts and he could just have said "enemy, close" to me.

I hope you understand what my question is. :)

/Johan

Hello,

There are a few threads here discussing this in places. In Arma1 where AI team would say "Man at 1 o'clock" etc and all done by relative clock system, you even had the clock show up on screen if you lowered the difficulty to show the clock relative to you ... and worked perfect.

So .. along came Arma2 which then changed this .. well, removed it and used the AI notification that you are confused about ... and guess what ... your not alone on this and this again proves that fixing what was not broken was a bad idea.

Its relative to the AI ... so ummm, yeh work that out when your in a tight spot, I never have. So far all it does for me is make we very jumpy as "enemy are around" and roughly take on board where that is, until I see or hear gunfire ... Christ knows why it went this way. I love A2 .. but if there is one thing that came in 2 that I think was bloody awful .. its this :)

Gone are the days team AI would say a direction and you could look that way and work your flanks :) I tend to ignore a lot of it now and simply keep the right formations, and switch when any detection is made if its near or close. Hopefully a mod will come with a clock system indicator .. I think its been talked about in the addons section.

Once again seeing as this proves thing again ..

BIS .. bring in clock indicator in a patch at least.

Yeah.

It was fixed, they broke it.

I did a search first becouse I had the feeling that I wasn't the only confused one out there. Which serchstring to use was not obvios though, and consecently, I found nothing...

I found an adon that shows the compass in degrees in top left corner and that would be great if the AI used instead. Simple and quick, don't need to take the clock orientation in account then. Just a thought...

What matter is that I now know that it is "ment" to be something that doesn't work in game as in real world, and I wasn't doing something weird. ;)

I really hope that BI fixes it again!

The communication system, BI introduced in Arma 2, was one of the MAIN points that lead to the absolutely devastating rating of the game by magazines (at least in Germany, eg. Gamestar.de).

So it is good that this issue is raised again and again. Not only because of the ratings but because often it's simply useless.

I say "often" because it's not completely bad. It's useful when the AI says compass directions.

But "Far to our right" or "Just in front of us"?? Where the heck is that?!

I have figured this out now!

You're supossed to look at the map. Use the compas and take a heading for every one in your squad. Add them together. Divide that with the number of AI plus you. Take the squareroot and ad som Pi, just for fun. Then you have the average heading of the squad and hence the "direct ahead" direction! Easy and simple, not to mention made in a blink of the eye! Hmm... :rolleyes:

Yep. Relative to the AI who calls it and it seems hosed as often as correct. I like it better when they give a bearing instead ("enemy to our west") but they rarely use that format.

Yeah, I never really understood why they changed it from an easy-to-use system to an obfuscated and unusable one.

The directions used to be relative to the formation. Now they are relative to the team leader, I believe.

Not relative to the teamleader at the moment the AI says it anyway. I have tried that. Perhaps relative from an earlier state while still on the move, but still, that realy doesn't help much either...