Armed Assault

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Berry_Racer
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Armed Assault

Unread post by Berry_Racer » Wed Apr 11, 2007 7:45 am

First off, sorry if there is another thread already about this, just couldn't find one. :)

Second, great to see the site still running Jason.  Seems as though not much has changed.  I see ViTaMiHn still causing trouble ect ect..  wink01
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But anyway, finally had alittle time to have alook at this game and had some questions for anyone who has played it.

Keep in mind i only have been able to read a review in PC powerplay mag =). (downloading demo now)

1>.  Patch 1.05 is out now and i wondered if it still had the same problems with AI shooting through stuff at 500 metres?  (mainly seeing you in grass type thing) And on the same topic, is there a way to make the AI slightly less....super, atleast for me and my friends low level of skill? (hopefully on the level of H&D2) :D

2>.  With the main story line, can it all be played in Co-op? 

3>.  How similar would you say the game play is to H&D2?  e.g alot slower ect.

4>.  Any other things you think i should know about, keeping in mind that H&D2 is the only shooter i ever played?:)

Anyway, any info or thoughts you would like to share about the game, please i would really appreciate any insight.

Thanks
Berry.

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Drozdov
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by Drozdov » Wed Apr 11, 2007 5:57 pm

Yo. I've got ArmA, it's a great game in many ways although the campaign is a little disappointing. You can't play through the campaign co-operatively, although it would actually be possible to unpack the campaign and convert the missions into co-op ones. Never mind that though, because you can make your own missions and it's great online. ArmA has probably the deepest teamplay of any game I've played. Co-op matches can be wrecked by idiots, but it's not so rare to get serious players who'll play as a team and even follow your orders if you're squad leader. You can set enemy skill level in the difficulty settings, but they're not so super-accurate as they were in OFP. Still a few bugs but they will be sorted. It's not similar to H&D at all, it's much more realistic, slower as well I guess. You can't run around firing at 100% accuracy for example...
"Nothing is more dangerous than a resourceful idiot."

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Berry_Racer
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by Berry_Racer » Wed Apr 11, 2007 10:21 pm

Awesome, thanks from your reply Drozdov.
From that and the demo, think i might get myself a copy!  smile01
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baff
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by baff » Fri Apr 13, 2007 8:33 pm

It's a different scale to H&D.

20 mile maps not 1 mile.



It's a lot laggier to play as infantry. It's not a dedicated infantry sim and performance suffers because of this. The engine is noticeably poor during CQB. Up close, buildings and bushes make it go all lurchy.

30 FPS is considered good, but the same computer gives me an FPS in the hundreds on H&D2.

On the otherhand view distances in game are up to five miles. Given the correct weapon system, (a tank cannon, artillery or a guided missile), you can engage the enemy at these distances.
I quite often design myself games with 2 or three hundred units participating. Enemies, friendlies and non combatants, even independants or a third army are possible.
As a player I perform a role as part of a brigade and not the 4 man squad found in Hidden and Dangerous.
I am able to play in 4 man squads, and many missions are designed for this, but it's the tip of the iceberg.
As I said, Armed Assault is on a different scale to H&D.



Armed Assault has got a greater longevity than H&D due to it's mission editor and modability tools. There is an endless supply of new weapons, vehicles, uniforms, missions and gametypes and multiplayer gametypes, maps and even animals, all home made and all ready for download to be found on the net.

I have a satelitte mapped area of Afghanistan, complete with local buildings, Afghans that speak Pashtun, local fauna architecture and wildlife, and also a model of every British forces piece of equipment found in theatre, for Operation Flashpoint.
I set it up as an RPG, similar to Oblivion where you can wander around and do quests and missions as you fancy, picking up new ones etc.
Some people have the game set up as a realtime strategy.
I Also have Satelitte mapped Falkland Islands, complete with the 1982 British expeditionary fleet, the Argentine forces, penguins, Newcastle Brown and all the rest. I have this set up as a campaign rather like H&D where you play a series of historical actions based on the events as they occoured.

What's available to download for Armed Assault is by no means as numerous as it's predecessors combined 5 years worth of user content. But a lot of it is getting upgraded and I am collecting new stuff everyday.



