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Suppression

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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2018 5:33 am     Super secret spam barrier
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I'd also like to say I enjoy the mod, it has it's limitations but by a large majority I prefer playing with it.

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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2018 2:19 pm     Super secret spam barrier
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As promised here's the design criteria for the suppression system, along with an overview of the implementation and some other useful info.

Suppression

The suppression system is designed to simulate one specific combat effect, suppressive fire, where the weight of incoming fire makes it impossible for the receiving side to return effective fire.  It is the tipping point in a fire fight where the losing side is forced to withdraw or be neutralised.  

This is not simulated at all in vanilla Arma, where no matter how much enemy fire is incoming, the effectiveness of outgoing fire remains unaffected.

There is no way in a video game to stimulate the mental state of a combatant and their desire to seek cover rather than risk injury/death.  So we fake suppression by making it increasingly more difficult for a player to return effective fire from their current position, thereby requiring them to either seek cover or maneuver.   This is achieved by making it more difficult for a player to identify the target (to simulate that as the incoming fire builds so does the willingness of the individual to stick their head up and observe the target) and by making their fire less accurate (to simulate the natural desire to point the gun in the vague direction of the enemy and fire, without taking the time to carefully aim and in the process expose themselves to the incoming rounds)

The tactical situation we’re trying to create is to force the player, when under heavy fire, to have to seek cover or withdraw.  If you believe you should be able to fight through the effects, no matter the weight of fire, then you’re missing the entire point of the suppression system.  Its meant to be extremely difficult to return effective fire when heavily suppressed, because you should be withdrawing / maneuvering / seeking cover and not being a stationary target.

Having said all that, it is certainly not a perfect system.  We’re combining a number of visual, animation and ballistic effects in a hope of getting something that forces a player to withdraw, whilst remaining playable.  The balance between these effects and even the effects themselves are fairly arbitrary. It’s entirely possible that there is a better set of effects and factors out there.  Also, it has to be implementable within the current Arma system. Some effects available in other video games are just not achievable in Arma.


The mechanics:

Each round that is fired towards the player, adds a little to the player’s suppression.  The amount that is added is dependent on:
  • The calibre of the round
  • The velocity of the round
  • How close the round passes to the player
  • Whether the round explodes e.g. grenade
  • Whether the player is prone, crouching, standing
  • Whether the player is behind soft or hard cover
  • Whether the player is in deflaide
  • If the player is in a vehicle, then whether the vehicle is armour, fully enclosed etc.

Meanwhile the player’s suppression level is continually reducing, going from max suppression to no suppression in 12 seconds


The effects:

As suppression builds, so does the following:
  • The blurriness of the screen
  • Weapon shake
  • Weapon inaccuracy
  • The level of adrenaline (a natural ephi)

Each incoming round, again dependent on distance, calibre, etc also creates camera shake.

Your ability to recover from fatigue improves when suppressed, so you can sprint further and recover from exhaustion quicker.  This is due to the natural adrenaline


Known issues:

Suppression and vehicles is a little janky.  In some armoured vehicles, the level if suppression builds too rapidly


Effects tried and discarded.

Tunnel vision:  The idea was to limit the amount the player is able to see, by an increasing black/dark border to the screen (in the same way as NVGs work).  This was found to have zero effect on the effectiveness of outgoing fire, as the player only really needed a few pixels in the centre of the screen to accurately engage the enemy.  So it became an ineffective annoyance and was discarded.

Tunnel vision in real life is when the viewer is fixated on an object and loses their awareness of their surroundings.  This is impossible to simulation in Arma, as it would require fixing a player to look only at the enemy fire position.  It would provide a horrid player experience.


AI

Vanilla Arma already includes a suppression system for the AI.  When rounds pass close to an AI unit, their accuracy, rate of fire, reload speed and ability to take any action is adversely affected.   When under fire, the AI regularly take cover and then refuse to move. Anyone who has Zeus’d will have experienced this, with AI becoming very uncooperative after they have taken incoming rounds.

Our suppression system, uses the same suppression values for the incoming rounds, as those used by the vanilla AI suppression system.  In this way we get some level of equality. The difference between firing an AK compared to a PKM at players, will be similar to firing the same weapons at AI.


Zeus

The system has been recently updated to now effect zeus remote controlled units, so the zeus can now better appreciate the weight of incoming player fire.


EDIT:  Added the missing part about AI suppression


Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2018 11:25 am     Super secret spam barrier
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Last nights Mid week was the most I've experienced the suppression system in action first hand on a single Op, and got to say it did its job!

Several times I was forced back behind cover, or to break away from a firefight because of the weight of fire, really enjoyed it!

