Rainbow deflection
December 24, 2013 11:53 PM   Subscribe

13 minutes of shooting through things (SLYT) in ARMA 3. Trajectories are colour-coded.
posted by squinty (12 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
My friend bought me a copy of Arma II because he knew I wanted to play the Day-z mod. I have not been able to get through the basic training yet. To say this game is a simulator would be an understatement. There's so many keyboard combinations it is literally shocking. Any game labelled a 'sim' is not a fair comparison to this franchise.

Wish I had the patience to learn how to play the damn thing.
posted by efalk at 12:06 AM on December 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's a Christmas miracle!
posted by Mezentian at 2:40 AM on December 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I remember being like 10-11 years old, when both me and my really good friend at the time had "gaming machines" of sorts which were really just the family computers with speed measured in the hundreds of MHZ, and at most 10gb hard drives... and just fantasizing about games having shit like this in them.

We used to stay up incredibly late playing shit like starcraft and total annihilation, and various N64 games and just BS about ideas for stuff in games like this, and star citizen.

Back then a bunch of units firing with actual trajectory stuff going on in TA in "3D"(the units were, the maps.. ehhh) would make either of our computers totally lag out, and my laptop get searing hot. Framerates would drop to like 10fps slideshows fairly regularly in intense parts of pretty much any game when lots of math-y stuff like that was going on.

I remember the day half life 2 came out, and how it didn't even take 24 hours for it to be totally 0wned and leaked online somewhere. By this point i had a pentium 4, with 512mb of ram and a 6600gt. It was the most badass computer of any person i knew, and cost almost a thousand bucks. It was in a clear plexiglass case(this exact stupid case. it's still the same price 10+ years later! mine had cool "laser cut" fan grilles that were part of the case... and completely blocked the fans) and i thought it looked like something totally badass straight out of hackers. I was stealing open wifi from a nearby business, and only got reception if i slid my tower right up to the window. It took all night to download a cracked copy of the game, and i fired it up and was fucking blown away. i played through nearly the entire thing in one sitting until almost 6am.

But, at the end i was left with this empty feeling. The graphics were cool, and more than a couple things about it were amazing(ZOMG GRAVITY GUN!!) or even groundbreaking, like a lot of the physics stuff... but where was stuff like this? You could cause cool "nuh uh" ricochets sometimes, but it seemed like it was fairly underdeveloped. It seemed like a lot of the "realism" of destructible environment stuff and well, stuff like this video had written checks its mouth couldn't cash. I was kinda bummed when i realize how scripted and limited a lot of that sort of thing was.

So yea, i don't know why this video made me smile so much, but i just felt i was 11 again and going "COOOOOOOOL!!". Which is the exact same way i felt watching and reading a lot of the stuff about star citizen.

It only took 10 years for games to get as cool as i imagined them being then. 5 years ago all i was really thinking about was VR type stuff, and now oculus is gaining serious traction. I wonder where the hell we'll be 10 years from now?
posted by emptythought at 2:54 AM on December 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I wonder where the hell we'll be 10 years from now?

Unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
posted by sexyrobot at 2:57 AM on December 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


That dslyecxi guy has a very soothing voice.
Also, that stuff was awesome. Someday maybe I'll have a computer that can play serious games.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:44 AM on December 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh. Computer game graphics modeling reality, somewhat...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDoQwIAaXg&feature

A lot of assumptions here. Like, bullets don't deform, fragment or tumble from an impact, just lose velocity?

Real world is not so uniform or predictable...
posted by bert2368 at 7:09 AM on December 25, 2013


It's hard to see, but the white contrails (when 90% of the velocity is gone) do tumble away from the surface they hit.
posted by LogicalDash at 8:42 AM on December 25, 2013


I saw this particular video when it was linked from rockpapershotgun, but the related videos from dlslyecxi are brill. Nothing says Christmas more than watching youtube videos of people playing mock wars.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:03 AM on December 25, 2013


Penetrating the walls of Santa's little warehouse. Styleh.
posted by Namlit at 10:27 AM on December 25, 2013


It only took 10 years for games to get as cool as i imagined them being then. 5 years ago all i was really thinking about was VR type stuff, and now oculus is gaining serious traction. I wonder where the hell we'll be 10 years from now?

In my life, VR is a horizon that recedes as we approach it. I remember reading about it way back when I as a child with an Apple IIe. I figured it would be here by the time I reached adulthood. And we're just now fiddling with the Occulus Rift game thing, which seems to be more of a toy for hackers and tinkerers than it does a commercial product? Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure using it is mind-blowing -- but the version of the future I was sold on had us all spending a good part of our days fully immersed in technologically-enabled lucid dreams.
posted by treepour at 11:43 AM on December 25, 2013


Huh, an Arma post! I play this game a *lot* and it's nice to see it get some air. (Well, actually mostly Arma 2, which Arma 3 is a great but currently not completely polished and stable upgrade to). There is simply no other game like it for satisfying and varied playing-at-soldiers experiences, and the reason is exactly because of stuff like in this video, along with a thousand other aspects of equipment, effects, behaviours and general simulation, that is completely disregarded in most modern "war games" like Call of Duty, etc.

Well, that and the very nature of the game: it's neither a handcrafted singleplayer "cinematic experience" nor a controlled and repetetive multiplayer arena. It's a sandbox in the true sense of the word: with about 10 minutes of learning time, anyone can start putting together complex, reactive, truly varied encounters of just about any imaginable type in the mission editor and anyone from 1 to 100 (or more) people can then plug in and play it together, either against eachother or AI.

I could write a huge long fave-baiting comment explaining what kind of remarkable stuff this leads up to, but honestly the most effective way to explain it would be to simply link to another of dslyecxi's videos, showcasing his superbly-run Arma group, Shacktac: ShackTac's 2013 Year in Review. Most of the missions you see in that can be watched in full by going through his channel.

There is a Metafilter-derived gaming group called MeFight Club who play a little of this, but it really shines with a large, committed, regular group, and to that end I mostly play with the RockPaperShotgun's group, folkarps.com, who have a similarly grown-up sensibility (mostly). We have our own Year in Review video, too! Anyone reading this is very welcome.

I might write some more later on, or can answer any questions. Merry Christmas!
posted by Drexen at 2:01 PM on December 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


treepour: "And we're just now fiddling with the Occulus Rift game thing, which seems to be more of a toy for hackers and tinkerers than it does a commercial product?"

With the caveat that I'm kind of a booster/fanboy for Oculus as well, I think it will go a lot further once the finished, commercial version is released, rather than the dev kit available currently, which is out there soleley to get technical feedback and so hackers can start building things for VR.

The consumer version should have significantly better resolution (1080p-ish vs 720p-ish) and better pixel density to lessen the screen-door effect, full positional tracking to help with motion-sickness, and some other tweaks to make it more useable. I hear it's already easy to develop for with Unity and UnrealEngine support already, support from some relatively big-name PC games, works pretty straightforwardly as a plug-and-play device, and has already been enjoyed (as per Youtube) by everyone from kids to pensioners.

I haven't actually used it myself, but a lot of people who have have said that it seems to be pretty much the real deal this time. Of course that's been said before, but having been tracking it for a while, I am optmistic that it's really going to bring VR to a wide audience, and that's hella exciting to me!
posted by Drexen at 5:42 PM on December 25, 2013


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