Jump to content

RSColonel_131st

Members
  • Posts

    660
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by RSColonel_131st

  1. In my opinion as an "frequent, but not fanatical" gamer, i7 is top performance, but not very good at price/performance comparisons. And I don't know any normal app (besides video encoding, heavy photo editing or such) that currently needs more than 4GB ram.

    Tom's Hardware did a good article on gaming CPU for money.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu,2359-5.html

    For me, next buy is going to be a Phenom II X4 995. If it has to be an intel for you, look at the C2Q9950, forget the "Extreme Editions" too. I wouldn't go Dual Core today (except if you can get really a lot more clockspeed for same price) since even a dual-core enabled game might be happy if windows runs on the third core.

  2. If you can send me a scenario showing this stuff I'd appreciate it. I get shot by enemy soldiers I don't see all the time. But I haven't had any luck getting them "cover aware" in my scenarios. (demo editor)

    I could create a mission for you, but I have no clue what works with the demo. Simple USMC Squad maybe?

    For the talk on R6 Vegas - I stopped playing with the first Ghost Recon, but as far as I can tell it the biggest difference between these games and Arma is that the maps are "pathed" for the bots. There are door points, cover points, stairs and so on all connected by a path node network which the AI uses to figure out what it's doing in the gameworld.

    With Arma2, the AI is directly "reading" their environment. If you play "Trial by Fire" you might see a few of the enemy guys I mentioned peeking over a wall by moving up a slope. Which to me seems to indicate the cover-seeking is LOS based, definitley not of the simple "move to an object and crouch" idea.

  3. Adam, again I can only restate that what you are seeing is not what I'm and many others seeing. Just last weekend I got nailed two times more by soldiers I never saw. I also noticed one group standing in the open - because I had not given them "COMBAT" behaviour in the editor. As soon as I did they were hidden.

    I've played A1 to hell and back, so I'd definitely recognize if the AI is the same. It clearly isn't.

  4. RSColonel_131st, do you play with post-processing effects on? I turned them off after 5 minutes, they gave me the worst headache.

    Anyway how does it run for you? I have an intel Pentium D 3.0 processor, 3 gigs of RAM, and a Nvidia 7800 GTX and can barely get 20 FPS with everything on low.

    I like the effects (blur when turning) since they reduce situational awareness which IMHO is a realistic try to simulate that you can't observe enemy at distance when running.

    But I shut them down for framerate reasons. Performance is really weak, I have an AMD 5000+ Dualcore which will bottleneck at 15FPS in some of the included missions due to AI calculations, and the 9600GT - which runs other games like STALKER or FALLOUT3 pretty nicely, also goes below 20 FPS sometimes even with everthing on low.

    Adam, I don't have the demo, no clue what scenarios they included. But in the retail, there's at least one mission ("Trial by Fire") which has you assaulting a village with 6 squadmates (AI Group Commander) and they will all nicely take cover and move in leaps & overwatch. I've been killed by enemy AI laying prone next to a fence and bending their upper body around the fence post so only their head is visible.

    They even seem to use cover not immediatly in their front, for example a wall blocking LOS 6 meter in front of them, they will move up a slope just far enough to peek over that wall. The system is not restricted to hugging corners or trees.

    I don't know why you are not seeing this. One thing I noticed however is that you as commander should not try to micromanage them as in A1. For example, trying to send them into individual positions on corners makes them stupid. Best I found was to leave them in formation and just move ahead myself, or to use the "Advance" command so they can pick their own paths.

    The biggest notable difference for me is that enemy AI is not standing in the open anymore. I created a few quick editor missions with an enemy squad given a "Combat" behaviour waypoint in a village, and whenever I assault that village, I have to look hard for them. In A1, they would be standing in perfect wedge formation exactly on top of the waypoint, in A2 the AI scatters and hides, with just enough head showing to nail you. That improvement alone makes a massive difference for the way you as commander have to plan your assaults.

  5. Guys, I'm more than surprised at the reactions here. I've been playing A2 since about three weeks (German release) and the second evening I uninstalled A1 since no way I'm going back.

    The new AI in Arma2 is so good at using cover and concealment that I spent the first week getting killed by soldiers I never saw. Together with the new effects when running, it really cuts down (in a realistic way) on your situational awareness.

    The new editor modules allow for easy application of advanced scripting items, like Air Strikes, Artillery and random enemy patrols. You can also command platoons and even companies now with a "High Command" module that allows you to place waypoints and set behaviour for multiple squads.

