Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~

After upgrading to the most recent Nvidia drivers--the release that boasts a 12% performance increase for Arma2--I started having the same CTD problems. I discovered the solution for my rig by complete accident... If I have Post Processing (under Advanced Visual settings) set to 'None' or 'Very High', the game runs just fine. If I use any other PP setting, the game will crash within a couple of minutes. But at least Nvidia's claims of a performance increase seem to be true: I now enjoy an average 4fps INCREASE by using the 'Very High' setting as opposed to 'None', and of course the game looks better. The game also runs better in Windowed mode while Fraps is running, which is great, because I've captured some really great stuff whilst playing with you folks. I have footage of a helicopter making a nice UPSIDE-DOWN landing on a house (rotors still spinning!); and from the TacDom game of Oct 9th, I have footage of someone shooting down an enemy aircraft with a Stinger or some other such implement, which would not be terribly remarkable except for the fact that the downed aircraft was flying in a direct line towards me, and it came to a burning halt only 7m or 8m in front of me. When I have about 5 minutes or so of such footage, I'll post it on YouTube.

I hope I'm not out of line by talking about movies here, as I haven't noticed any threads about them... A film called "Paranormal Activity" is beginning to see wide release throughout the U.S., and if you're a fan of scary movies, I'd recommend it. The movie does a really great job of building tension and creating a sense of dread in the viewer, whereas most so-called "horror" movies these days are nothing more than a showcase for the goriest special effects that the filmmakers can fit in their budgets. I have no idea if there are plans for an overseas release, but the buzz that this film is getting--and the fact that it is a genuinely scary show--hopefully means that our friends across the pond will enjoy it relatively soon. If you've not yet heard anything about it, you can see the official trailer at the official website here: http://www.paranormalmovie.com/trailer.html ** EDIT: ** I found this video on YouTube; it consists entirely of audience reaction to the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or9wQrRIjmo

I really like Arma, it's a great game, and I can understand why people put hours into playing it as well as creating missions or mods for it. This, though, I really don't get. But now that I know it's there, I am going to have it open in my browser at work, and when someone asks me what it is, I'm going to tell them that we are now at war with Russia. That should make their day a bit more interesting.

I was only able to watch the first minute before I became too uncomfortable with the idea of how painful those bullets would be if they were piercing me instead of that scrap metal. On the other hand, I can blow virtual people to virtual pieces without even blinking. Odd, that.

Which specific file did you unpack to get this? I'd like to play around with this. By the way, the title "Breaking the 63 Entity Limit" sounds like the title to one of those slightly whacked-out self-help books. The following is an excerpt... "Entity 23 - Waypoints: Without Waypoints, one has no direction in life; ergo, life has no meaning. At the same time, the inability to deviate from Waypoints is symptomatic of a certain inflexibility and an inability to deal with situations that are uncommon in our daily existence. In this chapter, we will examine how to Follow Waypoints to Reach Your Ultimate Goal..."

I would personally like to thank the country of Canada for giving birth to my favorite rock band, Rush.

Hindenburg 2.0

I've been quite pleased with the detailed documentation for the OFPDR Mission Editor (see sticky post in this section.) Just in case you were not aware, there are a few demo mission files included (.mssn extension) that have examples of Lua scripts that you can modify to create practically any type of mission that is possible to execute in the game. Keep in mind that the scope of the missions that can be created is somewhat limited; the following is a copy&paste from the documentation itself... "You can have a maximum of 63 entities enabled at one time within a mission, this includes the player character, AI soldiers and vehicle entities. Empty or virtual vehicles count as one entity. You can spawn and despawn entities at various points in your mission, but that total should never exceed 63." So as you can see, the editor places a pretty tight limit on how much content can be used. You cannot create large scale conflicts like you can in Arma. That being said, I've had quite an enjoyable time running through 4-player co-op missions with some of the members here, and I can wait to see wait the creative folks here will come up with. I'm even going to take a shot at creating a mission myself.

Count me in. I have the entire day off; I have other matters to attend to, but I can work those in around the schedule for this game. Please update this thread as soon as you have a time-frame in mind? Thanks!

Agreed. I have all settings maxed, I use v-sync, and I'm running at 1080p, and my framerate stays locked at 60fps. I don't know how they pulled it off, but Codemasters did an excellent job at optimizing video performance. No matter what might get updated in future patches, I don' think Video is one of the things they'll have to mess with.

