More hours ingame and bit sleep to clear my heads, this is the second round of my thoughts about ArmA.
I guess this goes down bit to the negative side, so as disclaimer I want to say that I love OFP (well you guys who frequent PMC forums already know that) and want so many things from ArmA... but, heh here comes the BUT
But ArmA is so absolutely heavy on my computer, is my rig so damned old already? It runs games okay like hitman blood money, just cause, sid meyers railroads, fifa 07, pacific storm, scarface... but not ArmA. Yeah it runs okay on framerate wise and so on when the details are on Low or Very Low with viewdistance 900m, but for example the textures load pretty bad, sometimes I can even see untextured (white) objects before several seconds of playing time when the textures appear. I mean my computer is old, but come on now?
The good old mission editing method of ALT-ESC during running OFP is very heavy on ArmA, when I go to desktop and use browser (Opera) it becomes like bogged down, the screen scrolling up and down of web pages is like a slide show, however this changed few times to the slideshow and normal, strange. Anyways its very heavy to do this ALT-ESC.
This heavyness also appears on ingame map, press M to check the map and while coming back you get the Loading screen just for a split or second, uh oh. Sometimes even when nighttime I first fire my weapon, the first muzzle flash is just a blurry grey texture and not the muzzle flash itself, second shot then brings up the correct texture. Also I did get few times the menu icons "greyed out" because of textures, same goes for weapons & gear on mission start, my M4 was just blur in the picture and I already thought that is this some weird artistic way to render the pic or what.
The "Users/" directory is saved to
C:Documents and Settings<NAME>My DocumentsArmA Other ProfilesSnake%20ManMissions - ehh, for the love of god WHY? I really really do not want to go there to edit my missions. I havent seen any configuration to change this location to <armadir> and I must say that if this really is the case... its going to take huge amount of mental adjustments from me to go browse down that filthy Documents and Settings directory which is on the win partition anyways and might be low on hdd space etc. I very much dont like this configuration.
ArmA crashed on me once. It was after all the textures were set on very low quality, almost missing (yet they werent, Cobra AH-1 was textured correctly, but it was like just tan blueis). Not sure what happened that time. So after testing less than 12hrs of this game, if it crashes on me which OFP hadn't done since 2001... its pretty bad
Sounds are pretty bad, people already mentioned in BIS forums about this "all ENGAGE... that, MAN!" thing, but like I noted on first post the tank sounds appear out of nowhere and with huge volume. In one of the missions helicopter started behind a big hill like 500m away at least, it felt like it was hovering 50m above me and I was looking at the sky "where is the helo" like nutcase. Sounds seem like just bugged to me.
The air vehicle controls have been changed dramatically, with long OFP flying experience I just crashed my AH-1 Cobra after very careful flying. I did not investigate the control keys further, but I believe you need some joystic or whatever to control the thing, not sure yaw or what ever its called meaning you cannot do that on stock default keyboard + mouse. This is not a bad thing necessarily, the flight model seems gooky, which is good, helos arent easy to fly in real world I presume.
Overall feelings
Uh hard to say, well I mean feeling is bad, but I want to believe all this negative stuff posted here is because my computer is so old and causes the problems. However I dont think my computer is old is the reason why the Users/ dir is saved to docs&settings, huh.
I really really do not want to put down ArmA, I have almost lost my mind and my finances when I tried to get this game, so the last thing would be on my mind to bash it. It just feels to me like ArmA in this current 1.00.5087 version is rushed to the Czech/Slovakia markets, it still has alot of (and I mean ALOT) of tweaking and engine improvements to do and bugs to fix. I feel that the Czech people have been used as public beta testers and guinea pigs.
I am sad now, I expected a lot from ArmA so perhaps all the waiting and hyping went overboard on my head and I expected gods gift to first person tactical military shooters game... uh maybe its just me, what the hell is my problem, ArmA cannot suck maan? Eh, dunno.
My basic general feeling as of today, less than 24hrs gaming with ArmA is that I happily go back modding and playing OFP v1.96 if this is the real ArmA I'm expriencing. (but yeah my computer is old and yadi yadi I understand all that).
I will continue my testing, perhaps go through the campaign, single missions I already tried, perhaps to do few own missions and then I'll compile some more thoughts. Perhaps I go out bit to clear my head also. I do not want to jump into conclusions.
Stay tuned.