    Yes, many buildings can't be entered, and the ground is non-deformable, so no foxholes. But that seems rather minor when you are fighting for a village or town against a platoon of AI which uses every bit of cover. Oh, and smoke now works against the AI. I've used it quite a bit was my squad was getting hacked to pieces trying to assault an outnumbered enemy AI team.

    Adam, you seem to expecting CMSF AI type behaviour in Arma. Forget it. CMSF doesn't allow you to drive vehicles or shoot a gun firsthand, neither does it allow you to send individual soldiers around, so obviously it does a few things better with the stuff you can do.

    This is the closest to a first-person warfare simulator we can currently get on the computer. There's a reason the USMC uses the same engine for training, so if you are willing to let go of the idea that it has to be a first-person CMSF, A2 might be the best military game released this year.

    OFP:DR will be OFP in name only, and likely fall on the arcade side of things.

  6. The strange thing about QS though is that even though it is professionnally done and I can't find a flaw in it as a Bond/action flick, it is not engaging on an emotional level.

    IMHO this is exactly caused by the movie being "too tight", no time for character development. You may like it as a fast action movie, but CR did with - what you call "slowing down" - IMHO the right thing to flesh out people more.

  7. Casino was IMHO a perfectly fresh take on Bond, and as brilliant as "Batman Begins" in it's redefinition.

    Then they screwed up QoS royally with the fast cuts, laughable villain, bad plot and just generally not enough Bond.

    Small example: Instead of Bond flying into Bregenz (which doesn't in fact have an airport) I'd have invested additional 30 seconds or 60 to have him drive into town, with a nice wide-angle shot of the Austrian landscape. That would be bond-ish IMHO - they always brought out visually interesting famous places.

    But no, QoS is almost 30 mins. shorter than Casino, and it really feels rushed.

  8. The insanity continues:

    http://wwiaircombat.com/articles/rise-of-flight-interview-demo-confirmed

    Rise of Flight, which looks to be the best WW1 Aircombat Simulation ever, will require an internet connection even for offline play, EVERY TIME you want to play. If your ISP is giving you troubles, or their servers are down due to technical problems, you won't even be able to launch a single player mission.

    So much for "buying" a game - we are soon going to be "renting".

  9. “Despite our initial enthusiasm, it has become clear that Kenji’s impulses and behavior are not entirely rational or genuine,” conceded Dr. Takahashi.

    Well, irrational behaviour in a computer is about the closest you can get to a technical concept of "love" or general emotion.... they should be happy.

  10. By the way, there is no guarantee that a game will continue working, forever, with or without DRM. And there never has been. The "risk" that you cannot reinstall your game in a few years because of a new OS or because of new hardware is far far far bigger than the risk of losing your game due to eLicense or Battlefront "vanishing".

    It's far easier to keep a legacy machine or a dual boot OS for legacy games than do re.invent an activation server for DRM-protected games. Like I said, I'm not talking about Battlefront here since you guys are cool in my book.

    Yes, of course. That's the whole point of using eLicense - we enforce a limit of up to two concurrent activations for each license key. Once that limit is reached, you cannot activate an installed copy on a third PC until you unlicense a previously activated copy of the game.

    What I meant is if you could in theory not allow an user to do a "proper" reinstall (first deactivating and then reactivating) the game in another hardware. Like, if you place the customer on an eLicense "black list" which disables him from deactivating or reactivating his two concurrent licenses.

    Not that you would ever do, but most DRM that the game interacts with can do this. The question is just how often the game needs to talk with the DRM servers.

    Cross-posted from the other discussion:

    Let me give you a hypotethical example of DRM rooted in technical and coporate philosophical reality:

    1) Lets say EA releases a game with realtime-downloaded Advertisements in game, like Splintercell or Battlefield 2015 or whatever it was called.

    2) EA puts into the EULA that you as user have no right to remove these ads or tamper with the relevant game files.

    3) The DRM recognizes if you disable the display of these ads and disables your game. You then have to call up EA Hotline who will politely explain to you that you violated the EULA and will have to pay 10$ "handling fee" to get your game running again - with Ads.

    Sounds implausible? Please realize that at least one EA employee, in the thread Dart refers initially, says he would actually prefer to see people banned from online games for their forum conduct at EA's message board. This would already be technically possible too.

