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=VG= SemlerPDX
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Everything posted by =VG= SemlerPDX
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I'm not a fan of the notion that players who prefer to play PR in vehicles are somehow "bad people" or "whores" compared to the players who prefer infantry roles. It's a combined arms game, not an infantry game. Having said that, of course I know the vehicle players can be known for not relinquishing said vehicles when there are too few infantry to actually play or progress the current map/mission. Still, the opposite is also true - infantry squads don't always disband to form vehicle squads when infantry cannot progress without fire support... In the end, it's just a game - people are gonna play it the way they enjoy it. It's one thing to ask people to volunteer to comply, but... Forcing someone who enjoys one aspect of the game to play in another role as if they are some kind of "whore" for enjoying what they enjoy just sounds very arrogant. Coming from a stance of "forcing them to try new things" is equally presumptuous when we assume they've not already tried many of the ways to play the game already, as if we've provided the only time they have tried "something different". This concept in this vote is admirable for those who are voluntarily relinquishing vehicle roles they would normally operate, allowing others to have a go at the vehicle roles, but IMO doing any "forcing" feels wrong on some level at least. Asking certain vehicle regulars to voluntarily choose a different role is one thing, but actively enforcing this concept seems like it would be both too much work and too much hassling of our players for a public event designed to be fun and entertaining. It's important to look at concepts such as "entertainment" and "fun times" objectively, and not subjectively.
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(unrelated/unhelpful/inappropriate comments have and will be deleted - watch your manners and your attitudes people, we're trying to host a gaming group with a friendly and fun atmosphere here, and we won't tolerate immature ignorance)
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There is a Discord that we frequent when looking for other Pilots to fly with, it's called the Falcon Lounge, I believe -- it is frequented by nearly all of the "Discord using" BMS players across the globe AFAIK. Like Rotblut said, we are trying to encourage new people here at VG to sit in the Pilots Lounge channel of our TS3 Server (ts3.veterans-gaming.com) because TS3 also has a smartphone app, and a way to view the names of people in all channels on a website as well i.e. To be clear, I'm happy you've taken the initiative to improve something for this community! We merely feel it's important to funnel our players to one or two services that we've already set up so as to not further fracture the player base across multiple social platforms. I hope we're not coming across as completely illogical here on this matter. Looking forward to flying with you all again soon when I feel like returning. Cheers!
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I'm fairly sure he means it should follow proper SOP from the manual, and all angles and heights should be within acceptable margins according to the spirit of the lesson (don't cut corners, keep it professional), and not that every number should be exactly the same at all time intervals. Even in real life, every carrier landing is slightly different due to the challenge of a moving platform on windy, choppy seas. Perform in a way that would not get a real pilot fired - that's probably a good rule
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That is something I can train people in, and I'd be happy to help you go pro -- an hour with me, and a few crates of 40mm, and I'll have you dropping them in 3rd story windows from 4 blocks away on the first shot. Grenadier was always my favorite 'attack' kit in any game, and I've spent countless hours in offline sessions just firing (in PR and Arma 2/3). The very coolest trick a Grenadier can do is a MRSI (multiple round simultaneous impact) where multiple grenades all hit the same small area within a second, giving the enemy zero time to react or disperse. Not all tactics are available in all games, but skill with a UGL does translate between different war games for the most part. example of MRSI (although it's in Arma 2):
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I'm looking forward to hosting these workshops every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a few hours each time, one week, they will be AM, the next, PM -- numbers will be small so we can keep handle on the group and maintain focus on the Workshop objective. We want the number to remain small so we can better manage the session, and the sessions will be short - ranging from 1-3 hours tops. Example would be 8-12 players with 1-3 Hosts/Directors. m823us already mentioned many scenarios that would work well, such as "Learn the Map" sessions, "Kit Training" where people can take kits they normally would not in a less difficult setting allowing learning/training, and even "Vehicle Teamwork Training" where we can take a large number of the same vehicle and everyone gets to work together in various group/formation tactics. That last one, even if the "training workshop" is not possible in a real COOP match (few maps have 15+ Abrams), they will serve to build teamwork, communications, and even small group tactics that CAN apply to a real COOP match. So, obviously, these workshops are not going to be geared to train the "Know-it-All" players who have logged hours into the thousands -- though we would like to encourage such players to take up Team Lead or Host roles during Workshops if they would like. If we design and run them correctly, even seasoned players should find the Workshops useful if everyone can learn at least one new trick, or gain a better idea of the COOP concept and how to better communicate and coordinate with others. *We are still looking for Map Makers familiar with PR coding because we'd like a few specific maps edited with more/less vehicles of certain types, and in some cases, some restrictions lifted so, for example, a Squad Leader Training can bypass "minimum squad members required for...." limits to allow more actual Squad Leaders without so many squad members needed (imagine base building tutorials, but can build 5 fobs right next to each other for training/instructional purposes). Whoever is interested in helping to make these Workshop maps can post up here, or contact me in a private message.
