ArmA 3's Animation and Lighting Systems Being Overhauled

[Mearehear]

Look forward to it.

Hopefully it doesn't have a dying/dead/absent Australian online community like all the other BIS games.
That's the main thing that has killed them for me.
Most times I'm free to play there's only a handful of people playing... and they're usually well into a game so if I join in, I struggle to 'keep up' with what's happening.

Yeah I'm much the same, and resort to playing mainly in singleplayer, making little scenarios with the editor, which thankfully is still fun.

[Shinanigans]

Considering how poorly Arma 2 runs on High end machines, i'm dreading to see how Arma 3 performs. Almost guaranteed to be a buggy mess for quite a while at launch as well (still can't wait)

An 'overhaul' gives an opportunity to correct past mistakes on a fresh start. Code cleanup, if you will. Hopefully they make use of the opportunity because yep, Arma2 ran like **** and this was not represented linearly with graphics quality.

What they really need to fix is the AI sniping with AK-47's from 800m and that horrible network warping/glitching when AI were in the distance. Made sniping mostly pointless.

[Death Mittens]

What they really need to fix is the AI sniping with AK-47's from 800m and that horrible network warping/glitching when AI were in the distance. Made sniping mostly pointless.

If you didn't hear, the netcode had an overhaul and warping was fixed in 1.6 patch.

[meji]

BiS greatest problem with these games has always been the unoptimised engine, people can overlook bugs as long as the game gives an otherwise playable experience. Flashpoint: CWC wasn't too bad, lot of bugs and the engine needed a more optimisation but it ran fairly well. ArmA was, well a bug ridden, system destroying pos of an engine that still plays rather poorly on excellent hardware.

ArmA 2 was much more fun but again had it's share of bugs and engine issues.

Here is hoping that ArmA 3 really does benefit from player testing and that the game comes out optimised.

I tell you what though, besides the Thief series, Flashpoint and ArmA series are right up there for games I love playing.

Edit: Very much looking forward to the animation upgrade as it is fairly woeful in their games.

[Shinanigans]

What they really need to fix is the AI sniping with AK-47's from 800m and that horrible network warping/glitching when AI were in the distance. Made sniping mostly pointless.

If you didn't hear, the netcode had an overhaul and warping was fixed in 1.6 patch.

Oh no, i hadn't! That's great, thanks

[InAUGral]

I admit that without mods the game would be quite a different experience thats for sure. Most of my gameplay in arma 2 was using mods such as the ACE mod which didnt take me long to get as I craved more realism in arma 2. Arma 2 by default is still more realistic than FPS games and I found the base game quite simple once I spent some time to learn its basics. Arma 2 wouldnt be as realistic without me spending ages setting up defences manually (with ACE mod) or sighting in artillery for a strike and taking several hours to learn the correct method.

[Nekosan]

these are the reasons why mainstream gamers dont like the opflashpoint/ arma series.

slow UI's are just a by product of a complicated game

The reason mainstream gamers have never embraced any of the games is because they install the demo and it runs like total dogshit, they turn their settings down to stop the lag only to find that anything other than max settings looks like you're playing on a N64.

The UI is fast to use and extremely simple, that isn't what I was saying, it may be easy and fast to use once you learn it but combined with the usual performance problems it feels terrible, 2 games and 5+ expansions later and basic things like accessing weapon crates still feels (and looks) terrible...

* click middle mouse

* awkward bend down

* awkward lag

* scroll through 50 weapons to find the mod you want

* attempt to click a loadout button you don't need

* exit

* awkward stand up

At this point a lot of gamers are going "do they even want me to play this game? I honestly know people who have been driven away just because of the base stupidity in the way the weapon selection works (which the next game appears to have fixed thankfully) and because they HATE every single one of those stupid voices in the game, it's just not professionally made.

If they had half a brain then accessing a crate would go:

* click middle mouse

* weapon inventory instantly opens (character crouches in the background)

* select weapon

* select mods from drop down boxes for each moddable position

* click button

The same would work for the backpack interface:

* click pack in inventory to open extra inventory window

* drag items into backpack (with clear indications of weight etc)

rather than just having the inventory open and go HUUUUUUUURRRR

ARMA fails for the same reason most MMO's fail, people don't have any tolerance for junk these days, a game needs to work reasonably on launch and it needs to scale well with graphics settings. Default ARMA doesn't even have any features, modability might be nice but they barely added a single new feature over numerous evolutions of the game.

Those guys fell so in love with Flashpoint that they just keep making the same game over and over and over again, everything that ACE adds to the game should have been standard features for everything ARMA and beyond but it still gets left to amateurs to beef the game up (and they continually do a better job than the pro's do).

There's no reason they can't have all those features at launch AND make it easy for people to drop in and learn, if they want to just stand back and let the community do the work then they might as well just quit making games and start selling engines because ARMA in all its recent incantations may as well be Unreal Tournament 1/2/3/4/5/6.

[Gober]

everything BallFire Said

ARMA 2 is pretty easy to run these days, you don't need a top of the range PC to run it.

ARMA 3 will push todays' and tomorrow;s hardware to the limits but that's what makes it so great, beside it being a Super SIM.