    Legally this would be very gray, almost black thing to do - but so are many EULAs today, and no one has the money or time to sue EA or UBIsoft over it.

    Now, I agree that disk-free DRM for the purpose of copy-protection is the most convenient solution available. But the more DRM-protected games (activated games) enter the market, the more people are willing to adapt to further restrictions that do not just relate to copy protection.

    A year or two ago, the idea that you only have a limited number of reinstalls to a product like EA's Spore would have been unthinkable. Today, after Steam, FSX and "Direct to Drive" products have "conditioned" us to "live with product activation", it's actually happening.

    Two years down the road or three, do not be surprised when companies charge you a monthly fee to keep your game activated. You will pay more and be able to do less with the games you "own", because that's how the industry wants it to be - more income for less risk.

    I realize that RoF and it's developers (and Battlefront, too) are not EA, but it's just another nail in the coffin of truly "owning a game" (in legal terms, being able to exercise your license to play this game anytime, anywhere), and there aren't many more nails left until the coffin-lid will be air-tight shut around what we once knew as our "customer rights".

  11. Sergei, the original topic was this here:

    http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=449687&tstart=0&start=0

    Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned.

    Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature.

    All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but its what we have to do.

    Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account. However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key =)

    They denied this later on here:

    http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=457006

    That said, the previous statement I made recently (that's being quoted on the blogs) was inaccurate and a mistake on my part. I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad.

    Now the question to me remains - did he really just misunderstand, or was EA calling this back for damage control after a lot of users threatened action? Also take note that "Elearen" from EA later writes below the refutation that: tbh I would rather that forum behaviour did affect online availability. It would tie in with the TOS quite nicely.

    An objective truth is that EA *could* do this in theory. Technically it's all possible with DRM. Legally it would be questionable, but so are most EULAs these days, yet they are never challenged because no one has the war money to go vs. EA. Morally at least one person in that second thread working for EA would be in favor of connecting forum accounts with paid-for game accounts.

    And that's bad enough for me, honestly.

  12. Well, I would disagree on the last point (even though I really trust you guys).

    Microsoft them self decided to shut down the licensing servers for their first music store version. You would think such things are indeed rarer than a plane hitting my house, but they aren't. I've recently been looking at a lot of FS2004 addons, and some of the makers just flat out have vanished, their activation/key-generation/registration with them. You can still find the trial downloads but no way to unlock them anymore, which I guess for legitimate customers already owning their addons is a real problem.

    As for your inability to "revoke" an eLicense - I understand once it's activated, it's activated, but can't you still in theory prevent someone from reactivating after a reinstall? Not that you would, just hypothetical.

    In my hierarchy, no activation (FS9, Dangerous Waters) is better than one-time activation (eLicense) is better than regular activation (Steam). I can see myself maaaaybe buying games with a 1-time activation from people I trust, I'll never buy regular reactivation requirements.

    BTW, I would have liked to add that for me, it's not primary a concern for money wasted. I can deal with losing 50 bucks on a game every three years. For me, it's just that if I really like a game, I feel damn lost when it becomes unavailable. It's an emotional thing, not as much an investment problem. With Red Orchestra, I really loved every minute of it - and when sometimes I had organized a game with my friends of one of our favorite servers, and I couldn't logon to steam THAT VERY EVENING, it really stank, even though I lost no money and could play the game next day again.

  13. Moon, it's a bit unfair of me discussing this with you since your eLicense system (and helpdesk system) are a fair cut above anything else in the industry. So don't feel like I'm personally targeting you in my reply, I'm talking more about the state of Steam and other DRM in general. That said, some responses to some of your points:

    Not any more than the risk of losing or scratching or simply wearing out your CD. Or losing stuff you had on your harddrive in a catastrophic failure. Or forgetting or losing your serial code. Or buying a new PC which is incapable of running a game that is older than a few years.

    My CDs are in their cases as I'm only running games with No-CD cracks (legal bought games, of course). They won't wear out or break, the keys if needed are inside those same cases. The patches and No-CD cracks are on a second disk inside the same case. I make an image backup of my hard disk every month. I come from a professional IT Environment, so a lot of the "common" user errors you cite just do not apply to me. I can also fairly certain hack or mod any game on a new OS to run, especially with compatibility support in Windows which is pretty good.

    For me, the biggest risk of losing my ability to play a game are in fact the things I can not control myself - like the activation servers from the publisher.

    But for me, many industry DRM shemes are a lot worser.

