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Ryko

AW Core Staff
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Everything posted by Ryko

  1. This reminds me of my very first car accident - a minor fender bender, where I skidded into someone's rear bumper. At the time, I was convinced I was in the right because the driver in front of me drove erratically and stopped very suddenly, giving me no time to react and creating the situation that led to our fender bender. We drove out to the collision reporting center where we had to fill out a report form. "Where's the box that says 'the other driver stopped too suddenly?'", I asked myself, and the officer I submitted the form to. This guy clearly had heard this complaint a million times. He calmly asked me how much space I was leaving between myself and the guy driving in front of me. "Enough," I said. "Plenty," I opined. "If you gave yourself enough space, you wouldn't be here," he replied. The point of the story is - it's up to you to create your own safe environment. If you get shot down by a jet, that is obviously evidence that says the skies are not friendly right now and that's a threat that needs to be dealt with before you can try to get players back into the AO. You are the captain of your own ship. If other players are trying to get you to fly out when there are enemy planes in the air, or too much anti-air, or a SAM site, or WHATEVER, you have the authority to tell them no. That they have to remove that threat before you will risk your life (and theirs) to transport them in. Air transportation is convenient, but it's not the only way into an AO. Further, this is the reason we give you two airframes - everyone can get unlucky. But we limit the amount of airframes to give everyone a chance at the highly-coveted role of pilot.
  2. Thanks in advance for your comments and feedback; I will just take issue with your use of the word "monetization" as we have no interest or capacity to charge anything. The in-game "currency" is reward points which all players accumulate on the same equal level. This would defeat the purpose of having different roles. At base, the arsenal is configured to offer you the weaponry you're entitled to use for the role you've selected; in the field, you can pick up and use whatever you want, though you may suffer an aiming penalty for using non-class or non-faction weapons. Plus there's no practical way for me to limit ammo. The intention for the EU1 server (after several rounds of testing) is to make it an arcade atmosphere, so eventually yes, the arsenal will have all role-specific optics, and suppressors available without a need to unlock them. I don't know what you're talking about here; the DLC content is available, as long as the item in question is available for the role you've selected. The Promet weapons, for instance, are all available and unlocked. If you jump out of an air vehicle you are automatically equipped with a parachute that is removed when you touch down. If you want to take a parachute with you from the arsenal, that's up to you, but Arma does not inherently let you take multiple backpacks. If you didn't get a backpack back after hitting the water that's probably a bug because the code is waiting for you to touch ground. Added to the list. That's a bit beyond the scope of what we want to achieve for this version, plus it'd only be good for a given mission; once the mission is completed, everything would reset. Thank you for taking the time to add your feedback, and I take your comments in the spirit they were delivered. Looking forward to seeing you back on server!
  3. It is a good idea, except the Shikra can't land on an aircraft carrier (can the Neophron even?). Not that I use a landing pattern for enemy CAS - they just fly back to the airport and despawn. So we could say that these are carrier-capable airframes... hmm... this ain't a bad idea.
