The state of things going forward

  • October 28, 2012

Limitations

I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but it’s hard to know exactly what to say about the situation. The short version is that the demand for ShackTac membership right now is extremely high, and our ability to bring in new people is constrained by factors beyond our control. We have had several thousand join requests this year so far, and receive hundreds of them every month.

The group right now stands at ~400 members all told. We have pushed ArmA’s netcode hard to try to find the max number of people we can get into a session. As it turns out, this is somewhere in the realm of 120-130 players currently – beyond that you start to run into crippling issues where even small amounts of packetloss from individual players can have catastrophic repercussions, to include freezing the netcode/server until any players with packetloss can be kicked.

This has become a very real blocking issue for us now. Pulling in significantly more people means that we will more frequently run into the >130 player network bugs. There’s nothing we can do to avoid this right now aside from throttling the number of new joins we’ll accept any given month.

Future Actions

Now, as to the future? I intend to continue to press this issue and take us to the highest sustainable single-server playercount possible. Right now that’s ~130 players. In the future it could be 200. This is in Bohemia’s hands and the best we can do to try to realize that future is to continue to show them that we are interested in it.

The best way to do that right now is to up-vote this ticket on the DevHeaven community issue tracker:

https://dev-heaven.net/issues/27001

Anyone can register on DevHeaven, go to that ticket, and click the green ‘thumb-up’ icon to give it a vote. BIS uses these votes to prioritize their community-related fixes, so your vote does and will make a difference. If you are looking to join ShackTac, and you happen to be one of the many people that get passed over simply because we can’t take many new joins on each month, you should definitely take a few minutes to register at DH, up-vote that, and try to influence BIS to make the change required to allow for higher-playercount ArmA.

More after the jump…
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Video TTPs Premiere

  • September 25, 2012

I’ve begun two training-oriented video projects recently – ‘Dslyecxi’s Art of Flight’ and ‘Dslyecxi’s Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures’. I intend to continue these far into the future, to include ArmA3 of course. There will also be a written/illustrated TTP3 to follow up to my existing TTP2, and work on that has been ongoing for a bit now.

If you’re interested in seeing more episodes of either the Art of Flight or TTP series, make sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel – I may not always post them to my site as news articles on time or at all.

Here’s the first of the TTP videos:

Crew Coordination

You can find the Art of Flight videos after the jump.  Continue reading

ShackTac BunnyHop

  • September 2, 2012

ShackTac BunnyHop, created by Macolik, allows you to do a running jump over obstacles. While jogging, simply press the key combination you already use for “Step Over” and you’ll activate the jump. This can be used to jump over fences, fallen trees, and various other impediments to movement.

If you want to see what it looks like and listen to me say the above text, check out this video!

Download from our DevHeaven page.

Welcome to the new Dslyecxi.com!

  • August 28, 2012

I am rolling out my new site layout tonight. I thought it might take longer to work everything up, but nope – I’m feeling good about what’s here already and can continue to add and tweak stuff in the background once it’s live.

Please take a look at the About Me & My Site section for an updated intro on both topics.

Also, if you have a chance, check out this brief survey about the future of the site.

Note that the ‘Dslyecxi on…’ tab will take you to a blog about all sorts of things. Currently it’s hosting some of the more interesting topics from my Tumblr blog, and in the future I hope to use it for various other interesting content that doesn’t quite warrant a front page inclusion. As to the front page – I intend to use it to post announcements about new mods, major articles, etc. I’m sure I’ll find some additional tabs and options for the main menu, but for now it covers the basics well.

As to how this all actually turns out as we move into the future – who knows, let’s find out!

Thanks to everyone for their support so far. It’s been a great ride. Here’s to the future. 🙂

ShackTac Interact mod

  • August 28, 2012

ShackTac Interact is a small addon I created awhile back for our in-house use, which has been asked for by other communities and is now being made public.

ShackTac Interact requires ACE2 and CBA. Note that a server (or mission) must allow this addon for it to function. ShackTac Interact introduces two new features, as follows:

Join Player Group


This option becomes available when you walk up to a player and press your interact key. You will see a ST-orange ‘ShackTac’ menu item – click on this, and you will have a ‘Join their group’ option. When you select this, you immediately join that player’s group. Note that this only works on players, not AI.

Take command of current group

Press your self interact key and you will see ‘ShackTac Self’ as an option – click it and you will have an option to take command of your current group. This can be used if you were wounded as an FTL or otherwise lost command for some reason. This can also be used in the event that the order of seniority gets out of whack and somebody out-of-order needs to assume group leadership.

I’ve put together a short video demonstrating how to use the features:

More, including download, after the jump.

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ShackTac Map Autobrightness Mod

  • July 31, 2012

This one’s something I’ve wanted to see for awhile and just randomly had time for today. Put simply, the map will automatically darken when dusk/night falls, then brighten again at dawn/daytime.

Yeah, that’s it. If you just went “Oh hell yeah!”, this mod is for you.

See a video demonstration of it:

Download it here.

BIS forum thread here.

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