The grass isn't the greatest issue, the patch altered it a little and for the better. It's not often that I notice it. I think Once in over 2 hundred hours of play so far.
If you remember the single player mission versus the Japanese in H&D2, and all that long grass that the AI could see through but you could not, you will be relieved to find out the grass in Armed Assault is only 6 inches high.
(However, there are other annoyances as well as the grass. Updates do tend to address lots and lots of things, but there is always more issues).

AI skill is configurable, either through the difficulty settings or individually through the mission editor.



The gameplay is not so fast. It could be if it wanted to be, but mainly the travel distance between contacts is a factor. This, added to the general lagginess of FPS infantry, generally prevents you from ducking and diving, popping up and peak killing as you do more readily in H&D.
Another contributory factor is the engagement range. You have a lot more scenery to scan for targets before you dare move. Miles more.

In single player, the game has a built in time accelerator just as found in a flight simulator.
The enemy may have blown up your wheels, or as Special Forces or a Downed Pilot, you may be required to navigate 15 miles across open country using only your compass and map, but you can always speed up time to 4X to compensate in some way.



Another element of Armed Assault that is more exciting than H&D other than the flexibility of the modification tools is the use of vehicles.

They are integral to most battles. You will spend as much time commanding a tank or a jeep, flying helicopters and driving trucks as you will running around glued to the back of a rifle.

Armed Assault is a B grade Tank Simulator, a B grade Flight Simulator, and a B grade Infantry Simulator. But it is all these things at once, making it an A grade battlefield simulator.


I spent 10 hours on my LAN last night with some friends crewing a Hind helicopter, 1 pilot, 1 gunner and 8 infantry.
The Hind was user created, so was the scenario. I downloaded the Hind and made the scenario myself. The mission editor is easy to use, it took me 20 minutes.
A lot of vocal communication was required between the pilot and the gunner to operate effectively, and even the ground troops needed to chip in with the spotting of targets, and tricky landings.
We would pop coloured smoke grenades to signal our position when ready for extraction.
The gunner would spot us, and then between us, we would guide the pilot in.


While a massively more complex piece of software, Armed Assault is a much less polished game than H&D.
It very much feels like work in progress.
Updates are regular and needed.

Despite being 5 years old, I last added a new mod (The Falklands mod) to Armed Assaults predecessor Operation Flashpoint only 8 days ago. The company released it's last major update 2 years after the game released. The fan community is still releasing them daily.

Instead of playing like a storyboarded FPS, with pre-scripted adventures and missions as in H&D, Armed Assault is more like a computerised game of toy soldiers.

Set your armies out on the map and watch them fight it out, and or participate in it. A lot of the fun for me is collecting all your national units and trying them out.

For about £4,000 I can build one of these, minus the Humvee.
Image
Hardware wise this game will work well with default settings on a 2000 processor with a geforce 5600 and 768 RAM, but if you wanted to, you could build a triple screen or even twelve screen 360 degree setup, it's off the shelf technology, the only issue will be your wife.
Head tracking is supported for the flight sim brigade.
Last edited by baff on Fri Apr 13, 2007 8:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Berry_Racer
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by Berry_Racer » Fri Apr 13, 2007 11:45 pm

baff wrote: I quite often design myself games with 2 or three hundred units participating. Enemies, friendlies and non combatants, even independants or a third army are possible.
As a player I perform a role as part of a brigade and not the 4 man squad found in Hidden and Dangerous.
I am able to play in 4 man squads, and many missions are designed for this, but it's the tip of the iceberg.
As I said, Armed Assault is on a different scale to H&D.
This is just what i was hoping for :).  When me and my friend play H&D2 we feel abit alone so the reason i was mainly after ArmA was so that we could feel part of a bigger battle with AI on our side.