  4. Tomorrow morning when the server restarts the beta test will be using version 087:
  5. Thank you all for providing your feedback. I appreciate that you took the time and effort. This is something we're consistently talking about: what are the desires of the average Ahoyworld Arma player, and is the mission a fun place for them to spend their time. That said, trying to define the "average" player is an exercise in futility. Generally, you have players that gravitate to the "milsim" style, where things are regimented and meticulous with a chain of command; on the other side, you have extremely casual players who want the exact opposite of this. Trying to find a balance is particularly difficult. I contend that you have to have some practical limits to what players can and cannot do for a very important reason; mission balance. If you have a squad full of players armed with Titan launchers, machine guns and classed as medics and engineers, they can pretty much wipe out an entire AO from a hillside by themselves, and other players will complain that they just spend 30 minutes getting to the AO only to have it finish. Over and over again. Further, if a player can take any vehicle, then you run into situations where seven tanks are dismantling the AO. And again, other players complain that these players are ruining the game. It certainly isn't my intention to prevent players from playing with their friends, and I will gladly concede that the IA4 dynamic groups system, especially concerning custom groups, isn't currently friendly when it comes to making that happen. It's one of the last things that needs to be refined and improved before launch - but it's also one of the things that has the most bugs, and those need to be fixed first. This is a server difficulty setting that we can look at changing; right now, the setting is that the markers appear when the player's GUI is refreshed (for example, going to the map and then exiting it and then they fade over some seconds. We could set it so that the task markers are constantly on the screen, but you will potentially have up to 7 task markers on the screen (primary and sub objectives - all clustered together, secondary mission, personal waypoint). Feedback from previous beta tests is that this is overwhelming and that the fade model is preferred. If a majority of players tell me that this is no longer the case, I'm certainly open to changing it. The workaround for you would be to double-tap J, which will bring up tasks and send them away again, which will show your task markers in the game world. You're all completely correct in what you've mentioned. The challenge is to make a system which balances the usefulness of the asset and makes it fair for all players to have access to. I think we can (as a baseline) agree that there is a distinction between pilots and non-pilots. IA4 tries to make a further distinction by segregating heavy armor out from all other vehicles, purely because the vehicles have the capacity to completely wreck an AO, similarly to how a CAS airframe can do. As another baseline I've put a hard limit on four heavy armored vehicles (ie., Marshall, Slammer) that can be used by the two dedicated armor groups. If you don't think 4 of these vehicles is enough to tackle an AO then that's another conversation. Early testing didn't have these limits and we say cases of 6+ heavy vics going into an AO and wiping it clean within 2-3 minutes. So if we can start by agreeing that this isn't desirable behaviour, then we have to work backwards from that and decide how to regulate those vehicles. What you're asking me to do in looking for a solo-vehicle scenario is create a situation where you can have groups you can exclude players from. For jets and helis this isn't a problem because they are functionally solo vehicles. But for tanks, which can (and probably should) accommodate up to 3 players, it seems you want a system where you can have a small group of players who are your friends, but also lock out players who are not your friends. This is tricky because if you by definition want a casual play system, you can't then start creating barriers for these same casual players from playing. This is made further complicated by situations where a player solo's a Slammer, gets it killed within 5 minutes, and is then chastised by the server for taking it out alone. I welcome suggestions on what the perfect solution is on this front, because I hope you can see there are a number of issues at play here, and I haven't yet found a balanced solution which accommodates them all (at least, in the Gambler/Hitman context). I could allow for something like the Armor Commander can lock the squad and prevent other players from joining (or allow the AC to invite other players specifically) but then we run into other issues as I've enumerated. I've also heard it from players that they enjoy having goals to accumulate points towards, but I don't think there's a clear majority on this issue. I could easily be persuaded that the default setting for EU1 is that all weapons and gear are essentially pre-purchased and available in the arsenal, but I think that touches on another discussion point - whether people are chafing at role-related restrictions ("why can't I have a machine gun as a medic"). IA4 is trying to be a lot of different things, and I think what we're trying to aim for is what the "general/casual" settings will be - this is an extremely important discussion and I welcome it It's an interesting idea Pukamafin, but as you say there's going to be an issue if, say, we make the "Fine" 500 points and your infantry player comes into the role with 4,500 points. If they accumulate points while flying, it could be over a dozen choppers have to get destroyed before they're forced to leave the role, and in an IA3 environment one of the things the mods love doing is having to tell inexperienced/bad pilots to leave the role. This system automates that process. I recognize that it is at times vastly unfair (arma physics, Tigris spawned underneath you, etc) but remember that the system is at its heart designed to accommodate the fact that the pilot role is one of the most popular, and we're trying to let every player have a fair shot at the role. Plus, it's only a 30 minute timeout.
