nomdeplume

It might be a good idea to try something like Google Moderator to collect the questions and let people vote on what they're most interested in, would probably be a lot easier than trying to pick out questions from the chat stream. Also, a lot of people don't read the chat so it's better to answer questions on stream rather than in the chat, whenever possible. As for the stream, I understand why they went with a basic introduction to the editor, but it would be cool to see more advanced mission creation techniques, particularly explanations and examples of the modules. Especially if that was an ongoing series - maybe designing a complex mission from the ground up across a series of streams and making use of the various modules to really bring the world to life with minimal effort. I think it's pretty easy to find info on the basics of the editor, but the more esoteric things is something that the BIS team could deliver a lot of insight on that most of the community can't. Overall, good stuff, looking forward to more.

Where did you get "PMC_Setup.exe.md5" from? Is this created by the Sprocket downloader? The direct download gives this information: MD5: 4a3fe86a002ad4540a2687f4e9c3f00b You can use an MD5 generator to generate a checksum for your PMC_Setup.exe and compare it to the above.

Just to play devil's advocate, what's the difference between paying $10 for two DLCs a few months apart, or paying $20 for one bigger DLC and waiting a few extra months for it? I mean, I can see differences, but none of them seem particularly positive, so I'm not sure why you'd prefer that.

??? The only emails I've had from Sprocket were only sent to me, and contained information specific to my order.

I can't say for certain but I would expect: - damage modeling is probably model-specific, therefore no effect on ArmA 2 content. - flares become available for the USMC AH-1Z and presumably other aircraft, along with the new 'radar' display. - engine changes obviously affect the graphics, so you'll get SSOA etc, but again anything texture/object model related won't be changed. - weapon penetration is probably model-specific as well, though it might also apply to older content (e.g. a new tank might have different levels of penetrability depending on where it's hit, while an older tank might have one level for everything). - FLIR is only available for new weapons/vehicles, so won't be in the campaign. Also if you run the betas, I read somewhere that BIS will be doing betas for OA only so ArmA 2 stock will only get release-version patches. This could of course be completely false, so we'll see.

US / Men (Special Forces) / Forward Air Controller Weapon classname is LaserDesignator, magazine is LaserBatteries. Which I think is the same as in pre-OA, so it may just be that the laser designator has received a functionality upgrade in OA. It has normal vision, night vision and thermal.

It is absolutely intended. Some people prefer to play with none of these 'cheating' visual indicators on, whatsoever. However this often isn't possible, because the instructions provided by the game are too vague for you to know where you're actually supposed to go without having the marker. This is mostly a problem of not having two-way communication, i.e. in real life if you weren't sure what was intended you could ask follow-up questions. If they tell you to target a man at 2 o'clock and you can't see him, you could say you can't see him, and they could provide a better reference. However games are a long way from being able to do that. So, there is a balance required. But as you noted, if you forget where you're supposed to be going, you can just hit escape twice and the markers will pop up again so you can reorient yourself. Or perhaps adjust the difficulty/realism settings so they don't disappear at all, if that's possible.

If I remember the history correctly, they did originally use the sound card fully in Operation Flashpoint, however a lot of people had problems with bizarre things happening with the audio because different cards supported different features, or implemented them differently. So eventually they gave up and went with a fully-software audio engine so it would work and sound the same on all computers.

You shouldn't see any speed difference between the Sprocket client utility and following these cumbersome instructions to access the FTP servers, since they do the same thing. It's only useful if you want to download to somewhere other than your My Docs folder, or to a different non-Windows computer, etc. If you can run the Sprocket downloader for a bit it creates a logfile in My Documents / Sprocket, which has the IP addresses and username/password. If you can't, then ... the FTP servers are sprocket1.idea-games.com to sprocket3.idea-games.com. Also 69.175.13.106 appears to be sprocket4.idea-games.com but there's no forward DNS for that, so I'm not sure how the Sprocket downloader actually finds the hosts. This is the NA one which gave me my best speeds, around 1 MB/sec to my US-based server. The username you can get from the website download page URL, look for "&UID=SPROCKET2ARMA2OAENG...&" in the URL. There's a bunch of stuff after the product name, the username for the FTP server is everything after the UID= and before the &. Password is just "SPROCKET2ARMA2OAENG01". Files are in the root of the directory you start in, so just "GET setup.exe" exe will do the trick. Here's the MD5 checksums and sizes for the files:

Good idea! I fished the FTP details out of the Sprocket log and the speeds are much better than from the website. Might even get to play it tonight! :D

It just uses FTP so you shouldn't need to do anything special, if it's downloading at all that's the best you can get. You can try switching to a different mirror which might be less loaded. I'm downloading it straight from the website (since the Sprocket downloader doesn't let you choose where to download to)... might be able to play it tomorrow (it's 1pm here). I laughed when they said they thought they had enough bandwidth. :)

It downloads to a directory called "Sprocket" in your "My Documents" folder.

Well it seems you have md5 checksums there, so you can check to make sure all the files match those. This utility will probably do the trick: http://www.toast442.org/md5/ I think you just need to run it, and drag the .md5 files into the program window (probably one at a time).

Mirrored @ http://mirror.quex.org/arma/video/Arma2.mp4 (734MB). Speed from their server was quite variable.

New changelog entries since 71382: [71543] File cache size increased a lot on systems with 4 GB RAM or more. [71484] Fixed: C130 was crashing on takeoff. http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php and also mirrored @ http://mirror.quex.org/arma/beta/