ARMA & ARMA2

[gvse]

Hey Art, I have found the script that unlocks all weapons in your supply trucks and copters here:
http://www.armaholic.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=6785
(The armaholic site also has user-created missions and tools for extracting the contents of pbo files [missions] so you can later put the unpacked folders in your documents/arma2/missions and edit them).
But the script only works if you are editing a mission. I no longer use it since finally I discovered how to put ammo crates on the map, which is all I was really trying to get. Other than that I wasn't looking for cheats as the biggest and most useful cheat is the officially supported auto-aim.
The indicators: the olive green ones you see in my screen-caps are for teammates. For objectives they use orange ones and you can activate them via the map by selecting tasks and setting what you want as the current objective. True, they tend do to blend in with the environment.
Thanks for the heads-up re the patch! They sure are fast, nothing like FC2 devs!
Now, go on and have some fun in a mission already soldier! :) I recommend downloading Converted OFP SP missions (@armaholic).

[Art Blade]

Thank you for your help, gvse :) I decided to restrain myself from using scripts for now, though. Since I'm not yet in the editor business I might as well do it the hard way (usually start like that and hopefully finish without cheats, then cheat like hell haha)

I'm in the mood now for going on with the game... will keep you peeps posted up.

edit. accidently wrote fiach, sorry lol

[Art Blade]

Here is a selection of the map, enhanced with irfanview, that shows an ongoing training mission. The red dots, your enemies, show direction markers and they move about the map in real time. I'm hiding behind the corner of a house and heard some of them say something, I think I heard "I see him." Uh-Oh  ;D I plan to first kill that warlord, so the enemy may surrender happily to me. Not sure if that works haha  ;)

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[gvse]

well, I'm done with some w@&k here so I think I will have a go at Arma2  too :)

[Art Blade]

have fun, matey... and stay alive  ;D

The above mentioned urban assault was like this:

I left the car at the anti-tank range and decided to walk those few metres (like 230m) still remembering how my first approach by car ended disastrously for me. As you can see in the last screenshot I managed to get close to a house, proned. I noticed that using "Q" and "E," which usually serve for peeking around a corner, in proned position make you roll over like a log and doesn't produce much noise. So I flipped over sideways downhill like a damn pro and nearly knocked myself out on a wall, but ended up in a nice hiding spot. Feels great wearing a camouflaged combat suit without padding and helmet.

I then crept across the place, hiding, running crouched, making noises like my pockets were filled with pans and pots. I heard some enemies talking occasionally, but I think they spoke a language I wasn't familiar with. Whenever I reached a safe spot, I hit "M" to check the map again (cool to be able to watch the enemy movements and positions on the map). Apparently a road and a house were between me and a pair of enemies, so I decided to run across the road and circle around the building in their backs, so I could approach that warlord who was still some distance away.

I cowered behind a wooden fence that had some gaps in it, when I saw another couple... let's call it team, to avoid misinterpretations haha... another team run along the street only a few strides away from me. They didn't spot me, so I was lucky... nice camo suit ;) I decided to not shoot them so I could maintain cover. Didn't want to advertise my position to everyone in the area. While they ran towards my right, I waited till they passed me and counted to three, then ran straight across the road. They don't have eyes in the back of their heads, have they  ;D Well they didn't but another team must have snuck up behind me and I took a shot in my right arm. Nasty patch of blood on my ellbow. I heard myself saying "ahhh, my arm." Bastards! I switched my rifle to grenade mode and fired at the team that had shot at me, they went down nicely and didn't move any more. I tried to loot them but they had nothing of interest.

I was now in between all those buildings and homing in on the warlord. There he is! Somewhere in the green, he stood tall... and I trained my rifle on him, single action, and fired. Once, twice, and he slumped down like a sack of potatoes. I walk over and grab two hand grenades off of him. Couldn't find out how to use them, though... might need to consult the manual for that. Or Chief instructor GVSE for that matter :)

Now, the warlord is down, but still there are more enemies, totalling 6, that means three to go. Two I spot nearby and use rifle bursts on them, got them clean off balance and they croaked. The last one of them was down at the beach, I spottet him and managed a quick kill (he missed me twice).

Mission accomplished! :) I finally finished my bootcamp after 1hr 1min.   ;D

[gvse]

Nice, man! Looks like you are enjoying the game :).
Granades: just select them by pressing F key (toggles firing mode as well), aim and hit L-mbtn.
I accomplished a mission too, and here's a small report.
The objective is to steal a car with some documents in it and deliver it to a friendly base.

The jeep is somewhere in the villaga at the foot of the hill.

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I can roll down there too, like a pro ;) (btw, great animation both in 3rd and 1st person)

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Slowly now cause tangos are everywhere!

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Yes, here they are:

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So, slowly...

