SITREP #00006

reported by Joris-Jan van 't Land on April 9, 2013

FROM: Project Lead
TO: Alpha Users
INFO: Pending Alpha update, Supporter Editions
PRECEDENCE: Flash

SITUATION

This is a busy week for the team. We are pushing hard for the internal milestone mentioned last week, but we have also begun preparing another Alpha and Alpha Lite update (default branch). The exact release timing by means of the second SPOTREP depends on whether we find major showstoppers or not. Meanwhile there have been some cool fixes in the Development branch, which will make it into this update. There are fixes to the simulation of speed of sound and delays for weapons and explosions, as well as the synchronization of character rotations in multiplayer. There has also been a fix in the combat AI, which means groups (who do share target info) will no longer have all members fire on targets which cannot be seen at all. Do note that certain other AI technologies can confuse you as to who knows about what: sight, hearing, 'guessing' and suppression are all factored in.

INTELLIGENCE

When we launched the Alpha, we said the first 500 people to purchase the Supporter Edition would get into the full game's credits. Since there were some issues with Store.bistudio.com on launch day, we are extending this to the first 2500 people. We feel this should cover all people who were affected.

Many of you are obviously eager to see more content in the Alpha. We do have several possible additions in our plans, but we will not detail them, nor say when we intend to release them until we are sure we can. The big update to look forward to is the start of Beta in Q2, which will have more vehicles, weapons and characters. What we can and want to release before that depends on many factors: testing focus (currently still infantry and general stability), fixing important new issues, priorities on full game content, etc. Don't count on much, so any additions during Alpha become a pleasant surprise. If we do release new content, it would appear in Development branch first.

OPERATIONS

Preparing the Alpha update means that an internal data snapshot is being made tomorrow, which we then put through quick testing and evaluation. The goal is to catch major issues such as crashes on start-up, but not to fix every bug (it's still an Alpha). We then stage the snapshot on Development branch for one or two days. Finally, the thing is green lighted and released via SPOTREP.

LOGISTICS

The first 2500 Supporter Edition owners will soon receive an e-mail with a link to a special webpage. On this page they will be able to opt into having their name displayed in the game credits. You will also likely be able to format how your name is to be shown, but we will need to moderate entries for the usual things. Stick to just using your name if you don't want to risk your entry not being used. We also plan to highlight opted-in supporters on our main Arma 3 website.