Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Thaeris on April 08, 2010, 02:37:51 pm
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So, after determining that I hate generic "shooters," I determined that an actual combat "simulator" would be more than acceptable after playing a bit of Rainbow Six 3, which wasn't all that bad for a shooter. But does such a thing exist?
...Yes, yes it does. Armed Assault/Operation Flashpoint is probably the best known and most economical of all the infantry/ground combat simulators out there. Thus, I decided to try the demo, which has raped my computer as expected.
Despite turning almost every visual setting to nil and nixing most of the system-heavy processes, movement on foot is... really shifty. Flight was better, but even then performance wasn't great. Moral of the story? Don't buy your computer from Best Buy. :p Heck, recommended minimum requirements include a 2GHz processor and a Nvidia Go 7800 - I have a 1.6GHz processor and a Go 7600... I envy you desktop people. :lol:
Flight was what I was really looking into testing, as ARMA is cited as being rather realistic in many aspects. Though helicopter flight is probably much more realistic than in some crappy shooter like BF2, it's still very much simplified. However, I must concede that it was good fun. And despite the fact that it doesn't quite live up to my standards for flight realism, it does a good job of capturing the feel of flight visually, which lets one overlook the shortcomings in terms of controls. I'm also rather thankful for being able to use my stick for flight, which tracks infinitely better than the mouse in-game. I'm certain I could assign axis/key assigments for aircraft if I try to play with the game more...
In short, I think I'd like this sim if I could run it decently, but I don't think that's oing to happen with my computer - this is the same with most modern FPS games. Heck, even Mount & Blade didn't run terribly well (although I tried to get more visual features going at a given time), though I could run that with no problem I imagine... Does anyone else play or at least has tried ARMA or ARMA 2?
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I found this a very good game,
except when half way through a level, get shot in the head, and no idea, what happened :(
lol
Great game though :)
You should trry operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, also very good :)
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I agree... If I could play it decently! :p
Also, it looks as if you've been emasculated by Karajorma! :shaking:
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I agree... If I could play it decently! :p
Also, it looks as if you've been emasculated by Karajorma! :shaking:
he is jealous of my large size
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I have ARMA II after playing the original OFP + expansions to death but I've not played it much since January because of problems running it, despite playing it on an i7 920 PC, which I spent over £1100 building in December. :(
I rarely get above 25 fps and in cities it crawls / crashes to desktop. PROPER's graphical mods help a little with smoothing framerates but the game is heavily CPU dependent and does not recognise memory above 2 GB, or a certain amount of multiple cores, which is pretty bad for what is a fairly recent game and also that it's developed to fully support 64-bit systems. It's also hard disk dependent resorting in people running the game from ramdisks (those who are lucky enough to own 10 Gb+ of performance RAM) or buying SSD drives for the game just to get it to run stable and above 30 fps. Funnily enough it seems that the people on XP 32/64 bit with Dual Cores get generally better performance than people like me on Windows 7 64-bit with Quad/i5/i7 CPUs. I'll be overclocking from 2.6 Ghz to 3 Ghz or greater soon, which will hopefully help.
It's a shame because in the missions that are playable it is good fun. On the plus side at least BIS seem fairly interested in bug fixing even though patches take a while to come out between Beta releases. Looking at their bug reporting system they are gradually acknowledging and fixing the problems.
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I get the impression they're a pretty good company from looking at their site and their forum.
...Like I said, I'd happily pay $13.30 USD (otherwise known as dirt cheap...) on Amazon if this would perform decently on my computer. I suppose I could try and put it on the new computer in the other room, but I don't think that would go over well. That was actually an... Office Max or Staples?... HP (and I find that HPs in general are pretty good, I've got one after all), but for a pretty reasonable $600 the thing is packing a quad core, 4GB or RAM, etc... I'd love to put X-Plane on that thing....
What's the DRM on ARMA/ARMA 2 like, if any?