I had to give up on the idea of doing a video review for OFPDR because the game doesn?t get along well with Fraps. So, after finishing the entire campaign, spending a bit of time with the mission editor, and getting a small taste of online play (all within 30 hours downloading it from Steam!), here are my thoughts on Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising? Let me get my biggest beef out of the way right now: there is no Save Game function whatsoever in Hardcore mode. In fact, even in the Experienced mode, Checkpoint Saves are few and far between. I understand that Codemasters made this decision to give the Hardcore mode a greater sense of realism, but I don?t think they realized that doing so could lead to more frustration and less fun. The game is difficult; you will die at some point, and/or you won?t complete certain objectives in a timely fashion, and either scenario means you have to start over from scratch. I finally gave up on Hardcore mode after spending three hours trying to complete the third mission, so the next step down was Experienced. This made me feel like I was cheating for two reasons: there is a compass at the top of the screen that always shows the direction of any spotted enemies, even after they move out of visual range; and your crosshair turns red anytime it?s placed over an enemy location, even if that enemy is concealed by cover or inside of a building. Now that I?ve had my chance to air my biggest frustrations about the game, I?ll try to be more objective. Those of you who already have Arma (which is pretty much all of you, right?) should be aware that, for all practical purposes, you already have OFPDR, only on steroids. Anything that OFPDR does or tries to do, Arma does better. The only exception I can think of is the Radial Menu used to issue orders to your team; while not perfect, it?s much easier to use than Arma?s command system. Part of this is due to the fact the OPFDR is less complicated and doesn?t place you in charge of anyone else except for your own team. There are a couple of missions where your team will be augmented by a few people (I won?t spoil anything by saying more), but those additional people will simply follow the same orders you give to the rest of your team. As a general rule, your entire team will follow given orders, but you can also issue commands to just one or two members as well. The campaign is pretty straight forward; each mission is a linear progression of ?move to this location and complete this objective? scenarios. The fact that everything takes place in a big ?sandbox? seems irrelevant, because if you travel outside the fringes of any AO, there is nothing to see but open, unpopulated terrain. While the campaign does attempt to make you feel that your team is an integral part of a much bigger operation, it?s not very often that you?ll work closely with other units, and even when you do, it?s only for a brief period of time. The scale of the conflict therefore feels much smaller than what I think was intended by the developers, and the game suffers a bit because of it. There?s also nothing that I found that lends any sort of emotional impact to the game, even among your team members; the only dialogue that takes place among the four of you are your orders and your team?s acknowledgment of those orders. Heck, two of your team members even look exactly alike, and the only way to tell them apart visually is by the equipment they carry. The campaign also denies you the ability to customize your load-out in any way; you start each mission with whatever the designers thought would be necessary to complete your objectives, and the only way to get different equipment is to take something from the bodies of dead (mostly enemy) soldiers or from ammo crates (also full of enemy gear). Those of you wanting a bit more variety with missions that allow you to use assets such as tanks or combat helicopters will also be disappointed; the very first mission allows you to fly a transport chopper, but doing so is completely unnecessary, and the controls and physics both leave a lot to be desired. A couple of missions let you use a Humvee, but other than that, you?ll get from Point A to Point B on foot, or else someone else will taxi you to different locations. Otherwise, you?ll have to rely on custom missions to try your hand at the limited selection of vehicles and to use a load-out of your own choosing. And pilots beware: aside from the keyboard and mouse, the only other controller that OFPDR allows you to use is an Xbox 360 gamepad, and you can?t even customize its configuration; those of you with any other preferred control methods are out of luck. And while it was probably to be expected that TrackIR support would not be included, the fact that there is no sort of Independent Look option whatsoever is very disappointing. The AI is something of a mixed bag. At times, it can seem unnervingly human, with enemy units making use of cover or executing flanking maneuvers. At other times, the AI is mind-numbingly dim; enemy units will sometimes continue to stand in place even after you hit them, and while you can clearly see them and even hit them from 400m, they often don?t seem to recognize your presence even as you move directly across their field of vision unless you?re at less than 200m distance. On the occasions where you are spotted at mid-or-long range distances, I?m pretty certain it?s because of triggers activated by entering a certain area and not because of the observational powers of the AI. I tested this with the Mission Editor by placing myself about 400m out from a PLA sqaud; I continued to walk around them in circles, in broad daylight and on plain flat terrain, closing my distance as I moved. The enemy units didn?t start firing at me until I was perhaps just inside the 200m boundary. Graphically, the game is somewhat bland. It?s not terrible by any means, and with the detail settings at their highest, the models and textures look okay. The biggest problem is simply that there really isn?t anything interesting to see on Skira Island. The view distance is great, but all you?ll see in any direction are the same rocks, trees, and hills, and this serenity is broken only occasionally by a few very small installations. As far as the value of the game is concerned, this wouldn?t be as big of an issue if the Mission Editor allowed you to place buildings to create your own custom towns or installations, but the best you can do with the editor is to place tents and a few barriers to create small camps that don?t otherwise exist on the map. On the plus side, you can actually enter almost all of the buildings that have doors (but not the tents), and although those buildings are otherwise empty, the mission editor makes it easy to place units inside of those buildings, creating the possibility for some really good user-created Urban Operations missions. The included Mission Editor is quite good and easy to use. Without even glancing at the Help file or any documentation, I was able to quickly create a nice little PLA camp, populate that camp with a bunch of bad guys, and create my own little team that followed my orders to assault the camp. And although multi-player games are limited to four players for co-op or eight players for versus games, each player can command his own four-man team, and additional AI-controlled units that are allied to either side can be thrown into the mix as well. While not integrated into the game itself, the game will load very quickly so that you can test and tweak your custom missions as you go. The overall impression that I get from OFPDR is that the developers started out with a lot of ambition and great ideas and tried to squeeze everything they could into this game. Then, as the game became more polished, playable, and closer to completion, they began to realize that they were up against some serious limitations for the console versions, but instead of removing some gameplay elements while improving upon others, they left everything in that they could and made compromises all around. Of course, I have no way of knowing if this is what really happened, but it certainly feels that way. To be fair, the game is quite satisfying when it stays focused on SpecOps-style missions, since the interface and engine are well suited for it. I think the game would have been much, much better if they had done away with the open-world environment and instead focused on operations in more limited but much more varied and detailed locations. This was definitely a lost opportunity. Since the game is supposedly identical on all platforms (save for the Mission Editor), I would still recommend this game to console owners who want something more than a run-and-gun game. Compared to most games in the FPS genre, it still requires a lot more thought and places much more emphasis on strategy and tactics than it does on twitch skills. And for any PC owners that don?t already have Arma, it?s not a bad choice either, especially since the life of the game will be extended by custom missions and mods from the community, and at $40 it?s a pretty decent bargain. The game will also have a lot more to offer PC players that want to spend a lot of time playing online because of the Mission Editor, provided that you have friends to play with. But if you want something more, well, you probably already have it. Since this isn?t a formal review, I?m not going to give the game any sort of rating; besides, such things are always very subjective. Personally, I was disappointed with the campaign, and if there had not been those pesky PLA soldiers shooting at me, Skira would have been a very dull place. On the other hand, I?m looking forward to the possibility of some fun multiplayer games, and I?m excited to see what the modding community will come up with for this game. If you have any questions about OFPDR that I have not addressed, please feel free to ask.