  6. They know what happens if they stay in the AO
  7. Yeah, that's not intended behaviour, I think you got unlucky with ambient AI. Remember that the mission also attempts to simulate that the entire country is occupied by the enemy, not just the AO. But three enemy air spawns is definitely not my intention there. Unfortunately this is the nature of a public, casual server; we don't whitelist slots, anyone is welcome to play any slot on a first-come, first-served basis. We have guidelines in place to suggest that players learn to fly offline, but we can only kick for wasting assets, and we have no intention to create any kind of system which segregates players. That said, I appreciate the point you're making, and I like the idea of reducing a respawn timer for vehicles that die within the limits of a friendly base. Reward vehicles are spawned as locked to the player that bought them. Are you talking about an "armor commander" in your group doing this? I mean, I can't possibly regulate how players choose to play their roles. I think the only thing I can suggest here is that you offer some kind of suggestion for how to alleviate this situation. Right now, any group leader can lock their vehicle, as long as it's a land vehicle; air vehicles can't be locked as you could create problems transporting players, and attack vehicles don't have enough seats to justify locking. Yup, I like it and it's implemented. I can't distinguish between a bad landing and a combat kill, so it's just going to have to be a generally hard exception case to try and capture base shenanigans.
  8. Reward items are tied to the role you occupied when you bought them; if it's a Sniper-specific rifle, then you'll only find that weapon in the arsenal when you re-occupy the sniper role. If it's a general weapon (like the AK-12, for example) then it should be available for any role you occupy. It's worth asking if that's the case before assuming there's a bug. Likely these are both ambient AI spawns, reflecting the fact that the entire country is a dangerous place. I'm also assuming the enemy has access to satellites, UAVs, etc, which means they have good visibility on player vehicles. That said, if you're finding that ambient is too frequent, then it can be toned down. Once AOs are secured, they become zones where ambient AI cannot spawn, so if you want to be safe (at least from enemy ambient land vehicles), drive through secured zones. Also - recall that not all enemies de-spawn after the completion of an AO, so it is also possible you are encountering vehicles that are not in the immediate engagement area of the AO, or vehicles that have spawned in relation to other players. Unless you have specific knowledge to know that enemies are spawning specifically to you... I am 99% sure I am creating tasks as CREATED rather than ASSIGNED, but I'll check. Not sure how this is different from current rules, which require ground forces to authorize CAS strikes. Is there a specific rule on IA3 that prohibits one player from authorizing CAS against targets when other players don't want it? Could be because you're not in the driver's seat, I will check. Not a great hint, either way. That's true, but I would suggest that players in the reverse situation would probably not be as kind to OPFOR... Next version will feature a glorious overhaul of vehicle spawning, which hasn't gotten any love since beta 36. It's particularly bad this version. Uh not sure that's true, but I'll check. This is known, because you're creating a new zeus module every time you enter zeus. It's on my list. They get a search and destroy waypoint when they land, if there's nothing there when they land, it will end with nothing. They will react to players through standard AI. If the AO completes, they'll be swept up into a move waypoint to the next AO. I'll check, I think they're supposed to get a move waypoint after the search and destroy waypoint, but generally, they land pretty close to the action so I've never really bothered. I can only move the goal posts so much. That's 1.4 km from player spawn See above. Ambient spawns consider all players to reflect the idea that there are loads of OPFOR on the entire map, not just in the AO. On a counter attack mission, the mission is on a timer, not simply a slay all enemies condition, because players aren't omniscient to know when they have killed the last dude. The mission notifies players that they have to secure the area for X minutes, and when the timer completes, the next AO spawns. Players in the AO actually get several notifications indicating how much time is left. Technically if there are more enemies than players in the AO when the mission completes, OPFOR should retake the AO, but I can't be bothered and it would probably slow down the game. If it went for more than 15 minutes without completing, then there's a bug somewhere. The possibility to spawn chosen specific side missions was added hastily and with no documentation, technically you need to pause side mission spawning before launching the side mission you want or else things can get messed up.
  9. double tap V or scroll wheel eject option?
  10. 10 to 15 minutes? Sheesh. I'm going to split the difference and go between 180 and 360 seconds.
