The Best

[Mkay1]

What is better 3.0 or 2.8.3_rc2, and why

[Word]

2.8.3 is stable and the second most used version after 2.8.2 i'd say.

3.1 has got lots of features and extras you don't need or that don't work yet, and you often need to find out by yourself how to turn them off, but most things are useful improvements. It's easy once you got used to. It's still called experimental but that doesn't need it may destroy your computer.

[ed]

It's like the blind leading the blind...
28.34 is the new 2.8. Real stablility in a somewhat flexible timeline.
3.1? Pah! 37.6 ftw!

/me puts his sensible head on...

It's 0.3.0 and 0.2.8.3_rc2...

0.2.8.3_rc2 - The second release candidate for 0.2.8.3 release. Tried and tested stable version of arma with not too many experimental features. Use it and report any bugs you may find.

0.3.0 - An experimental version. No stable release of this branch has been made, it's simply a snapshot of the still in development next version of Armagertron.
Some new features...
Highly customisable cockpit, minimap, mirrors, tab completion, many more I can't remember right now - zones v2?
Some experimental features...
Music with playlist support, other sound is near enough broken
New camera code which is despised by many as it can't emulate the widely used 0.2.8 cam.

Try them both. It's a personal preference which one you prefer.

Me, I'm waiting for 0.2.9 release where we have all the featues of both

[Van-hayes]

The biggest differences I found between the two, gameplay wise, is the glancing. Basically 0.3 glances can go in 360 degrees with either right or left glance, 0.2.8x can glance faster by default, but in 0.2.8x you have to press which glance you want to see in that direction while in 0.3 you can use 1 glance to see all around you. Its all personal preference but it can be hard switching between the two if you get usedto/comfortable with one. Also, i cant really remember, but i don't think 0.2.8x has forward glance.

[Hoax]

Try them both. It's a personal preference which one you prefer.

[Lucifer]

@Vanhayes: You managed to more or less completely summarize the mercam quite well. Now when people ask what makes it better, it's "You only have to think what direction to turn your head, not which button to push".

[Van-hayes]

Speaking of the mercam, would that be named after meriton? I remember he did something with the camera in 0.3 when it first came out, I thought it was patching it so that you could use 0.2.8.x glances in 0.3 but maybe im wrong. Someone brought it up, asking why it was called mercam, and that was the only reason i could think of. Now I'm curious why it is called that.

[Lucifer]

Meriton wrote the mercam to make glances behavior more like natural glances behave. Like, when you're walking down the street and you want to look left, you turn your head left once. If, while looking left, you decide to look behind you, you turn your head left once again. So the idea was that it tapped into natural head movements, basically.

Wrtlprnft checked it out and liked it, and accidentally committed it to the svn repo just a few days before 0.3.0 was released.

I saw it while working up to the release, and got used to it. So I decided to leave it in 0.3.0 and see what people thought about it, since the only other way they'd get to see the mercam was to patch and build, and that means most of the people who we'd like to hear from would never see it. It was a whimsical decision on my part, but I don't regret it at all. The people that like it really like it, and most of us are in agreement that it should be default behavior (although we would like to have the old glancing available via config options, there's a fair amount of work that needs to be done to allow that).

So, in a nutshell, the mercam *is* the smartcam/glancing in 0.3.0 (although I don't think he messed much with the smart cam itself).

[dlh]

My main issue with 0.3 glancing is with glancing back. It is disorienting. I don't want to be spun around in a semi-circle to see behind me. This is still a problem with a higher CAMERA_GLANCE_ANGULAR_VELOCITY.

The glancing in 0.3 is also slightly less responsive, but enough to be noticable. For example, I will glance left, release the key, and then glance right. My glance keys are the arrow keys, and I can do this action in a rolling-fluent motion. The glance right will sometimes not occur, like my keypress was ignored. This is not a problem with 0.3-old-glancing. Also, I am aware that I can just press glance back when glancing left to do this action, but it has the disorienting spin I described previously.

There is also an annoying bug with 0.3 glancing: I have two camera modes enabled; custom and in-cam. Go into in-cam mode and glance left/right and hold it down. While still glancing change camera modes, and your camera flies far away…