Anyone interested in firing ARMA up? Probably the single most pain in the ass game to set up, but when its going, its a lot of fun.
Not helpful I know butā¦
I love ARMA! However my VR snobery may well prevent me from ever playing it again. But guys like nearblind and jedi were a commin fixture at SimHQ. If they still do their ARMA nights, well, it is really hard to enjoy they game more. Those nights, even though I only did a few, will go down as some of my more enjoyable multiplayer experiences. Good luck!
I rarely play ArmA3 anymore; donāt enjoy the base setting and outside of stock involves installing hundreds of mods.
I keep ArmA2 because the AH-64 mod I worked on was made for it and my motherās voice is the Betty.
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Iām biased here, spending hours modding ArmA 3. I think our Unsung Vietnam war mod is quite enjoyable nowadays. True some stuff is still from the old ages of ArmA, but other models did get quite a facelift.
On vanilla, I played that back in 2013/2014 on milsim and public groups, never grew onto me like ArmA 2 Gossamerās Warfare did.
Franze, I think some of your scripts and configs survived to the day 
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I think that if we can come up with a small(ish)/tight set of mods it could be fun.
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I think too many of those scripts survived to the day! Some of them date back to when Flashpoint was still a thing. I was a bit surprised to see scripts from the super bug I released in '06 still being used in ArmA3.
Yeah, Iām guilty, AERIAL_REFUELING/FA18_aerial_refuel.sqf and CARRIER_OPS/FA18_tailhook.sqf of the current F/A-18 in ArmA 3 start with //created by Franzee and modified by John_Spartan. Feels like ānever touch a running systemā, lol.
I think there are a few ācoreā mods that are required IMO. ACE, TFAR, CBA3, and the RHS unit packs. RHS is the largest of these, and its about 700mb for each pack, around 4-5 GB.
ACE 3 because it is literally the best mod for the game. Should be included in the base code.
Adds so much to the realism of the game.
CBA3 because you need that to run other mods
TFAR because its the best voice/radio mod IMO. SRS wishes it was TFAR. (not knocking SRS, but the voice modulation, sound distortion, etc. in TFAR is fantastic.
RHS for the real units and guns.
Anything else is excess or someone personal preference for a specific weapon or vehicle. The CUP stuff is nice, but they are monster downloads. And I really only like the maps, RHS vehicles/weapons are nicer IMO. I usually run enhanced soundscape, Dynasound, ASCZ Heads (tatts and beards), but those are client side aesthetic only and do not affect other people.
You can have a lot of variety, and run some cool mini ops with just these mods. Granted you can run some cool stuff in vanilla ARMA, but these add to the āIMMERSIONā. Also with Steam launcher, getting the mods is easy as hell. You can literally click on the server you want to join, and automatically add the mods it has running. Not like the old days of 7 zipping and command line crap.
If youāre into ACE, you should definitely check out ITC for flying: Steam Workshop::ITC Air Systems and ITC Air Systems - V1.8 - CCRP, Encore, Updated Compatibility - ARMA 3 - ADDONS & MODS: COMPLETE - Bohemia Interactive Forums
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Yeesh, talk about old. Those were originally written in .sqs.
Straying off topic, but what the hey:
I tried to convince a lot of people that using the old mechanic of āfake target, then moveā was no longer necessary once we got the ability to set an objectās pitch and bank, which allowed us to effectively guide a weapon to world coordinates without a predefined object to lock onto. This was an effective solution for a variety of simulated guidance systems, but it involved some complicated arithmetic, not to mention anything that needed to track a moving target needed to have a prediction routine (I used simple time-velocity calculation for mine, which worked well enough). In the era of what ArmA3 could do, it felt awful silly.
As for ArmA3: itās never ran well for me, despite having a good system to run it on, both when it came out and nowadays. The strange voodoo needed to get the settings just right to ensure decent performance are rather ridiculous and one of the more glaring examples of the engineās age. We accepted it with ArmA2 because it was doing a lot at the time it came out, but for ArmA3ās era, a lot of other engines are really putting it to shame.
Its stupid for me to defend a game I no longer play. But āstupidā rarely stops me on this forum. I just want to say that at the time I was playing Arma3, I was doing so on a 2009 iMac with a Windows partition. I ran it at (ā¦I can never remember common resolutionsā¦) 2400 x whatever the equivalent vertical happens to be. Ran smooth as silk with medium settings. The advantage I had with that old partition was that I had nothing but a handful of loved games on itāall my grown-up stuff was kept on the Mac side.
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Even when I was running it on my old computer, I never had issues with Arma 3, certainly none of the 15FPS slide shows Arma 2 would give me.
