Life is just so darned complicated these days (Gaming) :D

Back in the day things used to be so simple.

Left, right, shoot/jump.

Life was easy. My simple intellect could keep pace.

Nowadays !!!!!!

Lot's of buttons and commands, shifted one's to help them all squeeze in. Some with un-obvious cryptic names just to help make life easy.

ADD TO THAT, video settings, resolution settings, aliasing settings, SMAA, FXAA, high, low, medium etc.

Then there's the add on extras, not essential, but essential non the less.

TrackIR profiles and curves, dead zones, speeds, smoothing, limits etc etc.

Joystick sensitivities and dead zones, ingame and out

Then there are mouse controls with toggle switches and macros and DPi settings.

Then there is Belkin N52 settings with buttons and combination buttons and macros and mouse wheels and profile switching etc etc etc.

Then there is V.O.N settings and teamspeak settings and profiles and V.A.C settings and profiles and making sure they don't conflict and what buttons to assign them too on an already cramped button map.

AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF, you just know that if you don't get a system set up quickly enough that you're happy with (like that's ever going to happen) you'll forever be pressing the wrong buttons or doing the wrong action because that's what your muscle memory tells you to do when under pressure and grasping for the right keys.

"GRENADE"

simple soloution, just re-map the keys to something you'll remember ..

failing that, theres always call of duty or battlefield3, there still simple left, right, shoot/jump games

You don't think I invested in all this kit just to bunny hop around do you ?

Anyway it's more of a general state of the nation post, not specifically ArmA, it's just that ArmA III has my attention at this moment in time.

I took my first steps before you used a mouse for shooters...good old keyboard-only control using WASD and the arrow keys.

Running at FULL 320x200 res.



The Jedi Master

Me too, Castle WOlfenstein... I was literally scared...

I remember that and Spear of destiny ohh god those were the days. Even installing was fun (1.44) FDs

Heh, I remember rushing out to buy Falcon 3.0 on 5.25" FDs (because I didn't trust those fancy new 3.5's yet) and eagerly popping disk 1 in the drive...to a failed install. I literally went back to EB twice exchanging it to similar failures before I went online to Prodigy and saw from others that OOPS! SH's 5.25" installer was bugged and didn't work. They were going to be releasing an update via their BBS, but that was a long distance call and at 28.8 speed I wasn't going to do that.
So, back to EB...this is my 4th visit for F3 in one day!!...and getting the 3.5" version.

Took that home, and OMG it actually installed after all those floppies were done. Then came the fun of getting enough conventional RAM to run it free...



The Jedi Master

Oh yeah, I remember the config.sys, autoexec.bat and command.com.

Falcon dance alright, still back in the day.

SSDD

lol yes conventional ram, forgot about that

I remember when I got my sound blaster, and had to upgrade my ram from 4MB to awesome 12MB, and then I could play fleet defender with SB16 goodness

Remembering having to configure sound ports?

Oh yes, freeing conventional RAM (because the games couldnt use the RAM over 640kb) was unnerving. But my personal top 5 of the most annoying things in the old times are:

1.) in the really old times: having a hercules graphics card and being not able to run games, because they require CGA and your cga-emulators can't handle them,
2.) when graphics became much better but the games were still shipped on floppy discs: installing a game shipped on 27 discs (e.g. wing commander, strike commander) and having read errors on one of the last ones (return to start)
3.) spending hours on driver installation / trouble shooting
4.) fighting with bugs and problems and having no internet to ask how to work it out
5.) having a XT when the game required an AT (or simply having to few MHz to run the game) - games weren't as scalable as they are now

Nowadays optimizing is complicated, but the games run (even if you can never be sure that you have the settings giving you the optimal graphics/performance relation)

I remember before computers. |lOL

SD

What pre Babbage ? That is surely the longiest long time ever.

Oh, you mean back when people had jobs that they could do even if the computers were out? I've never experienced that, it seems everywhere I go "PCs are down" = "everyone stands around and talks and snacks".
I guess all those jobs disappeared ~1995. Either that, or before then no one worked at all they just stood around snacking and talking about "how much work we'll actually do once PCs are invented."



The Jedi Master

I used to be a master at customizing the order of tsr's in the config.sys/autoexec.bat so as to maximize the available memory for the games I would play.

A hard-won skill that became irrelevant in Windows 95.

Not that the skill itself is dead, the loading order of mods in games like Arma or Skyrim is still important today.




The Jedi Master

I feel your pain. By the time I have everything setup I don't even want to play the game anymore lol
and you can't go back to it because you'll never remember how you set it up.

Waiting half an hour for the tape to finish loading only for it to crash out..now that was painful..or the tape with the save of over years worth of playing Elite gets chewed up by the tape machine..most painful gaming memory..

LOL...you guys....my first system was a TI-99...big console with monitor and puter together....ohhhh the graphics, the graphics...
in RGB squares...or should i say just really big pixels.

The enormous 100Mb HDD, who could ever need more than that?
Squeezing everything you could high so you could get Tornado to run in your 1Mb of RAM

My Atari 400 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family#The_early_machines:_400_and_800) had 8k RAM!
Also the best keyboard in the world if you wanted blisters on your fingers and feelings of arthritis in them when you're not even a teenager!


The Jedi Master

I was made up as my dad bought the BBC B with 32k!! Other mates I knew only had ZX81 or Vic20!!

My next was one I saved my paper round money for Amstrad CPC464 with green screen monitor.

Then an Atari ST , swapped it for an Amiga 512, then bought an Amiga 1200, then finally to a PC with Win 95..

Good god I hate having to deal with load orders in mods for ARMA. If someone could make a single 100% working all the time tool that will allow you to switch out load orders easily without screwing up something else somewhere it would be amazing.

No Arma2 Launcher and Sixupdater are not the tools that work as they are supposed to 100% of the time.