ScopE's first impressions:

[ScopE]

German downloadable retail version from www.morphicon.de:
Version 1.01.50_something_something (i.e. German patch 1.01 included.)
plus 6th Sense Ger->Eng language patcher v0.8 (easy-peasy one-click .exe )

I got it all going last night, after the 2.7Gb download.

My specs:

• Lanboy aluminium case.
• 550W power supply
• DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR
• AMD 3500+ cpu (single core), no overclock, Zalman CPSU-9500LED copper cooler
• 2Gb RAM (2 x 1Gb OCZ "Performance")
• XFX 7800GT nVidia-based graphics card (single only), factory overclocked to 450MHz core & 1050MHz 256Mb RAM, ScopE/nVidia-overclocked to ~480MHz/~1180MHz using 'find-optimal' nVidia utility option. Stock cooling.
• nVidia drivers 91.?? (will check exactly)
• 19" LCD tft monitor, 8ms (1280x1024 native resolution)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
  (better check my driver versions for you... can't remember if they are the OpenAL betas or not.)

Time spent on ArmA:

• approx. 1hr playing (first, second SP campaign level / chopper mission to check flight model)
• approx. 1 hr fiddling with controls & vid settings.

First impressions (very early, but for the benefit of others):

Engine/graphics

• Interesting engine.
  Massive potential at max settings (better than BF2 as an outdoor military engine), given some:
  • serious optimizing, or if you can't wait for Bohemia Interactive,
  • laying down some serious $$ for something like nVidia 7950 or 8800 (or ATI equivalent).
    .
• To qualify this point above, some of those drool-worthy still-shots we've seen, I think are actually attainable.
  I think the key settings enabling these are serious anti-aliasing (to blend the leaves on the trees into something non-sprite-ish), and on the innovation side, what BI label in the settings "post-processing" which brings the depth-of-field/non-focus blurring we've seen.
  The PC capabilities I'm concluding that you need to harness these features whilst retaining a >30fps framerate are a top-end vid-card (7950/8800 and up).
  
  • In summary, don't expect lofty (BF2-esque 70+fps) framerates out of your 7800GTX.
    This ArmA engine, on release, ain't there.
    But given Bohemia Interactive development time in the coming months, and/or a bit of upgrade on your behalf and tweaking, it'll go beyond in terms of visuals.
    .
• CPU grunt required?
  Forum impressions are that polygon models impose a system drain, my guess because of an un-optimized engine. (The character/vehicle models are incredibly detailed, but I reckon BI deliberately (... as they did for OFP?...) put effort into models and not buildings and other stuff arguably more peripheral to where a player looks for eye-candy.
  => Ppl seem to indicate something >AMD 4000+ or equivalent
  ... And aparently dual-core doesn't help because it hasn't been taken advantage of.
  .
  
• My impression from a lot of forum posts from members of the OFP community (of which our Doc E is one), is that the BI developers are the types to really stay on things like engine optimizing in the medium term. Hopefully they will continue to...
  

How I 'feel' about it:
This is extremely subjective I know, but it's often hard to gain this sort of stuff from open forums when you don't know the individuals or their backgrounds...

• It's a bit 'rough'.
  • Even compared to Battlefield games/engines (and I know how contraversial the BF/EA/Dice discussions have been ), ArmA seems 'rough' to me.
  • But I am also aware that I've personally kept myself on a diet of Battlefield since 2002, through BF1942/BFV/BF2/BF2142. The character mechanics/movement stay more or less the same from the same developers, so it may be that I am simply too used to BF-style stuff.
  • Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter - nice engine. Comparable to BF2; more polished than ArmA.
  • Prey: Doom3 engine ... sensational indoor engine wrt eye-candy, very refined, but not apples-with-apples versus BF2/GRAW/ArmA engines.
    .
• Collision detection needs work:
  (I mean that in the optional sniper bit of the 2nd campaign SP mission, when I was up on top of a water tower lying prone, my character's body seems to hang way out over the edge of the platform. Just feels a bit wonky in terms of your situational awareness of where you can lie. Not terrible, but not 'immersive' in this isolated aspect, either.)
  .
  
• HDR (high dynamic range):
  Pretty effective and cool, but again needs a little refinement. This is when you look around and across the sun, and your eyes take time to adjust to the changing ambient light conditions. Even works at night too, when you activate your night-vision gear and then take it off again.
  The "little refinement"? Sometimes HDR seems to kick in a bit when you're turning around in a street, when it didn't need to.
  .
  
• Character animations:
  Quite simply the best I've ever seen in an infantry-type game. REALLY smooth, detailed, and convincing. Including your own, when you dive prone, get back up, etc
  .
  