Armed Assault has got a greater longevity than H&D due to it's mission editor and modability tools. There is an endless supply of new weapons, vehicles, uniforms, missions and gametypes and multiplayer gametypes, maps and even animals, all home made and all ready for download to be found on the net.
Is there any other sites that you recommend for me to visit besides the main one, to find added content?
I have a satelitte mapped area of Afghanistan, complete with local buildings, Afghans that speak Pashtun, local fauna architecture and wildlife, and also a model of every British forces piece of equipment found in theatre, for Operation Flashpoint.
I set it up as an RPG, similar to Oblivion where you can wander around and do quests and missions as you fancy, picking up new ones etc.
Some people have the game set up as a realtime strategy.
I Also have Satelitte mapped Falkland Islands, complete with the 1982 British expeditionary fleet, the Argentine forces, penguins, Newcastle Brown and all the rest. I have this set up as a campaign rather like H&D where you play a series of historical actions based on the events as they occoured.
Sounds amazing!  Have you happen to of released it to the public?  If so may i please have a link.(mainly to RPG type scienaro)=)


I spent 10 hours on my LAN last night with some friends crewing a Hind helicopter, 1 pilot, 1 gunner and 8 infantry.
The Hind was user created, so was the scenario. I downloaded the Hind and made the scenario myself. The mission editor is easy to use, it took me 20 minutes.
A lot of vocal communication was required between the pilot and the gunner to operate effectively, and even the ground troops needed to chip in with the spotting of targets, and tricky landings.
We would pop coloured smoke grenades to signal our position when ready for extraction.
The gunner would spot us, and then between us, we would guide the pilot in.

Was this with all humans? Or humans + AI?
I wonder if you had a quick moment, could you quickly explain about Ai soilders on your team? 
Are they all under your control or do some find there own way about, following scripts and such?  e.g can you count on them to fly a chopper somewhere to support you while you just forget them?


Hardware wise this game will work well with default settings on a 2000 processor with a geforce 5600 and 768 RAM, but if you wanted to, you could build a triple screen or even twelve screen 360 degree setup, it's off the shelf technology, the only issue will be your wife.
Head tracking is supported for the flight sim brigade.
Great, we have one pc with a 6800 128mb, 1 gig of ram and another with a 7900gt and 2 gigs of ram so hopefully the first one should run it well :)
Regardless of if you have the time to reply again or not, thanks for the informed and detailed comparison to h&d2. thup01

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Drozdov
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by Drozdov » Sat Apr 14, 2007 4:07 am

I've a 7900GTO and 2GB RAM, plus an E6400, and I've not experienced any FPS slowdown in infantry fighting even with all the graphics options (except terrain) set to very high and a view distance of 6200 metres. It actually runs a lot better than OFP does on high settings on my machine, guess the engine is more efficient. :-?

What OFP mod team are you on baff? Not downloaded any of your stuff but it sounds impressive, hope you'll be making stuff for ArmA as well. I didn't download many large mods for OFP, FDF mod was the only one I downloaded, although of course I had hundreds of individual add-ons. Most of the time I just pottered around in the mission editor, but I never made a proper mission. I don't have the patience for scripting if something doesn't work after the first few tries, and since all my mission ideas were ambitious beyond my abilities I never really seriously attempted any. I'm happy enough just making simple 10-minute missions for myself. Got a detailed campaign plan for ArmA but I doubt I'll ever make it.

By the way that's the first time I've heard H&D 2 described as a polished game... damn bugs and glitches never got fixed.  no_02 Although ArmA certainly does have a few bugs and such, at least we know they'll get fixed eventually, probably sooner rather than later, and none of them are game breaking.
Last edited by Drozdov on Sat Apr 14, 2007 4:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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baff
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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by baff » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:23 pm

I'm not in any mod team, everything I have I downloaded.
I mainly source my stuff from the official forums.

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/i ... 92baa4a633&

Although this is a pretty good resource for Armed Assault too.
http://www.armedassault.info/index.php? ... itstart=16



I've never uploaded any of my missions online. They require the use of so many different addons and are so incomplete that they are all but useless outside my LAN. Similarly, since I am not especially adept with the mission editor, I don't have any cut scenes, and my event triggers don't always work. The mission doesn't necessarily end when all the objectives are complete etc. However, rather than learn how to do it and debug it all, I can just say "that's it, well played folks!".




I start by making 10 minute missions, but then it just organically grows.
Each time I make a new 10 minute mission, I make it on the same map as the previous one in a different area. Pretty soon large area's get fleshed out with a comboination of activites to chose from.