Fatal_Papercut = Fatal_Papercut *** EDIT *** I had asked earlier for volunteers to run some online play with me for a video review, but Fraps and GameCam don't work with the game, so that review has been nixed. Just finished the campaign in Experienced, oh, about an hour ago; I'll save my thoughts for the review (and after I've had some sleep).

It looks to me like the guy without the shirt is under the influence of something, since he was walking a bit wobbly even before he got decked. And it looks like his big buddy in the white t-shirt was actually trying to stop him from getting carried away; unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

And unfortunately, most of the "fire" is from the flame war that practically every post devolves into. Based upon the "quality" of posted content, one would be led to believe that every 12-year-old Halo fanboy has migrated to OFP2 and the Codemasters Forums. However, the best "bad post" that I've read so far is on the Steam forums. You can see it here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/show...ad.php?t=982648 Follow the thread and read the next couple of replies from the original poster; I swear, we're all going to see this guy in the news today or tomorrow because I'm pretty sure he's going to go postal and kill his entire family and a few other people, and all because of how the launch of the game was handled on Steam. This same guy, Serph, also started a couple of additional threads because the Steam moderators locked the first one. My favorite part is how he describes his utter despair that a delayed launch caused, and all because he took a vacation day so that he could play the game all day. I mean, it gets to the point where you have to wonder if he's just making everything up. Unfortunately, since I know someone like that (a friend who threw his new 24" monitor through a his 2nd story window when he died in Prototype), it's probably all too real.

Update to the Update to the Original Post: Steam has the game available NOW, and they dropped the price to $39.99 USD. I'm downloading it as I write this.

Some of us were probably worried that OFP2 was going to be "dumbed down" due to its multi-platform release. I'm afraid those fears have been confirmed: On the plus side, those of you with young children can share the joy of shooting enemy combatants together! "Thanks for playing, kids! Today's operation was brought to you by the letters Sierra Hotel!"

Based upon some previews I've read about the game--and in regards to multiplayer specifically--it sounds as if the game wasn't designed with dedicated server functionality in mind. I can only guess for the time being that the console and PC versions will be nearly identical when it comes to features (mouse/keyboard being the major exception), and if that holds true, well, the console versions only support 4-player co-op and 4v4 multiplayer games. Anyone with a decent upstream speed should be able to host a game. Heck, I only average a 4mbps upstream (it's supposed to be 8), and yet that has been more than sufficient for me to host practice games of Battlefield 2142 with 16 people (they all had a ping around 90). Of course, I understand your concerns. There are still major advantages to having a dedicated server, and if no official version is ever released, you just know someone will find a way to make one work using installed games files.