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See, this is what I mean by not optimized. Many people had problems with the gameās performance and it often took some strange voodoo to get it to run right. You would think that lowering settings would do the trick, but noā¦ Often, youād get better performance if you switched some details to high! For example, I first played it with a AMD quad core Phenom II quad core, 16GB of DDR3, and a GTX 680. Ran with stutters all over the place, even at the absolute lowest graphics settings. I got better performance by switching certain settings to medium or higher. When I upgraded a couple years back to an i5 Skylake, 16GB DDR4, and a GTX980, it ran about the same. It wasnāt until they switched over to the 64bit executable that performance really got better, but it was annoying not to have things as smooth as other modern games.
This was annoying as all get out to me because I had friends with weaker systems than me that ran the game with no problems. That doesnāt even get into the issues we had with the engine and scripting commands which were a real pain until BIS got serious about fixing them.
Needless to say, these issues kept me from getting full enjoyment out of ArmA3 and since the setting wasnāt as interesting as it should have been, it ended up on the backburner for the most part. BIS games are often hit and miss like that.
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I would recommend taking a look at it now. They have steadily improved and updated the game, even making a rather large upgrade this week (TBA). Iām on a i7 (skylake) with a 1070 and it runs great. As with all simulations, you can make it chug with massive battles (hundreds of units), but its pretty stable. Should be able to port your Apache mod over also, Ive seen tons of ARMA 2 stuff make it over.
We ported over the Apache years ago. It took a while to fix the annoying issue with modelToWorld, but when they did, it solved some of the bigger problems. We made it open source and some in the community have been updating it; itās even on Steam now. I donāt know know the state of the AFM for it as what we used was made for TKOH, which had issues being ported to the RotorLib used in ArmA3 (ArmA3 used a more simplified version than TKOH). For reference, hereās an old video of the problem we had with simulation type:
Thereās still quite a few issues because the scripting was all designed for ArmA2 and so certain functions like the TSD are wonky. Fixing/changing all that is a full time job and Iād rather invest that in something like an Unreal or DCS project if Iām going to do it; I donāt have the will to do so anymore, which is partly why we made it an open source project. The community has done good things with it and I do believe a lot of the scripting has helped a lot of people out, despite how clunky it is. Fun fact: most of the scripting for the Apache started as a JHMCS script set for an unrelated F-16C project for ArmA2. It evolved into a JDAM script, which was later turned into a missile guidance script, which turned into a BVR missile system with sensor fusion. This was all recycled into what became the target database for the AH-64, which formed the core of the scripting system.
I had really been trying to do a special project with ArmA3 with the Apache and while I made a fair bit of progress, real life impacts in the past couple of years made it become not a thing. Thatās the eye I tend to look at with ArmA3, because it had a lot of potential that was wasted for lack of imagination. Certain people behind the scenes I had a few disagreements with, but Iāll not vent about those in a public forum. Perhaps my ego is a bit big after doing a campaign for ArmA2, but ArmA3 has always felt schizophrenic to me ā it doesnāt know what it wants to be. As time has gone on, thatās changed a bit, but it still suffers from lack of focus and cohesion which, thankfully, is fixed by a lot of mods. That sticks in my craw because mods should add to the game, not be necessary to enjoy the experience.
Apologies for the long rant; itās a very personal subject for me. As you can imagine, I had high hopes for ArmA3 and felt let down.
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I understand your point. ARMA 3 vanilla really is pretty lacking. Without the mods, Iām out. With the right mods a group of friends, it has provided the most gaming fun/excitement Iāve ever had.
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The mods are really the only thing that saved ArmA3 from itself and I think BIS knows this. I know of very few people who enjoy the stock game and campaigns and I only really enjoy it through the lens of those mods. ArmA3 had a very convoluted development process and the plot/setting we got was quite a bit different from what they originally set out to do. Of course, if they had done what they originally planned to do, I canāt help but wonder if the entire community would have descended on the BIS headquarters with torches and pitchforks!
Anyhow, itās been kinda hard for me to enjoy a game like ArmA3 in multiplayer anyways. Iām deaf, so using voice comms are usually a one way street and that gets frustrating for people. Iāve always played only with a friend or two if I did play online.
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Honestly, I just started playing the ARMA 3 campaign, about two or three hours in now and Iāve been really enjoying it. I remember the Death Valley(East wind) mission being in the earliest A3 build and me having a terrible time getting through it. I am playing unmodded, I also play with FolkARPS in a casual setting online(our egalitarian farmers collective will be victorious one day comrades!). ARMA3 for me is extremely enjoyable, modded or unmodded. The APEX campaign in coop is a ton of fun too!
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I lost it at the campaign when I shot an enemy soldier from 5m away with 10 5.56 rounds to the head only to watch him calmly look over and insta-kill me with one shot to the face.
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Haha okay I havenāt experienced that yet, but it sounds like ARMA yes.
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