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My cover is blown, gotta get a move on.

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Yep, a pro kill, no auto-aim!

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Now to a structure nearby to have a good look who is left.

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Other pro kills. Damn, I'm getting better!

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To the jeep.

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And away I go.

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The mission is one of the OFP conversions (Take the Car or sth). I just dropped an ammo crate, got mp5sd and that was that. I might try it out again in the rain and fog and a bit earlier. It was fun! :)
Oh, and I toned down postprocessing as I read somewhere it makes everything more blurry hence it's more difficult to spot enemies. I dunno, things do look sharper but a little bit less appealing.

[Art Blade]

Cheers mate, and ah, another report. I love reading reports :) Congrats on an accomplished mission  :-X

And your screenies are also very welcome. Interesting camo gear you have there, the rucksack with those green stripes and stuff, had to look three times until I recognised you and were glued to the brick wall of that house :)

I think people who haven't got the game might want to look at the first picture of your post again, there is something fluffy white on a road between the left building and the one next to it. Those white fluffy spots mark animals if I got it right, so I reckon you see a cow or a horse there :)

Shooting is problematic when you despise auto-aim. Your weapon does move with different speed, like when you see something to your left and swing your rifle left, it overshoots the target, then you move it back to the right, and then you can decide to use that green "crosshair" (which isn't a cross at all) or switch to scoped view, when you additionally can hit a key to hold your breath in for a more steady aim. By then you're dead, already  ;D

I decided to use auto-aim and spare me the fight with my weapon for now. :)

[Art Blade]

PZ, regarding "a map!" - What I saw so far was just a tiny isle... Now, editing a first mission, I saw the mainland... omg. Here is a tiny  fraction zoomed-out to the max...

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[PZ]

OK, I can't stand it... I'm going to go to the store and find ARMA2 for the PC...

Fantastic reports you two - enough to convince me!   :-X

[gvse]

OK, I can't stand it... I'm going to go to the store and find ARMA2 for the PC...

Fantastic reports you two - enough to convince me!   :-X

haha, I believe you won't regret it. Given the game's scope and the fact that they keep releasing patches, it looks like a good long-term investment. Even if you get overwhelmed at the start you will slowly get the hang of it, and the editor grants almost unlimited longevity.
Auto-aim: I don't despise it but it's far more satisfying to successfully use the manual option. I do miss FC2 and COD4's ironsights view as it is so much more precise for mp5!
And the map is enormous but I don't think the environment is as diverse as in FC2.
The whitish fluff in the screen is an indicator for anything neutral (animate or inanimate; in this case it's a tractor ;)).
Another thought: if OFP:DR is as diverse and its avatars a bit easier to control (i.e. more fun) then it looks like we are headed for a fun fall! :D

[Art Blade]

LOL PZ  :-X :-X :-X  ;D ;D ;D

gvse, yeah... Dragon Rising is deffo a game I'll buy, just to compare them. I guess that DR will benefit from a longer developing time, and codemasters delivered great games so far. My bet is that DR beats ArmA2, but hey, I'd never complain about having too many games to choose from :)

[Art Blade]

Now here's some better gfx :) On my way to a combat zone... booyaka banzai!  ;D

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[Art Blade]

Artificial Dumbness... my medic found out that it's a bad idea to walk underneath the back rotor of our heli. He's that black * to the right in the pic.

This is tactical view ("," NUM) of my unit. The heli brought us to the dropzone. Luckily it didn't drop onto the zone  ;D By the way, it's not misty or foggy, you just see a lot of dust that gets whirled up by the heli.

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[PZ]

Very cool... I'm starting to drool...  ;)

[Art Blade]

PZ, I read your post in Events, pity you'll have to wait for another game now  :(

Ok, ArmA2... the mission I was talking about, I said "editing" which didn't involve the editor, but customisation of a mission. You can choose somewhere "My Own Mission" or whatever it's called, choose what kind of mission (ie combat, defend, and more), choose a location, time and weather, and other small stuff, and how long the mission should be (I chose 1 hour) - and then you go on your own mission, which is saved with your current player profile and available as selectable mission for later (plus you can always edit the parameters later).

You see I chose combat and a place near the coastline which made the game fly us in from the seaside, drop us off, and there we were. One medic, sniper, grenadier, two more marines and me. Shortly after we landed I received a radio message from HQ asking if I had time for a recon mission, which I accepted (it's possible to reject it). The first thing that happened was my medic got chopped up by our own chopper, so I reloaded the game. The next time was alright, I tried to make my team go away from the chopper by having them follow me. I noticed you have an option "change team" which actually makes you change your avatar to the one team member selected (reminds me a little of Prototype), and I ended up talking to myself - I chose to be the medic and walked up to team leader Art Blade, who was having a nice chat with me  ;D By the way, you can choose the looks of your avatar (I reckon for MP) and it was fun to see I was actually wearing black sunglasses.