I prefer not to play in co-op with a load of AI, (although I often do).
There is quite a lot of micromanagement required for whoever plays the officer.
A a squad member is wounded, send him to the medic. A Rifleman runs out of Ammo, send him to loot a dead body or to an ammo cache to resupply.
As squad leader, I can spend my entire game doing this. And it's tedious.

If an AI plays the officer most of that is done for you.

Some people play Co-ops and even PvP where each player commands a squad of AI.
Ai can each be assigned a military rank so that their is a chain of command. (Who takes over giving orders if the officer dies). An AI squad with no leadership will no longer follow waypoints etc.




I quite often play as a squad leader just to bring logistical support to my team mates. Cart along extra ammo and fuel etc. Or sometimes to be an objective such as the squad they must extract.
If I could be bothered, I am able program all this via the mission editor instead of manually playing it in game, but it's so much easier to set up and adjust "on the fly" if I do it manually in game.





Helicopters or planes or tanks can be assigned to follow you around. Tanks being followed by Apaches is good to watch.

In all honesty, the AI isn't marvelous. They don't hide behind stuff under fire, and the pathing in cities is pretty miserable.
But out in the open field they start to show off. 4 advancing while 4 cover and then switch, with the other 4 advancing while the other 4 cover.



H&D bugs were only really MP related.The SP side was flawless.

Initially the MP bugs in H&D2 were impossible to ignore. Spawning in your underpants and stuff like that.
The core of this was all addressed in the first few patches.
There's still going to be a hardcore audience who play online 24/7 12 months of the year who have found every exploitable hole in the map, every overpowered gun and all that doodahand are wildly incensed and outraged by it all; (Lets face it even games with such extremely high production values as BF2 are regularly condemned as being bug ridden and unpolished).

In H&D2 there isn't anything obvious like numerous missing or incomplete weapon models, incomplete vehicle models tanks that upon collision can be thrown 200 feet into the air, guided missiles that head off at 90 degrees to the target, broken missions, Level of Detail glitches, helicopter controls that map the rudder to the cyclic and all the other enormous catalogue of errors that Armed Assault has. (Or had on release).
Just like H&D2 (and almost every other MP game out there), there are plenty of specifically MP related bugs too.
Last edited by baff on Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Armed Assault

Unread post by Trebissky » Sun Sep 09, 2007 1:39 am

The grass isn't the greatest issue, the patch altered it a little and for the better. It's not often that I notice it. I think Once in over 2 hundred hours of play so far.
If you remember the single player mission versus the Japanese in H&D2, and all that long grass that the AI could see through but you could not, you will be relieved to find out the grass in Armed Assault is only 6 inches high.

(However, there are other annoyances as well as the grass. Updates do tend to address lots and lots of things, but there is always more issues).
I am reminded (a LOT) of the mission in HD1 with the blown bridge.  One of several ways I did that one was to send a 2-man team way around to the left and over the mountains, and nearly every single time, those guards on a hilltop almost a mile away could spot my team low-crawling and shoot at and HIT them, with an MP40.  Even though I couldn't even see THEM in a scope.

I eventually learned how to aim where it looked like their TRACERS were coming from, and took them out that way.

One of the things I'm liking most about OFP is that there are NO limits on the maps, other than the shore of the ocean.  No more invisible walls you can't go through (unless you know the little trick).  And yes, the high grass, bushes and low pine trees DO actually hide you from the Other People.  I was doing the Sniper Team mission, and one time I was under a tree, a squad came up through the woods obviously looking for me, but I took out all six or seven of them from under there and it was obvious that they had no real idea where I was!  Then a little later, under a different tree, I did it again in the same mission with a different squad.  So it was no coincidence.  I also hid under a tree while several 2-man patrols walked right past, literally FEET away, and didn't notice me.

I also like that you CAN shoot while moving, although with just about as much accuracy as in real life.  In other words, it'll probably make the Other People dive for cover...

And if you just got done running at full speed, you can't just flop down and hold your sniper rifle rock-steady for that 100% head shot.  Or aim the RPG right at the turret ring of the T-80, either.  Nice.

Well... nicely REALISTIC, anyhow.

I'm still learning the ins and outs, and I'll be checking back in here from time to time for tips and such.
Last edited by Trebissky on Sun Sep 09, 2007 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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