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VETERANS-GAMING is an international community with less than 50% American players (for the record), and our server is centrally located in Germany for such reasons. We have members from over 40 countries on 5 continents - as a community, we choose to speak English as our common language, though this will never change. Non-English speaking players are VERY WELCOME, so long as everyone follows the rules, except in cases where communication is absolutely required and therefore a language barrier becomes a game-breaker. Groups of non-English speaking gamers are welcome to use our TS3, as well, and for example we have a small Norwegian group that hangs out at VG (but many of them do not speak English). Any player who finds themselves "wrongly banned and they couldn’t defend themselves cause of the language" may post up here in the forums (we can translate text) and we can help them resolve the issue. Please let your friends know that they are indeed welcome here, but they must understand the rules and follow them, and if there is an issue, tell them to write it up here in the forums. We are very fair, and we hand out second chances for minor infractions all the time!! While it is helpful to have PR Admins and VG Members who speak a variety of languages to assist in communications, a real bonus, we do not consider it a problem that requires immediate attention by way of electing "translator admins". If an admin is elected that is able to assist in those languages, that would be wonderful and helpful. We have internal discussions regarding players we feel would be a good fit for admin on the server. It's good to know this is something you would be available for. We will be watching you over the coming weeks or months, and will let you know if we are considering you for an Admin position on the PR Server. In the meantime, it's helpful to report players when no admins are online using the !R report function (and you may also use this system to make a note for an admin to review because we read these almost daily, but please do not spam !R reports in game). Thank you for your interest in Admin'ing here - we keep an eye on potential candidates to be sure they posses the same spirit, maturity, and positive attitude we expect from potential new PR Admins and VG Members here. Get to know the other regular players, PR Admins, and VG Members here and make some friends, too. We do not promote people we do not know, so get known. Cheers!
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We don't need to quote what you said here. I read it myself. Seems like you were angry when you wrote it. Shit happens in games and you cannot become abusive. Watch what you say, this is just a game. There is no reason to attack other players or admins with words. If you do this again, you will be banned permanently. Play the game, have fun. If you are angry, stop playing the game. /unbanned
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Sounds fun! Looks like you've been busy, had a feeling this was coming soon based on our last chat. Well done Haven't played an Arma event in a very long time. Looking forward to leading a squad!
