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Hello and welcome to the Arma 3 E3 Night Ops Showcase, director's cut.
Here we'll take a closer look at some of our new lighting features and finish things
up with a short fire fight.
So, little touches like the chemlight to the right
- or small improvements to things like the heat effect from a burning fire -
demonstrate our commitment to adding some richness and quality to night scenes.
That's also evident in the revamped muzzle flashes.
Although, again, it's an example of a visual improvement, it's interesting to
consider the way that subtle aesthetic changes
might impact upon gameplay. Which, hopefully, we'll see in combat just a little later.
Although we've still got a little more work to do tweaking and configuring
- particularly with the brightness and recoil -
by switching to my side-arm, we can see I'm now making a much smaller visual footprint.
Now, if I head into the new gear system - which we'll talk about a little more
shortly - I can take off my attachment, and the resulting muzzle flash is now far
more pronounced.
It's a pretty basic idea,
but it demonstrates the way that
simply adding some small visual polish produces a new set of decisions to make in combat.
One bit of feedback we noticed was about the 'brightness' of the scene
('ZOMG, BIS nerfed teh nightteimez!1one1').
If I use a quick dev-cheat to skip the date forward a fortnight or so,
we can immediately see the difference between having a full moon and not.
It's a lot darker (orly?)
meaning that I can't see quite so far ahead and that things like NVGs or flashlights
will be far more effective and pronounced within such a scene.
It helps demonstrate the way that various little enhancements come together to create improved
night time gameplay.
Ok, Switching the flashlight on,
we can see the way it illumines the environment
and also get an idea of the advantage of the new 'tactical pace',
where I can manoeuvre around with the weapon raised,
part of our greater goal of improving the fluidity of controls.
Taking a slightly closer look at the inventory system, we've got the customisable
attachments for my weapon; at the moment, we've equipped a flashlight on the rail.
Now if I open up this second tab here - which represents the gear I can carry on my fatigues
- I can switch that out for the IR pointer.
It's worth mentioning that this interface is still a prototype,
but it communicates the basic design g oals of the system; namely, on-the-fly
customisation, and factoring in the capacity and weight of your gear with other design
features, like our fatigue and aiming mechanics.
Switching the IR pointer on, we can mark targets for our team, which would
only be visible if they've got NVGs equipped, too.
Ok, so, just skipping ahead a little to the meet-up with our friendly patrol, we'll take
a look at some the things I've shown so far in action.
As we head away from the light sources and into the night, we can see just how dark it can get.
Ok, now, I happen to know there are some enemies up ahead, so, if I can dive
into some cover, we should get a feeling about how fire fights are influenced by some
of these new visual tweaks.
Now I can see muzzle flashes burning through the foliage (use 720p fullscreen!)
and it's clear than my own team mate is lighting himself up like a christmas tree without
the use of a muzzle suppressor.
So here we've briefly seen the way that lighting can bring a real sense of both
atmosphere and gameplay,
working quite organically together to, hopefully,
generate some fantastic experiences.
Alright that's about it for now.
Stay tuned to arma3.com and our Arma3official social channels to keep up to date
with the very latest news and updates.
Bye for now!