• Ability to die :
  Huge
  Patience patience patience.
  Don't bother buying if you like run-'n'-gun Quakey-Quakey. Even if you like full-sprint-full-frontal BF action.
  This game's for the tactical first-person enthusiast.
  APPARENTLY the gameplay is what fans live for in this (OFP-descended) quasi-franchise.

Will write more soon. My wife's yelling at me.

Edit: (back again!)

• Single-Player scripted bits and pieces...
  A bit 'clunky'. (I've only seen the first/part-of-second missions, mind you)
  Ummmm... I mean when some NPC vehicle moves around the path-finding/waypoints can look a bit jerky.
  So I'm sure this observation won't apply to true MP, but might still a bit to Co-op.
  .
• Vehicles look nicely detailed ... e.g. the Cobra helo looks highly comparable to the BF2 equivalent.
  Humvee's look good. I reckon you can always judge modelling based on the wheels and their motion in games. Not too segmented at Normal detail, and animate nicely when driving.
  .
• My pc's performance:
  Sorry, no in-game benchmarks yet. So, qualitatively:
  I seem to get about 30-40 in towns, higher -> 70 in open areas, with
  resolution set to 1280x1024 5:4 TFT (LCD),
  Viewing distance 1200m
  Terrain Low,
  Objects Normal,
  Textures Normal,
  Shading Normal,
  Post-processing Low, *
  AF Low,
  Shadows Low, *
  AA Low,
  Blood Low.
  .
  * Bear in mind as well that one game's "Low" is not another's....
  I'm finding that "Low" shadow detail for example in ArmA is
  equivalent to BF's "High" !
  .
  When I gear-down to 1024x768, I can kick all up to Normal...
  In fact, on some mission environments like sandy open areas (still with trees); essentially "not towns"... I kicked post-processing up to High, and even remained on 1280x1024 with a playable framerate >25fps.
  (A bit bizarre ... there simply seems to be a lot of performance variability with differing environments, which might annoy if having/wanting to change settings as you go. I'd expect this sort of thing to stabilize over the next few months with patches.)
  .
• SOUND ! :
  Oh dear.
  Not so much the samples; just the treatment (under Hardware/EAX) of VEHICLE noises. Not smooth at all... distinct step-changes in volume as your character turns to face or away from the direction of said vehicular sound source.
  There's a 6th Sense sound pack out, which changes the actual sounds, but I don't expect this to improve the way ArmA sound performs on my system.
  So yeah ... some directional vehicle stuff is very crude and rough for me.
  I know it's OpenAL-based in ArmA. I might have to investigate what drivers are best for my Audigy2 ZS.

Originally Posted by ScopE, on 15th Dec

Hmmm...
Been attempting to play it a bit this week...

(For the record too, I did a routine fresh install from scratch of WinXP SP2. I then re-installed ArmA as the only game on top.)
Confirmed my 7800GT nVidia drivers are 93.71 (latest).

Framerate:
Yeah; The framerate is low as stated in many places.
And yes, the engine shows promise at its extreme high end.
...But I think unless you have a December 2006 vintage machine (e.g. like the one BB's just built), you're not going to see anything remarkable. In my case, I'm getting images of a quality that is comparable to what I see in BF2, but at a FAR lower framerate.
So to get it up to industry scratch, it's going to take time, and I reckon that's going to hurt the game in the short term, with regard to pulling in new (non-OFP legacy) players.

Single-player Campaign:
Hmmm... A couple of times an AI which is part of my squad has been crucial to getting through a scripted section, and simply doesn't 'show' i.e. In the second mission, we're all hammering away at an enemy wave of armour and troops coming over a hill, and then the script requires us to mount up in 2 jeeps and go somewhere else. The Squad Leader calls us; 9 out of 10 of us mount up ... AI #10 is being called by the SL repeatedly over radio/in-game chat, and is replying, but somehow can't get to us. And so the scripted section just stops. And the AI dude driving my jeep just jerks the vehicle around in circles.

Chopper flight model:
No sensitivity adjustment on joystick X/Y ?? (If it's the sliders for the whole controls section (incl infantry and vehicles), then how can that not affect the whole lot?) Have I missed something dumb, or do we simply have to cope with the flight model that is extremely sensitive. I can understand making choppers a lot more 'sim'-like given OFP/ArmA's realism, but the flight physics aren't as polished as BF2's anyway ... and THAT's been touted as bit more deliberately an arcade game.

Co-op?
It's very much my lack of experience I'm sure, but once we got out of the 'lobby' and onto the battlefield, all the AI's raced off (i THINK they were AIs), and I couldn't distinguish who were the human players so I couldn't stick to them and play together.
Probably just me I know (and maybe a bunch of other relative newcomers) ... but quite an unfamiliar feel and learning curve.

MP?
Don't know yet. Haven't felt confident enough yet with the controls and navigation to try.