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Then again, every system is different, too..... I'm running a terribly optimized OS, the Windows 10, and I've had a Chrome browser open playing a YouTube playlist on a loop for the past 17 days, and I've played a game or two to break the silence and monotony without issue. As I look at my stats now, I'm sitting at a nominal 4.3/15.4 GB RAM (I have many other programs/windows open, just minimized) and CPU usage is sitting at 11%, currently with a 64 day up-time. I've also experienced the Chrome RAM gobbler happen myself, but there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to it going haywire. One tip for Twitch and YouTube in Chrome is to ignore "Auto" for quality, and force it to HD 1080p+ when you want it, and when it's a small window just on the side, manually set it to 360p or 480p - there is very slight audio degradation below HD, but it's barely noticeable. Monitor your temperatures while playing! When I had a laptop that struggled with PC gaming and Project Reality, I created a dual boot with another OS (WinXP) that was dumbed down to only run PC games with all sorts of utilities disabled, no background programs, a single temperature monitor, and a "Free My RAM" utility that could scrape RAM away from temp processes that allocated space but then stopped using it -- the more for available for the game, the better (when running a 4GB RAM lappy c.2007, that is). I never let Windows update that secondary OS partition, it didn't run security software, and I kept a fan blowing on the laptop for cooling. And PR still crashed from time to time... I believe the official PC gaming philosophy applies, by notorious poets The Beastie Boys, "You gotta fight... for your right... to party"
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Check out this Communications and Brevity section of the United Operations BMS Codex, and visit this page to see the Brevity List at the bottom: http://www.unitedoperations.net/wiki/Communications_and_brevity
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Good to see all the new pilots on the VG server
=VG= SemlerPDX replied to =VG= Kavelenko's topic in Pilots Lounge
No, not necessarily. Though it may be indicative of an instability on the server (or the client). On December 10th, we changed a particular setting to attempt to increase stability. It is important for players to note times when these "blue pause messages" appear, including any information about the current game that could be relevant such as number of current players and their country of origin when connecting. It is certainly something that can cause a problem, when these messages happen often or in multiplayer flights, and we'd like to stop scratching our head on the matter and have a setup or SOP to deal with it. At this point, all we can do is ask players to note and report. It's okay to concede that BMS is built on a very old game to a point, and we are certainly doing what no other server does (or recommends), which is a free-to-join public campaign running 24/7. But we won't put up walls just to gain a little more stability, so some punches we need to roll with. -
On multiple occasions, to multiple people, you expressed that you do not play PR on anything but the very lowest settings, citing many reasons - I actually thought that you were making excuses for a poorly performing laptop, rather than actually believing that a video game like PR was truly "better" when played at the very lowest settings. Glad to hear you've changed that rather odd sounding belief.
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Excellent voice profile, Kav!! You've done a great job here, and your category use makes it very easy to navigate. This will really add to the immersion and free up your hands so you can pay attention to flying. Well done! I got some tips, here's one... Example of multipart commands that could be made in your profile: Delete the "Emergency" command. Add "Emergency;" to the "Tower request emergency landing" command. The semicolon ";" means the command on either side is viable, it's a choice seperator. Do the same for the Vectors and Approach commands to turn many into few. Use the Multipart Command Toggle Button (near "Import Commands") to toggle between showing each one seperately or on the same line for readability.
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Might be good to also test the FPS of that map with players who do not deliberately play PR in the very lowest graphics settings possible, as Double_13 does, in order to get a good range of experiences across multiple PC setups and graphics settings; laptops and PC's. We'd also be willing to host a dedicated server test with groups of players, we could offer one of our other passworded PR servers for the test. It would provide more realistic data on FPS/playability as opposed to the testers hosting BOT/AI in SP which hits the CPU harder than playing on a dedicated server.
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I am unable to properly function, so I'm copying a note I sent to a few of my oldest friends here at VG:
I can't login, I can't think. I can't even process life right now. I've been in a stunned shock since Sunday (Dec 31st) evening. In moments of clarity, I am reaching out to those I can think of - I consider many of you real friends, and I just want you all to know what has happened and why I'll be absent.On New Years Eve morning, my brother took his life. We were extremely close our entire lives almost like twins, but he had cut off contact with us all and moved far away for over a year. He had been struggling with mental health issues including audible hallucinations (hearing voices) that berated him and tortured him "verbally", as well as addiction problems, and we all have to just accept that he felt there was no other way to stop it all and escape. He was a talented musician and a knowledgeable composer. If any of you have watched some of my old gaming videos on YouTube, you've heard my brother's music in the background.
