FROM: Project Lead
TO: Arma 3 Users
INFO: 2014 recap, Winter break, Happy holidays!
PRECEDENCE: Flash
SITUATION
Welcome to the last Arma 3 SITuation REPort of 2014! After a turbulent release year in 2013, our team was excited to continue supporting the platform and game this year. Let's quickly run through the major developments: we started by completing the campaign with episodes "Adapt" and "Win". That also meant adding 2 fixed-wing CAS aircraft, the Tempest series of trucks and 2 Altis Points of Interest: the ghost hotel and the stadium. We then unleashed the divine powers of Zeus multiplayer, which we've since seen used in many communities and in ways beyond what we had envisioned ourselves.
Then things got a little crazy, with us taking the April Fools parody to an actual DLC: Karts. That first premium package allowed us to trial a new DLC strategy and also resulted in a sizable donation to the Czech Red Cross. Realizing the vanilla game did not yet welcome new Arma players as well as it could, our team released the Bootcamp Update, offering various learning experiences and the Virtual Reality environment. We then hit a couple of rough patches, literally, causing various multiplayer issues. Our attempts to optimize and stabilize the game did not always work out on a large-scale. We've since improved this situation, but there's still work to do in this area. The year drew to a satisfying close with the Helicopters DLC and accompanying platform update.
Given that we've not even discussed many other additions and improvements, like expanded Steam Workshop support, we're looking back at a great year for Arma 3. We'll now be taking a quick winter break, before diving into yet another year of support. Our thanks to all players, our community, mod makers, livestreamers, server administrators, forum / Feedback Tracker / Community Wiki moderators, business partners, and not least of all: everyone at Bohemia Interactive! We wish you happy holidays and a most splendid new year!
INTELLIGENCE
The Arma subreddit has received a nice face-lift, also providing some useful links to official and unofficial resources. You'll find a supportive community, interesting player stories, funny pictures and awesome videos. While this is not an official channel, we have more than a few devs roaming around there.
We have stopped supporting the 'contributor' feature of Steam Workshop for now. Contributed items have been removed from your lists of published items to minimize confusion (no actual items were removed of course). After speaking to Valve, it would appear this feature is not quite well supported and therefore not useful in its current form. If this changes in the future, we'll certainly react to any changes Steam rolls out.
As the time of writing there are a few days left to vote for your favorite Arma 3 mods in the ModDB annual top 100. Four mods made the cut this year, so head on over and show your support!
OPERATIONS
Some of our developers frequently appear in these reports. Others operate in the shadows and yet without them we could not develop the game. Let's shine a light on these people, starting with Mastering Lead Jan Kyncl. Mastering is a set of activities that results in the final, you guessed it, master of the game. This means ensuring the correct and complete data exists in the right place, that meta-data is accurately configured, that the collection of parts brought in by all departments works together as a whole, and many more tasks of this nature. Jan is also responsible for publishing every single change to Steam. Every update of every branch of every Arma 3 application on every day - quite a feat! Kudos to Jan and those who assist him for being the backbone of our team.
Bohemia Interactive will be closed for a winter break from Monday December 22 until Friday January 2 inclusive. That means our regular operations for Arma 3 will be paused for that duration. Dev-Branch updates will likely continue until this Thursday and resume when we get back. There will also not be another SITREP until we open back up.
LOGISTICS
Tools Commissar Julien Vida would like to remind modders that they can switch to the Arma 3 Tools Dev-Branch if they experience issues with the main branch suite. This version can help to address a few issues in Addon Builder and WAVtoWSS.
Find more French unofficial translations of these REPorts via Elements Gaming. Most recently they've published translations for last week's SITREP and the latest OPREP.