    Like you said, DRM is a huge time & money sink for a publisher. Who guarantees me that Valve or whatever the others are, will not charge us in the future to reactivate our games on new hardware? They already have your CC details if you bought over Steam, so it's a simple change in their legal TOS and suddenly transfering your Steam game to another system might in fact cost extra money. With DRM (any kind of activation-based copy protection, to be precise) they could do that.

    Next bad example is EA. A while ago I remember reading a forum discussion that basically said their game logon accounts are tied to the message board accounts. If you get banned from their message boards (and that can be decided by fairly untrained, low-level qualified moderators with some personal chip on their shoulder) you lose the ability to play ANY games from your EA account.

    Get this? DRM allows companies for artificial made up, cost reasons or other bull**** to REVOKE your license after you paid full price.

    I know that I never legally "owned" a game I bought. But at the same time I could be nearly 99% sure that when I want to play my 50$ game, I will be able to do so provided my hardware matches the requirements. Nowadays, any number of reasons - some of them entirely out of my control - could kick me out of my legally bought games, which is in fact against customer laws in my country, but I could not possibly be expected to sue EA or anyone else.

    The ultimate bottom line is the reliability of support you can get from "your" DRM company. That's why I wouldn't worry twice about Battlefront's system (I still prefered to pay 10 bucks for CMSF Paradox version thought, it was cheaper). But the bigger the company (Valve, EA, StarForce) the more likely it is you will find yourself caught in bad customer support if something happens. And the more likely it is that somewhere down the road, they will use DRM to restrict our customer rights way beyond what normally would be our rights by law. Like the example of reselling games.

  14. Intead of repeating what I wrote at another board, I'll just quote myself here. It's a discussion about RoF, the upcoming WW1 sim, over at simhq.com for those interested.

    But: If it requires any kind of activation on a central server to play, or any kind of logon/online account, I will not buy ROF. For the same reason I haven't bought Black Shark either.

    DRM-Activation Servers have been taken offline (for cost reasons) or simple failed in the past, even from big companies like Microsoft. When they wanted to deactivate their first version of their music store, the response to 1000s of customers with 1000s of DRM titles was that they would not be able to transfer their music ever again to a new system or new portable device. The Microsoft Solution? Burn CDs with all your songs and rip them to MP3 again.

    I had a lot of problems with Steam and the new file system driver that came with the Red Orchestra release, often blocking me from playing when I had time and already arranged a meeting with friends. Very disappointing. Also the way Steam would force me to update to a newer version, even if it broke features that I already had liked, even if other people would also have prefered to keep playing the previous version on a few dedicated servers. These problems may largely be solved today, but the memory sticks. One of the reasons I didn't get FSX and still use FS9.

    I thus refuse to pay 50+ bucks for any software that will require a constant or even one-time online check to activate itself. I want to be sure that 3 years down the road if I want to reinstall one of my games, it won't refuse because the DRM can't handle the new OS, or because the activation server has gone offline together with a failed software company.

    There are still brand new games released with no security at all (not even a CD-Check, like Fallout 3 for example, or Arma with the official 1.14 patch) and I hope ROF will follow those examples of DRM-free games with considerable larger mass-market appeal and piracy risk. If they can't it will be a huge loss to me, but I suppose I can always use the 50 bucks for something else.

    To users like Schultzy (hi from another Austrian, btw) who say they are "slowly getting used to this online verification malarky": To me that is part of the problem in the current DRM-market culture. FSX and Steam started the trend with a one-time activation, which caused quite a roar initially and then was grudgingly accepted. Now people are starting to accept the next severe restrictions, like limited install activations (Black Shark). If we keep "getting used to this" then the day is not far were companies will pull trough with their new and most favorite business model "Software as a Service" were you will suddenly find yourself charged per hour and learn that you are actually "renting your game" instead of actually owning it. The current generation of DRM is paving the way for such abominations of customer rights, and you guys would do well to reflect on that for a moment before buying the next DRM-restricted game.

    Would be great to hear from the Development Team their take on these issues.

    And later on:

    Just to make myself clear: I'm not against copy protection. Disk Checks or even better a Dongle would be fine by me. The problem with Disk Checks I have is that I don't want to swap CDs five times a week and eventually break them, so I use No-CD patches for my legitimate bought games. But I don't mind that I need an original disk to install, and I don't mind that I can not "backup" (read: burn) the disk. I don't mind product keys either.