I find it disturbing to see a forum moderator advocating piracy, particularly since the forum rules explicitly prohibit such posts. In any event, even assuming that the above hack works, it seems unlikely that it would work for long. Undoubtedly, some of the updates to the Steam client are made to address such issues, even if the Update News makes no mention of such changes. An associate of mine told me that he had been running an illegal copy of Audiosurf through Steam, but it only worked for 3 days before Steam sent him some sort of notification and killed the game; that was the only action taken, and his Steam account and his other games still work. Please tell me that this is the exception rather than the norm around here.

Wow, Steam is getting crazy on us now. So, at the T-minus 1 hour-to-availability moment on Steam, everything was still looking good for those itching to get the game ASAP. I came back inside after doing a bit of yard work and refreshed the page; now the game won't be available until tomorrow, Oct 7th, and it's STILL listed at $49.99. So unless Steam is your only option for getting this game, wait until retail.

If you feel comfortable doing it--or if you know someone who could help you with it--I'd suggest overclocking your CPU. Even a small bump up to something like 2.6GHz would help with any processor-intensive game. Other than that, I can't see any reason why you won't be able to play OFP2 with settings at or near the highest quality levels. A buddy of mine runs the same video card, albeit with a faster processor, and all of his games look great.

Despite the fact that Steam is not advertising or promoting the game, OFP2 will be available on Steam at 12:00pm MST. I don't know if they're adjusting this release time so that it's available at noon for everyone, but at least at some point today (Oct 6th) you'll be able to download it from them. The caveat? Well, I've checked around, and two of my local retailers that will be carrying the game have the retail price listed at $39.99 USD. Steam, for whatever reason, will be charging $10 more. So it looks like you can save yourself 20% just by waiting an extra day or two while the game ships to retail outlets. I'm not sure why Steam is handling the release this way. I just searched for the game on Steam on Oct 5th, and the only things that came up were the Arma games. Perhaps it was a last-minute deal with the publisher? It's not even listed under the "New Releases" section; you have to use the Search tool to access it. I'll check the price when it becomes officially available, and if it's still an extra $10, I'll just wait it out. In this economy, a 20% discount is worth a 24-to-48 hour delay. Either way, I'll be getting the game, and I'm pretty sure I'll do a review of it if I can get my hands on it by tomorrow evening.

My advice? Steer clear of D2D! To begin with, I downloaded a couple of games from them over a year ago: Far Cry and Serious Sam: Gold Edition. While D2D allows you to download the game any number of times, they only give you a license for three installations. With my last build (prior to the new one), when I went to reinstall these games, I was informed that I'd used all of my installation allowances and would need to repurchase the games. Then, against my better judgment, I recommended the service to a friend when this sale began a few weeks ago. He downloaded both Civ4 and one of the Railroad games--neither of which works. We've tried installing the games on three different machines, and both games fail to completely install. This was during the first week of the sale, and D2D has yet to even address the emails we've sent them regarding these problems. And if you check their forums, you'll see many unanswered and unresolved problems of a similar nature for many of their games. I would recommend both Steam and Impulse, but then most of you reading this are probably already using either or both.

Everything is back up and running again. Spent about 1 hour on the US Dom server on Sunday, and 5 hours on Monday. Good times!

So I was all set to get back into Arma2 today on my fancy new rig; I ported over my profile info from the previous install, and everything was running beautifully. I purchased Arma2 through Steam. Another one of my Steam favorites, Audiosurf, is the next game--alphabetically speaking--on the 'My Games' list. And update for the game was released, but it caused some crashing issues due do some sort of C++ Runtime Error. Steam says the solution is to Delete Local Content and reinstall. Which is what I did...or so I thought. Turns out, I deleted Arma2 instead! So now I have to download and install it again, all 8+ gigabytes of it. So, um, see you guys later in the week? <sigh>

Two other games you can get through Steam that I would recommend: Audiosurf and Osmos. Both are simple and addictive, and through this weekend, Audiosurf is only $5, so you could get BOTH games for only $15. Audiosurf would be my recommendation if you wanted only one of the above. Besides being cheaper (for the next 2 days at least), it features a two-player mode where one player uses the mouse and the other uses the keyboard, giving you the opportunity to "get a little closer" to your significant other. And the greatest feature is that the game is completely customizable, because you'll be using your own music library to create the tracks you'll play on, a feature that also determines the overall difficulty of the game. For what it's worth, I think the fact that I've purchased this game FOUR times says something: once for myself, and three more times as gifts to friends and family.