Arma3 Alpha Controls

The Arma3 Alpha

This piece is a companion to my Arma3 Alpha Movement & Shooting overview. Please note that this is a description based on the initial Alpha release – expect to see the Arma3 controls evolve to some extent as it moves closer to release. I will attempt to update this to reflect those changes going forward, and keep a note of when and what was changed.

a3_clearing_structure

Introduction

Please feel free to share this and the companion video around to anyone who might have thought that Arma2 was a clunky game to play – because it most certainly was, and Arma3 is very different in that regard. Bohemia has put a lot of effort into improving the movement mechanics, animation system, and mouse control of Arma3, and I think anyone who wasn’t happy with it before will be pleased to see these long-desired changes.

Here I’ll cover my personal preferences regarding control bindings. These are not the defaults, and I’m not saying they’re perfect, but they’re what I use, and I really like this setup. Try it and see, or just give the defaults a go – your choice.

There are a few things that everyone should have standardized. For one, if you’re coming from an Arma or DayZ background, you are probably familiar with the concept of freeaim. This is where your weapon moves independent of the screen until it reaches an invisible boundary, at which point your view turns with it. The short version is that freeaim in Arma3 is one of the worst control decisions you can possibly make. It’s off by default – leave it there. Freeaim is a feature for those who are nostalgic about a time when the ArmA controls were just plain bad – leave it there, it’s the past. Let’s move on.

Mouse acceleration – turn it off, unless you’re positive that you want it. If in doubt, just keep it off. Smoothing should be turned off as well. For even more responsive mouse controls, turn “VSync” off in the video options.

Next, let’s look at the actual control binds.

Stances

Default Stances

I use F and V for my stance up and stance down respectively. F is bound to a control called ‘Up’ – nice and cryptic. What this does is toggle between standing and crouched. You can basically think of it like a ‘toggle crouch’ bind that you’d see in other games. V is bound to a control called ‘Go prone’. Again, this is a kind of awkward name for it – it’s more like ‘toggle prone’. If you’re standing or crouched, and you press ‘toggle prone’, you’ll immediately go prone. Simple enough, right? The only thing to remember is that if you’re prone and you press prone again, you’ll stand up. If you’re prone and you press ‘up’, you’ll go to a crouched state.

Note that if you use the F and V binds I use, you’ll want to ensure that ‘Get out’ and ‘Eject’ are changed, as well as any other potentially conflicting binds. I use Ctrl-E, pressed twice, to toggle eject. This is a keybind you will not accidentally press. I don’t have ‘get out’ bound – and I don’t feel that I need it. Your mileage may vary.

Stance Adjust

Ok, so, those are the basic stances. What about stance adjust? (called Adjust in the menus). You need a key that’s easily accessible for your stance adjustment – this is the fine-tuning you can do; we’ll talk more about it later, but for now just consider what key you’d like to use for it. I recommend Tab, CAPSLOCK, left control, or left alt. Personally, I use left alt. It needs to be a key you can comfortably press while also accessing your forward and back keys – W and S by default.

Movement Speeds

Walking & Running

You also want to make sure you’re using a good walk/run method. I recommend binding Walk or run temporary to left shift. When you hold this, you’ll walk. There’s also a toggle for it, called walk or run toggle, but I personally don’t use that. I believe it’s bound to double-tap left shift – this can lead to accidentally toggling it, so I just leave it off. There’s a bind for W+S and S+W to toggle between walk and jog – unbind it; there’s a better method to use.

Tactical Pace

Next we have tactical pace – this is a new movement mode in which instead of jogging, you move slower but with your weapon ready. You could think of this like a urban combat movement speed. I recommend binding this to something intuitive – I use Left Shift + Left Alt. If you use that bind, make sure that you bind it both ways – Left Shift + Left Alt, as well as Left Alt + Left Shift – this means that it won’t matter which key you press first. My rationale for this is that Left Alt acts as a “tactical stance” adjuster, while left shift is my speed modifier. Tactical + speed == tactical pace.

Sprinting / “Turbo”

After that, here’s a cool trick I learned from Karel Moricky of BIS. I’ve been using this keybind for months now in Arma2 and I absolutely love it – it’s clever and streamlines things. The trick is to make it so that your ‘Turbo’ bind – which is another weird way of saying your run key – isn’t double-tap W as it is by default, but instead is the combination of your W and S keys. With this, while moving forward, you can simply roll your finger down to press S at the same time as W, instantly transitioning you into the sprinting state. Try it – it takes a little bit to get used to, but once you’ve got it down, it’s a fantastic method.

