Alright I applied it and I haven't had any problems with it yet so far. The town seizing mission which was also in the demo ran at 35-60 frames per second, not counting the instances where I just looked out into the desert with 60-90 fps. I'm now playing the mission with the delivery truck where you start out in that huge forest area and I get 35-50 frames second with occasional rare drops down to 25. 35-80 frames per second in the helicopter training mission with an average of 39-40. Best of all: Although I had to lower everything to the lowest possible setting, I stuck to playable 1024*768*32 and I was able to turn up the texture detail to normal without
any (as in: Not a single frame per second!) hit in performance.
And all that on my crappy system with an Athlon64 3000+, 2GB of 400MHz ram and a lousy GeForce 6600GT with 128MBVram. Nothing overclocked.
I'm very pleased with this so far. It runs about 10-15 frames faster than the demo too.
Now, this might sound ridiculous but Operation Flashpoint: Resistance doesn't perform that much better..
Can't say that much about the gameplay yet because I haven't played long enough to get annoyed by little details.
A few things I noticed:
The control options are downright awesome: A distinction between pressing, holding and double pressing a button! Wow.
I mapped IS to mouse-click and zoom to mouse-hold. Works like a charm. It never misinterpreted my input up to now. I mapped everything else to mimick my OPF config, but I'll have to go over it again some day to get the most out of these awesome options. The single button IS/zoom is just so comfortable and I'm beginning to sprint by double-tapping forward instead of using the turbo-button too.
I love that you can adjust how much free-aim there is in the game and I threw the slider to the far right. I'm even beginning to like the free-aim IS the more I fool around with it.
In the training mission I find it impossible to qualify with the hand-grenades as they seem to go wherever
they want. At first I tried to lob them over the sandbags but they went way too far after that so I tried to throw them at the sandbags hoping the radius would hit the targets behind them. It did, but more often than not (maybe an estimated 7/10) the grenades somehow went under the sandbags and continued to roll and roll and exploded somewhere, maybe 10 meters behind the targets. Throwing grenades was handled badly in OPF and it's not better in ArmA either. I'm glad I'm not a grenade person or else this would really piss me off. This either needs work or I'm too dumb to do it correctly. Any tips?
The grenade launcher is pretty worthless too. I tried to figure out at what notches it would hit what row of targets but it seems to be rather random. I shot at a pair of targets three times with what I thought was roughly the same position between the notches on the crosshairs and once it flew much too short, once it flew way too far and once it flew only a bit too far. I assumme the fault is on my part because I never got his down in OPF either so: How do I use this thing?
I can use the RPG so feel free to use this a reference if you are willing to post an idiot's guide to grenade launching for me.
The pistol seems a bit too inaccurate. You have to fire at some man-sized targets that are maybe 10 meters away from you. I've never fired any pistol but my airsoft one and I've seen too many westerns to be able to distinguish between reality and fiction, but this seems absurd to me. Why would anyone want to use a pistol if this was the case? A javelin would be my choice. Maybe they wanted to enforce that the pistol was used strictly as a close range weapon of last resort? *shrugs*
Everything else I saw in the shooting range training mission made sense to me. Except that it was way too easy to qualify for sniper because of the short ranges and that the sniper test was a joke. America's Army has a way better sniper test. Nothing wrong with the weapons in this case, but the training level is too small. Who cares about the tutorials anyway?
I like how you can now change the difficulty of the AI individually for your own troups and for the OPFOR and I think I saw something else that struck me as great on the difficulty settings screen but I can't remember what it was..
There are still some issues that need adressing:
1. I turned down the "flip size queue" to 0 to get rid of the obsessive mouse-lag that plagued the game before. It's noticably better but still not gone completely. The framerate isn't the problem. I've been playing the demo of ET:Quake Wars offline lately and it's locked to 30 frames on medium to high details for me (rock-steady 30 frames though) but the controls are basically butter-smooth there. V-Sync has always been disabled in all of my games unless I needed it for trouble-shooting so that's not the problem either. Is there anything else I can do?
2. Once this is fixed: Is there a way to lock my framerate without using V-Sync? Like in UT3 or ET:Quake Wars via console commands? I'd like to cut down on the fluctuation a bit and maybe lock it at 35 but I don't want the mouse-lag that I would get if I used V-Sync with a refreshrate of 70 (which would do the same). No biggie, but it would be nice if this was possible.
3. I would like to enable the hardware acceleration in the audio-options but when I click on that button labled "disabled" it stays "disabled" and I can't enable it. Why not?
4. Can I disable the HDR completely? If I look towards the sun I don't get blinded or anything, which would be understandable, but the screen gets darker.. Huh? Do I wear auto-adjusting contact lenses? Can I get rid of this? Does this affect anything else that I might not want to lose?
EDIT: Scratch that. It was only so dark because it was evening. In mid-day missions this effect is a lot less pronounced.
5. In vehicles you can steer using the mouse like in OPF but it disables the then useless crosshairs, which is pretty nice. However in ArmA the view auto-centers once you stop pulling your mouse in a direction so in order to make a long turn you have to constantly pull your mouse in a direction and as soon as you let go the car stops turning again until you pull again. That's a stupid move, in my opinion, and I would like to disable this autocentering. Is there a way to do this?
Hmm, that's it so far.