    That is all copy protection. DRM for me is different - DRM is, as you all know "Rights Management", so basically I get a limited amount of "rights" to do with my paid-for software as I please. And that irks me, because ultimatly widespread DRM acceptance WILL result in companies allowing you less and less "rights", ideally (for them) coupling rights with micro-payments to earn them more cash. Already now, this DRM is killing the second-hand game market, which is one way how companies can restrict your legitimate customer rights via DRM. I think Valve charges you 10 bucks if you want to sell (transfer) a game in your steam account. Who's to say in the future they won't charge you 5 bucks, or two, for each reinstall-activation .Arguable the technology and manpower for them to keep the activation services running costs money, so who's to say they won't one day put this cost onto their customers?

    When you - as in my case - have to daily deal with inept, incompetent, plain out rude and stupid service hotlines for brand name products - expensive enterprise virus scan software for example - then you also quickly learn that you are more or less at the mercy of the low-wage support staff there. Who can guarantee me that if I used up my 5 or 10 "activations" (as with Black Shark, Spore...) and I need more, that I won't get stuck at such a hotline-person or in some standard-text email reply? This is how companies treat legitimate business customers, they are certainly not above treating their "cheap" private customers that way.

    Add the fact that in Austria, direct telephone support is often simple not available, so I can't just call StarForce or Eagle Dynamics if I can't reactivate Black Shark, for example.

    All this are things that can and will go wrong with DRM. At the Battlefront boards a regular, tech-savy and thrustworthy member wrote about "Jutland" (the WW1 Naval Game) how he bought it and couldn't activate it/play it for over a week. That's a week of the company having your money already and you not able to play what you paid for.

    In a world were technology gets increasingly complex and PC-Hardware permutations number in the millions, do we really need another layer of software that can go wrong and cause errors with our games?

    So, I hope now I have reasonable shown that I'm not simple trying to "help the pirates" or want developers to lose money, but rather that my concerns about an increasingly DRMed world are quite real. I hope RoF will not use such a sheme.

    Moon, as a developer, I'd really like to hear your take on these issues. Even eLicense basically means I risk losing the ability to reinstall the game anytime I want in the future. You guys are good for support times, no fuss, but most larger companies aren't.

    I figure after Black Shark and RoF which I won't buy, one more game I won't buy and I can afford Steel Beasts Pro (150 bucks or so), which uses a dongle.

    And just 'cuz it's a current posting from today and very relevant - a simHQ User about Empire:Total War

    I bought the retail boxed version of ETW and can't install it because I can't get past Steam. Steam has got to be the biggest piece of junk that I've run into in years. I have a game that I've paid for and I'm not being allowed to install it. It's INSANE!
  15. Well, if the delay would be implemented, you can move in RT a single unit to LOS and order Area target without delay, but not multi units. That's an improvement.

    Besides, for me it isn't as much a thing for "taking away cheats" but rather a thing for my own convenience as single player. If I play SP as the attacker, I get unrealistic good performance out of Area Fire commanded without LOS. With the delay, I would still command Area Fire first and then move the unit (simple because for me that's the logical way to do it if I don't want to micromanage) but then I'd get realistic performance. Of course I still could micro-manage a movement to LOS and THEN target, but that's not what I would do.

  16. For me the main question would be: How can you simulate the information transfer between units that lead to legitimate "out of los" Area fire?

    In Steve's example, Tank 1 gets toasted - lets assume some infantry nearby saw the gun, or the trailing tanks at least saw some impacts that give them a rough idea. Then Tank 2 and Tank 3 will need some time to assess the situation and figure out where to shoot. Right now, the area fire function commanded by the player does this immediately.

    So some sort of delay for AF out of LOS seems to make sense in simulating the information transfer.

  17. Nope, I don't think you have to worry about the UPS. As long as the batteries are good it will do it's duty, and when they get older, you have less safety reserve for shutdown, but still no power spikes or problems. Our Server Rack UPS is now 3 years and I have not heard anything that I need to replace it from my specialists.

    Why are you going Vista 32bit? You are wasting RAM that way since 4GB (including Vid memory) is all the system can handle, so 512 of yours are not used. Not sure if it's an easy upgrade to W7 64bit either afterwards. 64bit Edition Drivers is not a problem as it was with XP, and 32bit Apps run still flawless.

    You won't regret the nForce chipset (from my experience with three of them so far).

×
×
  • Create New...