Mantle

My mantle key – stepping over an obstacle – is W+X. Like the sprinting bind, this is a clever combination that allows you to take a key that doesn’t conflict with the concept (for me, X is my ‘hold breath’ key) and give it a second purpose when combined with a movement key.

Grenades

Error!

The default Arma 3 Alpha keybinds map the ‘G’ key, formerly used for accessing your inventory, to ‘throw grenade’. This is extremely dangerous for players who are coming over from an Arma2 background – I strongly recommend rebinding this to a different key, or using 2xG as the key instead. Note that gear is now on ‘I’, for Inventory.

Things to unbind

With that being said, there are a few things I recommend unbinding to address some potential latency issues with your controls. Make sure that your Q, W, and E keys do not have any double-tap binds on them. Q and E by default are your evasive keys, and they’ll have double-tap binds. Remove those. This will prevent you from accidentally ending up stuck leaning left or right when you don’t want to be. W by default has a double-tap bind for sprint – if you did what I recommended and used W+S for your keys, you don’t need that – remove it. Any key with a double-tap bind on it will have a slight response lag to it, as part of detecting double-taps. Look for double-tap keys like ejecting or leaving vehicles, toggling into different states, etc, and try to remove the ones that you won’t need.

Mouse Controls

Speaking of, the one last thing you should tweak is your mouse. By default, right clicking brings your irons up, and holding right mouse zooms you in. This is problematic – if you keep this bind, your right-mouse zoom will have about a half-second delay before it happens. I don’t know about you, but that bothers me. What I do to get around this, is remove my ironsights from right mouse, and instead use my Z key for them. I’ve been doing this since at least Arma1 and particularly thanks to the very fast zoom that Arma3 has, I couldn’t go back. Try it. If you like it, use it. If you don’t want to move your ironsight key off of right mouse, you could also try changing it so that zoom is on your Z key. That way you’d have an instantly-responsive zoom, while still retaining the right-mouse ironsights. It’s up to you.

Mousewheel Usage

There are two other binds I do with my mouse that I think are worth considering. I have a Logitech G9X mouse, so you may not have the same functionality – but if you do, it’s worth considering, and if you don’t, it’s worth considering getting a mouse that does.

The G9X has a scroll wheel that has side to side functionality. Press left on the mousewheel and you can trigger an event to happen, same with pressing it right. By default these are set to scroll left and right, but you can modify these buttons to do special keystrokes or act as generic buttons or whatever via the Logitech software.

Arma3 has a number of weapons with magnified sights. Here we have a HAMR sight on the MX rifle.

mx_with_rco

This is great for plinking people at a distance, but what if you want to get up close and personal? Well, Arma3, like Arrowhead, has multiple sights per weapon where appropriate. That little red dot on the top of the scope – that’s an unmagnified optic intended to be used at closer ranges where the magnification is unnecessary or a hindrance. The problem with this is that you need a bind to switch to it, and you want something pretty accessible. If you’re like me, your other keys – the easy-access ones – are full of other important stuff. I can’t really make room on my keyboard because of that. So instead, I use my G9’s middle mouse scroll right ability to toggle between magnified and non-magnified sights. It’s a very intuitive bind and makes good use of the middle mouse button functionality.

rco_dot_and_scope

Along those lines, I use my left scroll to toggle the infrared laser attachment, or the flashlight attachment. In reality you don’t necessarily want one of those turned on all the time – having it on left scroll allows me to toggle it on when I need it, then quickly toggle it off. You can find this listed as ‘Lights’ in the keybinds. While it’s significant to use this functionality for the IR laser – having many lasers on at once can be confusing – being able to turn your flashlight on and off quickly is even more important. Any idiot can see a flashlight in the dark, they don’t need nightvision like with the lasers. If you need to illuminate, turn on your light, sweep what you need to see quickly, then turn it off and move. This is how you avoid death in the real world when employing tactical lights, and it’s not too much of a surprise that the same principles apply to Arma.

a3_ir_lasers

So, those are some basic controls to get you sorted out for infantry gameplay. If you’d like to see more on how it all comes together, check out my Arma 3 Movement & Shooting tutorial.

Final Thoughts

Arma3 is a great opportunity to reevaluate keybinds, consolidate them, and integrate new possibilities. The default keybinds aren’t bad, but it’s something worth looking at to see if it works for you. For me, these changes have helped me significantly in my gameplay. I am continuing to evaluate the possibilities with A3, and there are a few things I can anticipate experimenting with in the future as they’re introduced to the Alpha.

Best of luck to you in your adventures in Arma3-alpha-land.