TLS_Cud


Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2018 5:47 am     Super secret spam barrier
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I  like the mod as it adds to the immersion as well as increasing the difficulty in firefights and encourages people to get proper cover and really affects your ability to react rambo style.

Ney88


Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 8:27 am     Super secret spam barrier
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tl;dr -> Blurry screen makes making videos hard. 

I know that this is a minor or no problem at all for the majority of members and it is obviously something that should not be the focus of our systems, but the suppression system also makes creating video content harder. 

In the recent weeks there has been less footage on the YT Channel. This is due to several reasons and the main reason was that I am not attending as many ops as before, but the few footage I got was often hindered or made somewhat unusable by the suppression effects. 

I am not saying or demanding that it should be changed because of this, but it is still something worth mentioning. 

There is no war to end all wars.


Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 11:47 am     Super secret spam barrier
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On Sunday while 1-2 artacked the airfield I couldn't see s**t due to the dark and nvgs so getting shot at was pretty cool. Firing a 50cal from the WMIK and taking semi accurate return fire I couldn't pinpoint was immersive as hell. Had to get down and gather myself.


Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 12:06 pm     Super secret spam barrier
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Thanks for all the useful feedback in this thread, both positive and negative, but nevertheless still useful.

We’ve taken his on board and made a few changes to the suppression system.

In order to get the balance right between realism and fun, we’ve made the following tweaks:
1. Improve recovery time from suppression
2. Slight reduction in blur at max suppression
3. Slight increase in camera shake when a round passes close


The issues around CQB and suppression are more complex and to be totally honest, I do not believe fully achievable within Arma.  As a prototype, we’ve added a new mechanism for suppression when the firer is very close to the player (ie for building clearance).  The original suppression is still in effect, but considerably reduced, and supplemented with a pseudo tunnel vision effect.  So at close range you will get a significant reduction in blur, weapon shake, etc  but your field of view will become very restricted.  The idea is to enable you to be combat effective, but to greatly reduce your peripheral vision.  This needs to be thoroughly play tested to see if it improves the situation.

The CQB suppression is a test, so any/all feedback welcome.  If it does not prove effective, we'll try something else


Any now the big one….

After a lot of testing with the “invulnerable” Russians, it has become apparent that the vanilla AI suppression system is not working effectively.  The AI only stay suppressed for 2-3 seconds max, and even when suppressed, don’t exactly behave like they are suppressed.  They can still very rapidly and precisely target players.  This leads to issues in CQB and also where vision is obscured e.g. grass

As a solution we have implemented our own suppression system for the AI.  They will now be suppressed for the same time as players, they will suffer from weapon shake, like players, and they will also find it difficult to observe and track targets, like players. 

Initial results look promising, as it both rewards good tactics as well as evening the playing field against the Russians, without unrealistically changing armour values, etc.  Suppressed enemy will return fire, but it will be extremely inaccurate. 

The player suppression changes will go live during tomorrow’s repo update.  The AI suppression system needs a little bit more work / testing, but could potentially also go live tomorrow.


Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 3:42 pm     Super secret spam barrier
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Just chiming in as a relatively casual public ops player here.

Overall, I really, really like the suppression, I think it adds some good immersion as well as much-needed balance. Glad to hear you're working on evening the odds back out so that the enemy is properly suppressed too, the most recent mission has been frustrating at times, as encountering essentially any number of enemies in close quarters seems to inevitably end in your death. Looking forward to trying the tweaked version.

As a general point, I find the visual effects a little jarring. Maybe it's just my settings (I have motion blur, head bob etc switched off) but it seems to go from nothing to wholly blind very, very quickly, with not much in between. The visual aspect of it is something I find more unenjoyable than the accuracy/sway/reaction penalties, especially as I sometimes suffer from video game induced motion sickness.

As a personal point, I am something of a real life fearless nutjob and suddenly finding that I can't be the same in ARMA when I want to, is something that I don't always enjoy, but I appreciate this is a wholly personal reaction. However, what I would love to see, although I appreciate it could be difficult to implement, is some kind of "last stand" or "moment of bravery" mechanic. Essentially, for it to be possible to counter suppression once, very briefly, especially in particularly dire situations such as taking multiple casualties in short succession (does ARMA/ACE track the number of wounded allies?), perhaps as a random chance event, or in lieu of some other attribute as a fixed setting.


Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 9:39 pm     Super secret spam barrier
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The updates to the suppression are now live.

As a reminder this includes:
1. Tweaks to the original player suppression
2. Prototype CQB player suppression
3. The new AI suppresion system

Please provide feedback.


Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2018 8:57 pm     Super secret spam barrier
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The suppression changes have been on the server for almost a week.  Is there any feedback on either ?

1. Tweaks to the original player suppression
2. Prototype CQB player suppression
3. The new AI suppression system


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