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Arma 2 only has DRM if you buy it off Steam, AFAIK.
Which is a fairly benign form of DRM.
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If I ever find the need to get this then, it will be from Amazon then. :D
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Well just spotted that patch 1.07 is out now which has finally added much improved multicore & 64-bit support. Had a short play and for me it's running a lot better and I now have higher and smoother framerates! Good to see a developer making significant improvements and also listening to their customers. :yes:
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Ah, ArmA.
I'm a flashpoint veteran, loved ArmA 1 (Had a friend create an awesome co-op campaign for usage amongst a small group of friends following a specific airborne division during a re-imagined Sahrani conflict), and love ArmA 2 (More than OFP and ArmA 1 in some regards, less in others).
Operation: Arrowhead looks like it's gonna be great.
"Hearts and Minds, people - aim for either."
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Yeah, like said earlier, I really get the impression that ArmA's developers really care about the insights of their userbase in terms of their product. I'd be happy to give my patronage if I could use their product.
:nod:
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So does this game have in mission saves, and if it does, does it let you save more than once per mother****ing mission?
I don't hate myself enough to deal with a setup like the original Flashpoint again.
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So does this game have in mission saves, and if it does, does it let you save more than once per mother****ing mission?
I don't hate myself enough to deal with a setup like the original Flashpoint again.
One save you can choose yourself, and checkpoints.
If I remember correctly, I could be wrong.
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Would helicopter flying in this game be anywhere near as fun as it was back in Battlefield 2?
If so I might consider checking it out.
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There's plenty of videos on YouTube demonstrating helo flight. My analysis of flight was that it's not going to approach the realism of something like X-Plane (which is to be expected - I've yet to encounter a simulator that does everything right), but it was pretty darn good. Also, as a whole, even if the little aspects revealed that ArmA 2 isn't as realistic as can be desired, the visuals give the simulation an amazingly life-like feel of flight.
For an infantry simulator, ArmA 2 has a sweet flight model - it's much, much better than BF2 could ever hope to be.
*Oh, and this is hysterical:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP0af6s87U
:lol:
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That's mildly surprising, since OFP's vehicles were basically as arcadey as BF's, only less fun.
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For an infantry simulator, ArmA 2 has a sweet flight model - it's much, much better than BF2 could ever hope to be.
Can I do backflips? Or loops? And jump out in the middle of the loop, fall, and hit the helicopter when it comes back down the loop, jumping back into the cockpit and recovering?
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Aerobatics? Military Helos can of course do aerobatics! But stupid stuff? No.
That gets you killed.
That said, go here (http://www.arma2.com/agegate/agegate.html) and find the demo tab, and try the demo. That will let you play with the helicopters.
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I've played the demo.
If I wanted to be told not to do stupid stuff I'd go play more Falcon 4.0 Allied Force - which produces some of the stupidest behavior I have ever seen.
So, can I perform the above action? Because if so, awesomeness will not > Battlefield 2.
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Aerobatics? Military Helos can of course do aerobatics! But stupid stuff? No.
That gets you killed.
That said, go here (http://www.arma2.com/agegate/agegate.html) and find the demo tab, and try the demo. That will let you play with the helicopters.
What can you do in the demo? Is it timed? Will it shut off after so much play time?
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If I wanted to be told not to do stupid stuff I'd go play more Falcon 4.0 Allied Force - which produces some of the stupidest behavior I have ever seen.
Red Orchestra, man.
Y'know what I would buy? A Flashpoint/Arma installment in which the opposition is supernatural. Zombies, vampires, demons, whatever. That'd be fun. Or at least interesting. SWAT 5 was basically going to be that, apparently.
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If I wanted to be told not to do stupid stuff I'd go play more Falcon 4.0 Allied Force - which produces some of the stupidest behavior I have ever seen.
Red Orchestra, man.