My thoughts on controls – RockPaperShotgun’s ‘The Flare Path’

December 21, 2012

In which I talk about the merits of mouse & keyboard for ArmA, as well as what I tend to use in more simulation-heavy games.

Check it out!

Freeaim

September 13, 2012

Freeaim: Or ‘Once upon a time, I was misguided.’

Once upon a time, a much-younger me wrote an article about tactical gaming. At that time I was an Operation Flashpoint player, grown used to using the game’s “freeaim” system – wherein the weapon was not aligned with the view, and instead moved freely in a box shape. Another game at the time – Red Orchestra – used a similar system, as did a landmark tactical mod called Infiltration.

At the time, I believed this to be ‘The Way‘ to do realistic aiming.

In the years since, I have switched my stance on this completely – and, to answer the question posed to me on Tumblr:

Do you recommend aiming deadzone? Why/why not?

…I do not recommend using the aiming deadzone in any game that gives you an option, such as the ArmA series. I am strongly opposed to the feature in general these days, and it’s a big part of why I do not play Red Orchestra 2 with any frequency – as it does not give you that option and suffers for it.

Why is that, you ask?

Freeaim has no basis in reality and is terrible from a user-interface standpoint.

There, I said it.

Freeaim fails by virtue of how it works. In the context of the ArmA2 implementation, freeaim fails in that it forces you to ‘pan’ your view awkwardly by moving your aim to the limits of the ‘deadzone’ area before you’ll actually begin turning. From here, you end up with your weapon pointed in the direction you were turning, offset from your screen center in whatever direction that happened to be. Your actual aiming point – your muzzle direction if unsighted, or your irons if sighted – continually moves around your screen and relative to your viewing direction. One of the key principles of becoming a good shooter in the real world is being able to muscle-memory various common actions, such as indexing a stock in your shoulder, moving a weapon from a carrying posture (low/high ready, sul, etc) into a sighted posture, aligning your sights, establishing a stock weld, inserting or removing a magazine sight-unseen, and so forth.

Freeaim prevents you from developing this sort of muscle memory with the aiming process, as it provides a ‘moving target’ that constantly changes where your aiming point will be on-screen. In reality, a shooter looks at what they intend to engage, and their body works to bring their weapon up and aligned with where they’re looking. It is an absolutely natural process, and being able to repeatedly execute this concept unconsciously and with consistent results is key to being an effective shooter. It is true that you may end up twisting your torso or contorting your body in other ways to engage multiple targets, take advantage of cover, and so forth – however, this has little or no bearing on what you as a shooter are seeing. You are focusing on your target, your weapon sights are aligned with your eyes, and that’s that.

Freeaim/deadzone systems do not give you this result. The ‘traditional’ FPS style of having your weapon aligned with your view, as with ArmA if you turn the deadzone off, is the proper way to do things. Your mouse (or thumbstick if you’re a console dude) controls your intent. When I snap my mouse around to aim at something, this should be allowed, it should be repeatable and consistent (something ArmA2 struggles with due to other clunky mechanics of how aiming works – but, fortunately, this is something ArmA3 fixes!) – if you want to penalize me for ‘snap shooting’ or whatever you want to call it, there are other ways to do it that don’t involve me feeling like I’m controlling a game with clunky metal robot arms. Deadzone/freeaim is simply not the right solution.

While freeaim can ‘work’ (insomuch as a cumbersome, clunky aiming and viewing method can be said to ‘work’) at longer ranges, it fails miserably when the engagement ranges shorten. Moving through a MOUT or CQB environment with ArmA-style freeaim is tantamount to suicide, as you are having to frequently turn left/right and look up/down to cover different angles, floors, etc. This means that your ability to ‘index’ on your sights, to gain the benefit of ‘muscle memory’, is continually impeded in a very severe manner.

Red Orchestra 2 is not as dramatic of an example as ArmA’s style of freeaim, as your view turns whenever you move the mouse and only the weapon is influenced by freeaim, but the end result is still quite goofy and artificially impacts the gameplay in what I would say is a negative way. I would even wager to say that the fact that RO2 saw such a remarkable drop-off in player activity shortly after release is partly due to the goofy freeaim it employs, though I suspect you will be shouted out of their forums on the pretense of ‘realism’ if you suggest this.

When it comes to the ArmA series, I would not ask for freeaim to be removed from ArmA3 – there are many who are likely nostalgic about it and play in a fashion where it works for them – but I will plainly state that anyone who chooses to use it in A3 – or uses it in ArmA2 currently – is at a severe disadvantage to those who choose to discard it. If you play adversarial missions with freeaim on, you are hurting yourself as well as your team – you would do better with it off.

Try it and see.