Well, I returned to be myself again and we marched on a little and I started to play around with team radio and team orders, quite some stuff. However, we reached a waypoint when I took my first shot. No idea where that came from. Funny thing, we had a wall to one side and behind it was a building and some yard. All of a sudden one of my teammates disappeared through the wall and I saw that olive symbol on the wall - he got through it as if it was not there. I couldn't. Sometimes I saw an enemy symbol through a house (wasn't supposed to see that I guess). I noticed a chat line in written on the screen, apparently I was saying something but heard no voice for that matter.

Voice is something to comment about: The game seems to use snippets of single words, recorded by various men in different pitches, so a spoken radio message or anything spoken usually sounds like a patchwork of different people saying one word each. Quite confusing, especially because you can't assign a voice to a face - they all have that same scrambled multi-voice. Only sometimes an entire sentence rings in your ear, spoken by one person (mostly you, in response to something, especially in the tutorial).

Alright, I read  that I was saying "nothing we can do here anymore, a heli will come pick us up" and indeed we heard a chopper approaching. That stupid pilot... we were outside that building, so far outside you could call it a field we were standing on, but that heli decided to try land in the yard and got wedged somehow, halfways stuck in a barn door and a wall, too tight to land, and was tilting a lot. I then saw red and heard a bang... I think the heli finally blew itself up and took me out in one go. ARGH!

New try, this time after landing two mates got chopped up immediately, so I shot the rest of the crew myself, including the gunner in the heli. Then another friendly heli approached and sent his thank-you-rockets after me and blew me up.

Next approach, after successfully getting out of the heli, seconds later, two enemy helis approached and started shooting everything, I saw missiles being launched and ooomph... dead.

Needed a little break, so here I am, writing :)

Now I'm back into tutorial, attending a team leader seminar. Hopefully I can handle a team using my radio after that :)

[Art Blade]

oh, PZ, this game has something particularly interesting for you (remember the driving in FC2 some time ago?)

You can actually assign a driver, get in on the passenger seat, and order your team mate to drive you places  ;D ;D

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[gvse]

Read your report, and it's a pity things got so scrappy. I was dropped by heli several times but the chopping incident never occurred. Also I saw teammates getting past low fences as if they were not there, and I had no such luck. In fact until I learnt you could use v button to get over them I used to walk round the damn obstacles ;)
If you don't know who you are getting shot by then look at your mission in the editor and that should give you an idea where the enemy is.
Managing a large team (anything over 4) is a handful and I avoid such missions. I usually tell them to keep low, hold fire and, if they spot a tango, hit the ground. Then I send a sniper to some far off spot and ask him to observe the area of interest. once we are ready I tell him to engage at will, and I storm the place with my team. Sometimes it works ;)
Last night I just fooled around and put different vehicles on the round and tested their handling. The bicycle is insane! :)

[Art Blade]

I didn't use the editor, it's more or less like choosing difficulty level, check or uncheck boxes, thingy.

A bicycle, insane :) ... ask me what I did a couple hours now... and look at the speed (roughly 600)  ;D I got killed so often I stopped counting. Flying that VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) is madness, using a keyboard and mouse. But it does look cool if you are above the clouds, or dive through them and see land and the sea glittering around...

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[Art Blade]

I usually tell them to keep low, hold fire and, if they spot a tango, hit the ground.

can you actually add a couple of orders in one go? If, how? I only managed to give one order to either one or more team mates.

[Art Blade]

sorry peeps... can't get enough of playing Maverick  ;D

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[gvse]

I tried flying a copter and a plane but I crash too often: not enough patience. I love flying in HAWX as it's so easy with just the keyboard!
As for orders I cannot help you there; I am still trying to master this aspect of the gameplay.

[Art Blade]

alright, thank you :)

I'm getting used to airborne fightings... modern dogfight here  ;D

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[Art Blade]

...and having fun racing down towards the ground

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[PZ]

This just keeps getting better - sounds like you guys are experiencing a real "simulator", which is exactly my cup of tea.  I was discussing why I love FC2 so much with my wife this morning, when most other games are just games.  What I came up with in explaining to her was that FC2 allows me to do things my way, experiment so to speak.  It sounds like ARMA2 will be a game in which the experimentation will never end - cool... really cool  :-X

PS: I really like the screen caps and the descriptions you guys have given - both make it much easier to make the decision on purchase.  This is way better than reading some lame review on one of the gaming sites - good job...

[RedRaven]

holy moly guys... its looking great!
mine still not arrived yet, but been ill all weekend  :(
gonna spend bit of time catching up on posts.

(need to change my email too cos password not workin!)

will add it to profile here soon as sorted it out. :-X