He will be cremated and released to us around the 12th, and I will be spreading his ashes at Wahclella Falls near or around then, presuming it is accessible this time of year, and we will hold a private Celebration of Life rememberance in our home somewhere around the 17th.
I may not come around for the next couple weeks, or until these matters have concluded, as I do not feel sociable at this time. Certain individuals can reach me when I am offline if there is a technical emergency, so contact =VG= m823us if there is a matter that requires my attention, and I will resolve it if/when I am able, and if not, it will go on the top of the "to do" list for when I am feeling better. I've already noted that I will be helping Oniblood work with the ARK Survival server as he expressed interest in that, and those who knew I was developing weekly PR event "team workshops" with custom maps should know I will continue with that project before too long.
I feel like I'm walking around in a daze, like a bad dream, and my time is filled with moments of painfully deafening silence and extreme grief, and the rest of it spent with family and friends, as people I've not talked to in years come over to express condolences. Hearing others talk about this all sounds like I'm listening to a commentary of my own life and it is too surreal to tolerate, so much so that my family now hushes up if I'm walking by when re-telling someone who has not yet heard, out of respect for my feelings.
I will eventually return because hanging out with friends online will help me to move forward and be strong, but I am having a hard time using the phone at this time and it's most comfortable for me to text for now - messages through this website or facebook are just fine if friends need to contact me.
Thank you all for understanding, and for being my friend.
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Condolence. :/
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Thank you all for the kind words
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My condolences for Your and Your family's loss Sem. Stay strong as you always are no matter how hard it may be...
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This looks like so much fun!! Thank you very much, TEDF!!! I'll be there throughout, and I'd love to lead a team; not sure which group, will decide something and send off the PM soon.
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Yea, this is pretty much what is happening already. Everyday, the server stops, performs a health check and backup of key files, swaps out the maplist file, and starts back up, all on a schedule. That's about as smart as it gets without me getting into zones that would not only require me to code additional utilities, but to add layers of security on top of it that increase the work load far into the realm of "why bother". Everything works rather well as it is, many persistent servers have a one to two hour maintenance window daily or weekly; ours is a daily maintenance window of only 2 minutes, and I don't think anyone here views that as unacceptable. If it was easy to improve on that, I would have already considered it - not to say I'm against going back to the drawing board, but the payout has to be worth the cost.
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It's not like this is possible, and for some reason, we're just not doing it.... There's no shortage of quality of life codings that I've created on our server, but we have to work within the realm of what is feasible (and which doesn't create a gigantic back door into our server to accomplish a task), and not what merely sounds ideal on paper. PR is an extremely old game.
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See those low peaks I've circled? Those are the average "lowest population times" over the past 7 days on the VG PR COOP Server, and they usually correspond to between 0300-0800 GMT. See how the peak is not exactly in the same place each day, how it fluctuates between a larger period and some days is WAY higher than others? This is because even though the server empties for the most part every day, 'when' that happens is an organic factor, so it varies with the day of the week, the season of the year (re. Holidays!), or with the phases of the moon itself (believe it or not). Since I cannot automate my daily restart/map rotation swap system to know how many people are online at a given time and then decide itself that the number is as low as the population is going to get in that 24 hour period, there is no way I can force our server to recognize that the "most off-peak hour possible" has changed for that particular day by, say, 45 minutes or more. Some of my automated systems on the server are able to wait for all players to empty out of the server, but this one needs to be forced to prevent issues where no one empties out and the server runs for 48 hours without it's scheduled reset/map rotation swap. PR is a mod built on a 12 year old game engine, and even some of the most recent, modern games aren't fully capable of such 'average player count rationalization' automation. It is already set up for the average "most off-peak hour possible" for sure, averaged over about a month. I wish it were possible to float it, but at times, we have to accept that what would be ideal is not always as easy to implement as it seems in discussion, if even possible at all. But, hey... better than Mutrah City starting map every single day, and after every single server crash, right? Could be worse.... your story could read, "every night we get into a good map, late when no admins are there to change the map - then it crashes back to Mutrah and the server empties out"