  11. Hi Art3misZA, Thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts down. I think you're referring to the server difficulty changes which fade the task markers as opposed to a vanilla regular setting of keeping the task markers visible at all times. There's a good argument to be made that they should remain on a casual server, and we could have faded markers on a more hard-core (EU2) server; I'll pop that question to our admin team for their thoughts. My feeling was to go with the faded task markers to clear the HUD of clutter; If we went this way, it would mean that you would also see that secondary mission that's 18 kilometers away. My intention here was to remove the godlike ability the player has to know where all enemy infantry are, and exactly where and how they are moving, by simply opening the map. As well, it would force the player to perform some level of target acquisition and keep them in the game world rather than flipping back and forth to the magic map; the targeting functionality (while, admittedly, not perfect) is meant to bridge the gap, but clearly, it's not used enough to do so. My hope was that this was just something that would be adopted over time. The reason the markers fade over thirty seconds is because they are statically marked, and over time it becomes misleading to think there is infantry in a certain place when they would have moved away from where they have been marked. It's hard to say whether this has resulted in more teamkills; my impression is that there is an equivalent amount between 3 and 4. I should note that EI do garrison in buildings. The difference between 3 and 4 is that they will leave the building if they are shot at. It makes no sense to glue the infantry to buildings when they are being attacked, and in addition, it has led to cases where players are absolutely certain they have cleared a town when they have not found that trio of enemy infantry that are stuck in a building. This way, they will leave a building and engage, leading to a completion of the AO. Infantry used to despawn, until there was some hue and cry about how unrealistic it was, especially when people where about to kill an EI and it would disappear in front of them. Keeping them in the AO makes it a bit more challenging, especially as that EI now gets a move order to go to the next AO. No amount of coding is going to stop that from happening, that's just Arma. I have made some skill changes to the EI to be in line with difficulty settings present in IA3, and I have seen it result in cases where the AI gets into battles they clearly should have won, only to get shot by a player. The logic I've seen with Arma is that if you're being shot at by an EI, it is time to reposition, as they will get more accurate over time. You are literally dueling with an aimbot! You're wise to ask this question, and it's a question I ask myself every beta test. Nothing is set in stone, and changes are being made all the time to adjust to the majority of the player base; especially the parameter settings of the mission that will play on our flagship server (EU1) where casual play is the intention. One of the hardest things is to decide what features are "too hard" for a casual player and should be removed, versus what features are too useful or good and you just want the players to adapt to it. Again, thanks for your comments, and I welcome discussion on any of these points.
  12. Oh man. That would be awesome. But I fear totally impossible from Bohemia's point of view Re the arty mission: It's 45 plus a random 0-30 seconds between shots, so yeah, probably every minute or so. So what, double that?
  13. Moved this over here as it's relevant to the mission generally You're not wrong, but I think you run this risk of creating a different perverse incentive for Vortex to plant people as close to the center of the objective as possible. I haven't heard a lot of complaints about pilots being slow to drop players at the objective. I already have to deal with pilots who complain about how they shouldn't be held responsible for the loss of an airframe when they're killed by enemy fire. Well, this is already in place: So this is your kill assist feature; when a unit is Hit by a player, a variable is set on that unit that marks who was the last person to hit it. When the unit is killed, if Arma can't detect who the killer was (the vehicle died due to arma physics, or a cook-off, or whatever) then it should reference the 'lastHitPlayer' variable and award reward points to that player. But as you and others are experiencing, that's not happening. The local unit checks are necessary because the unit could be owned by the server or the headless client, and in an MPHit or MPKilled situation, the code is run on all connected clients.
  14. Pardon me. The laser designator is removed. The camera is still there, and if it isn't working for you that's another matter entirely...
  15. It'd be a post-release implementation and I'm not even sure it's possible. Aircraft can have customizable loadouts but it's not as easy with vehicles that don't have pylons. There may be away to alter vehicle ammo loadouts. Yep, I'm well aware of this issue. Killing infantry is pretty straightforward as far as recording kills, but for vehicles Arma is a lot more tricky. I have tried to implement some exception cases that track who "hit" the vehicle last when it died, so as to award the reward points to someone, but that doesn't seem to work reliably. The larger problem is connecting a hit to a kill; there are cases where you can shoot a vehicle but not kill it, but then a second later it dies from arma physics. The ideal way would be to intercept the score table and equate that back to reward points, as that system seems to work 100% effectively, but Arma has no commands that let you parse that data back out, as far as I'm aware. That's not ideal behaviour, and all I can say is that I do go to some great lengths to try and spawn enemy units out of the reasonable visual range of players. Enemies only spawn during the creation of an AO, or when they are spawned via ambient AI, but in both cases, logic is in place to choose infantry spawn locations that are at least 500m distant from any player. That said, I can imagine a case where ambient spawns in response to a specific player, and that 500m parks in the vicinity of another player, but again, it's meant to avoid that scenario. This is indeed by design and for that very reason, and it's carried over from I&A3.