Y'know what I would buy? A Flashpoint/Arma installment in which the opposition is supernatural. Zombies, vampires, demons, whatever. That'd be fun. Or at least interesting. SWAT 5 was basically going to be that, apparently.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. I read that design document for SWAT 5 (and saw the proof-of-concept videos), it was pretty sweet.
My brother and I figured out that the best tactic in an Allied Force deathmath with respawns was to immediately upon spawn fire all your AMRAAMs in the ballpark of the dogfight and then eject. I love realism!
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Okay, that is sillier than anything I saw in my few hours with RO.
Along similar lines, what Il-2 really needs is gargoyles. Maybe a phoenix and a dragon or two, as well.
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Hey, Dragon Rising is $4.50 on Steam today and it has zombie mods. **** it, I'll give it a whirl.
ETA: And oh look, there're zombie mods for ArmA too. Thanks for telling me, ArmA vets :mad:
After playing around with it a bit and figuring out how things work, I created and played my first mission tonight. It took about 2 minutes to set up and a half hour or so to play. It was bare, bare bones: A town off the coast had been completely overrun by about 150 zombies and a small team went in to take care of them (5 men including me as a sniper and an M113 APC).
It was HELLA fun. We rolled in and started laying waste to the zombies but of course, we started to run out of ammo. I told everyone to get into the APC we had brought along and was firing hundreds of .50 cal rounds into the crowds of undead. Then things started deteriorating. They surrounded the APC when, after we had knocked over some walls and trees trying to get out of there, we smashed into a house and had trouble backing out. They started clibing up over the sides and dragged the gunner out of his mount. (This I really couldn't believe, it was really cool . . . they don't have the animation for this but they do have the animation for the zombies crawling up on things and he popped out of the turret and did the dying animation and fell to the ground).
We finally got free and backed up. In the headlights I could see the zombies eating him and then, right before we left, he stood back up and started staggering toward us!
Finally the fuel gauge started to run out and I decided to park the APC overlooking the town up on a hill. The lights of the APC were shining down on the village, illuminating the horse coming toward us. I wasn't sure how many we killed so far but I estimated about 75. That left around 75 to kill, which doesn't seem like too much but when you start counting rounds and realize not every shot counts, it was a little dismaying.
I told the squad to get in line formation around me. They startedd opening up down the hill as I took solo shots with my sniper rifle. I tried to get as many headshots as possible .. but sniping's hard! Especially in a realistic milsim game like Arma.
The zombies started coming up the hill at us. It became worse and worse at it was now night and the beams from the APC were the only light around . . . outside that it was vauge shapes and movement. My troops started calling out "Ammo out!" and I head and saw them switching to their sidearms. Finally EVERYONE was out of ammo and the zombies kept coming.
I'll admit it. I paniced and went to the back of the APC to reload. That's when I heard calls out that my men were going down. I finished rearming and raed back to the front of the APC. There were dozens of zombies there, some feasting. I started shooting wildly. Soon enough, my own men were coming towards me. One of them got a bit too close as I hesitated in shooting him and he swiped me. The front of my outfit stained with blood.
I gunned down as many as I could but they were coming in from all sides, albeit slowly. The problem was I was in an open hilltop now, with all sides exposed, and only the beams of the headlights showing me what was in front of me.
I got into the APC and drove down hill to the village. Finally it ran out of gas in the middle of the street. I reloaded and listened to the moans drifting through the night air. A zombie popped into view and I shot it in the head. Then another, and another, and another. I calmly dispatched them and tried to position myself so I wasn't exposed, back against a low wall.
Suddenly I was attack from behind and fell to the ground.
As the "Mission Failed" screen came up, the camera zoomed to an above view where I got to see my attacker eatingg my guts. In a final insult, I reanimated and started staggering around! Oh the humanity!
Mmm. $7.50 is more than I'll pay for that, but I'll be surprised if ArmA I/II don't get a daily deal.
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That zombie mod is bloody epic.
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anyone know where you can get missions for that mod?