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@Echo1 We're not trying to be mean, here, buddy. Seriously. Believe it or not, but I am personally quite sympathetic. When I began playing Project Reality COOP at VG back around 2010, it was during US midnight hours, and there were not only no Admins online, but I didn't see an actual =VG= member until I had been playing here for about a month. They just did not happen to have any clan members who regularly played during those late hours back then, and all of us regulars on the server knew it. It could get unruly at times, for sure. Not everyone who plays video games is a mature, level headed adult (to state the obvious). It's like, welcome to the internets, right? ugh We used the report function in game to make sure players knew we were all united in supporting the server rules even when Admins were not present, and once in awhile, we had to give up on an area, or asset we had rights to claim, or take a break for a few minutes to wait for a griefer/troll to get bored and move on. Yea, it pretty much sucked.. but we knew all the admins were sleeping or away, and our choice was to either not play, or play and just deal with it (without breaking the rules ourselves, or taking matters into our own hands). We didn't cry foul because there was no one to Admin, we just understood that rarely do ANY game servers ANYWHERE have 24/7 admins online, and even still a few of us fell in love with the community and it's values & spirit enough to make friends and eventually join the group, and then subsequently found ourselves as Admins in the game as a bonus. We also did not have non-VG Clan Member in-game PR Admins back then - this evolved over time to enable us to cover even more timezones by allowing players (who may even be in a different clan) to get vetted for integrity, respectfulness, level headedness, and a maturity level consistent with the values and spirit of the VG Clan.
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that further makes my point
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re. Steam - yes, we have one, but it's incredibly difficult to manage an online community in 5 places at once, which is why groups such as Steam, Facebook, Discord, etc. are less effective and less popular than our standard forums or TS3 -- also, because those services are so seldom used by the public OR our group, they just lose out as "the" way to make a community work, and end up as just sign posts leading to our true home - the TS3 and website, and game servers.
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Like 8-bits said, look for PR Admins on TS3 first*, and use the report function in game so we can review any activity later. It's not a useless function - though there are always going to be times around Holidays or just in general, where no admins are online at that time. We are very careful in our Admin selection process and therefore it is not easy to simply fill the server with Admins who are covering all 24 hours of the server's uptime. It's not something that can be "fixed" on any server anywhere, it's just a thing that happens during non-peak times or during Holiday seasons such as this, and especially on older games such as this. We do appreciate specific reports here on the forum such as this, as it will direct our attention to the logs for the time period you are referring to. *I've been on TS3 for the last several hours, and I have PR tags next to my name which means I'm a PR Admin, and you could have maybe got my attention to sort out a mess. Not everyone might respond, if they were AFK for example, but it's still worth a try. Cheers!
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[23:58:01 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: !r 2tarek steal [23:58:06 TEAM 2] KevinIsMyName: top stealing CAS squad's A-10! [23:58:10 TEAM 2] 2tarek: what [23:58:12 T2 SQUAD 3] KevinIsMyName: !admins [23:58:19 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: hurry before he crash it :D [23:58:27 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: please im not gonna wait 10 m [23:58:30 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: please ! :D [23:58:48 T2 SQUAD 3] Ranger >>>12<<<: !r 2tarek steal [00:00:42 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: 2 tarek i know u can understand my fucking language right now. bring the I10 back [00:00:50 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: if you crash it its a bann for you [00:02:33 TEAM 2] 2tarek: i can understand you im not stupid like you Reviewing the logs, we found similar behavior under an alternate account as well. Because of this, 2tarek has placed on the banlist, and will be eligible for an unban provided he takes the time to read the rules here, and agrees to follow them. Thanks for the report! posting this just for fun; in that same log, I also uncovered some infighting between two of our VG Clan Members who are also PR Devs - time to ban some bots! (j/k) [00:19:52 TEAMKILL] [R-BOT] Fastjack [mec_jet_mig29_sp_bomblauncher_1] [R-BOT] melonmuncher /locked