  16. I think it does do that, but I'll check... it does escalate from systemChat hints to actual hints, I'm fairly certain. But yeah, the hintC would be pretty obnoxious as a chopper pilot Standard arma rpt spam Very strange, as this is a defined function in the mission file, did this happen before you relogged? You said you had an issue with alt tabbing during mission load That's a specific Arma/Bohemia function, not sure what's happening there. As I've said before, if there are Achilles/Ares functions that are being blocked just let me know and I'll add them to the whitelist, I don't test with Achilles loaded because inevitably I manage to pack the mission with it, making it a dependency
  17. I think in 4 there is an exemption for pilots who are flying; I will have a look, and if there isn't one, there will be.
  18. Hi folks, Invade & Annex has a main objective to assault and secure an area of operation somewhere in the mission terrain; and when completed, it selects a new area and creates the next main objective there. In the context of those main objectives there are usually sub-objectives, which add flavour to the main mission, which may also be mandatory to complete the main objective. Further, there are also secondary objectives; side missions which are completely separate to the main objective. The purpose of this thread is to document what these missions are, and to allow suggestions for new sub- and secondary- objectives. We welcome your suggestions for new sub- and secondary objectives, in order to keep the game interesting. There is a big caveat to these kinds of missions, however; ArmA does some things very well, and other things very poorly. Anything that requires the AI to drive from one point to another is just asking for trouble, so your convoy missions, reinforcement missions, and even defense missions will likely not survive from the suggestion phase. It's just too hard to figure out how to get the AI to cooperate with what you're asking them to do. Secondary missions can fail; sub-objectives cannot. Please feel free to add your ideas to this thread and we can discuss if they can be implemented. So, without further ado, here is the list of sub-objectives: and the list of secondary (side) missions:
  19. It'll be a little less obnoxious in the next version (in this version, they were disappearing in about 10 seconds. That was never the intention; it was meant that they'd disappear over about 6 minutes. New behaviour is as follows: 1) Disappear functionality applies only to markers in sideChat. Markers in Global, Vehicle, Group, etc remain as normal. 2) Markers prefaced with "LZ" are maintained in sideChat and transformed into a special LZ symbol. 3) Other Markers disappear slowly over 6 minutes. It wouldn't be difficult, I just wonder how many people will dig down to find the preference to do so. I'll put it on the list. It probably won't make it in for initial release, but it's definitely an interesting idea. Yeah, thanks to Stanhope I have lined up enemy AI subskills to be similar to I&A3. I figure there was some good work done to find the right mix of AI settings for that mission, which I'm more than happy to paste into 4.
  20. Yup. Found another bug that stopped the persistent mission from loading properly. It (should?) be fixed for next test, next week.
  21. Beta 082 change log 082 --- TWEAKS 1. Players who fire in base zone will only be killed if they are within 100m of the player spawn area. 2. UAV now serves as AWACS aircraft, and will call out enemy air contacts if detected. 3. Zeus healing a unit (CTRL H) will also fully repair a vehicle they are in. Selecting just a vehicle will fully repair the vehicle with this keybind. 4. Revisions on how medical tent and healing actions work to mesh better with battleye. In medical tent it is now an action rather than just walking inside. FIXES ----- 1. Players were not receiving revive rewards. 2. Some vacated group roles showing up as Error: No Unit. 3. Persistent mission variables were not saving properly for server/mission restart. 4. Occasionally players switching groups would put player to orphan group (Al), will now be regularly cleaned up and replaced into their proper groups. 5. Tweaks to cleanup script, should now delete civilian and enemy vehicles that are not destroyed but abandoned in previous AOs. 6. Unlocked FOBs would not spawn vehicles after persistent mission reset. 7. Error for enemy officer sub-objective if mission spawned in area with no buildings for him to occupy. 8. Fixed error in zen occupy script (did not supply center position)
  22. On EU1, all welcome, will probably test for a bunch of days or until it bugs out.
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