Maybe I'll make some sense of this by the time my next diary entry comes.

Maybe I should stick the game on hold, to be run again 15th May 2007 (now+6months).

[B B]

kool very informative scope, i love to sneak around and check things out and plan an attack scenario, ive only just upgraded my pc so hopefully it will suffice.

[B B]

Is it just me or do we seem to be getting a lot more adds in the forums these days SORRY OFF TOPIC

[ScopE]

Nice spec BB. I reckon you'll get it going very nicely.

[Spectre8]

Most excellent write-up as usual Scope! Thanks very much for the time you've taken to do this. I'll look forward to the updates.

I grabbed the image of this the other day, but don't think I'll run it up until I can get a local copy. I've got little enough time to play as it is, and hopefully by the time it gets released here, I'll have some money for some more RAM and maybe a new vid card.

I'll still be keeping a very keen eye on all of ArmA's progress!

BB, this area of the forums is open to the public, and therefore picks up an additional advert after the inital post.

[Dr_Eyeball]

Yeah, the sound needs some improvement. I think it's mainly with helicopter sounds, so far. The volume is too loud and doesn't change smoothly over the distance.

I have a simple SoundBlaster Live 5.1 with (Altec Lansing) 5.1 speaker set-up but I often use headphones.

I hope they fix the varying voice volumes some day too.
__________________

6th Sense Sound Pack

Originally Posted by 6th Sense

This patch changes the volumes of the chopper sounds in Armed Assault (*) to a lower level, as many are annoyed by the current volumes. Please supply feedback!
Please make sure that you do not have Hardware Acceleration enabled in the game, as there seems to be a bug that causes all sounds to be even louder!

I just realised my hardware acceleration was turned off. Turning it on seems to have fixed the directional sound issue I was having, but now I wonder about the 6th sense advice.

[ScopE]

Cheers Spec !


And good pick-up, Doc. I might experiment a bit with the 6thSense hardware/software audio advice, plus maybe their sound pack.

[Stompya]

Some servers wont let you join with mods, I had to setup a shortcut without the choppersound patch to be able to join them.

[ScopE]

Hmmm...
Been attempting to play it a bit this week...

(For the record too, I did a routine fresh install from scratch of WinXP SP2. I then re-installed ArmA as the only game on top.)
Confirmed my 7800GT nVidia drivers are 93.71 (latest).

Framerate:
Yeah; The framerate is low as stated in many places.
And yes, the engine shows promise at its extreme high end.
...But I think unless you have a December 2006 vintage machine (e.g. like the one BB's just built), you're not going to see anything remarkable. In my case, I'm getting images of a quality that is comparable to what I see in BF2, but at a FAR lower framerate.
So to get it up to industry scratch, it's going to take time, and I reckon that's going to hurt the game in the short term, with regard to pulling in new (non-OFP legacy) players.

Single-player Campaign:
Hmmm... A couple of times an AI which is part of my squad has been crucial to getting through a scripted section, and simply doesn't 'show' i.e. In the second mission, we're all hammering away at an enemy wave of armour and troops coming over a hill, and then the script requires us to mount up in 2 jeeps and go somewhere else. The Squad Leader calls us; 9 out of 10 of us mount up ... AI #10 is being called by the SL repeatedly over radio/in-game chat, and is replying, but somehow can't get to us. And so the scripted section just stops. And the AI dude driving my jeep just jerks the vehicle around in circles.

Chopper flight model:
No sensitivity adjustment on joystick X/Y ?? (If it's the sliders for the whole controls section (incl infantry and vehicles), then how can that not affect the whole lot?) Have I missed something dumb, or do we simply have to cope with the flight model that is extremely sensitive. I can understand making choppers a lot more 'sim'-like given OFP/ArmA's realism, but the flight physics aren't as polished as BF2's anyway ... and THAT's been touted as bit more deliberately an arcade game.

Co-op?
It's very much my lack of experience I'm sure, but once we got out of the 'lobby' and onto the battlefield, all the AI's raced off (i THINK they were AIs), and I couldn't distinguish who were the human players so I couldn't stick to them and play together.
Probably just me I know (and maybe a bunch of other relative newcomers) ... but quite an unfamiliar feel and learning curve.

MP?
Don't know yet. Haven't felt confident enough yet with the controls and navigation to try.

Maybe I'll make some sense of this by the time my next diary entry comes.

Maybe I should stick the game on hold, to be run again 15th May 2007 (now+6months).

[Stompya]

If in coop make sure all squad leaders are human otherwise the AI will go off on its own. Then the AI does as its told, did everything I was ordering it to do last night on a couple of maps, taking out armor etc.

Seems hard to get into maybe for some, but once you have a slight feel for it you are ok. I still have a lot to learn about the controls,orders etc, but is great!!