FROM: Creative Director
TO: Arma 3 Users
INFO: DLC Survey, Launcher Updates, Splendid sounds
PRECEDENCE: Flash
SITUATION
Development on our forthcoming Helicopters DLC has picked up some pace and, alongside it, our goal to bring RotorLib's flight dynamics to Arma 3's development branch draws closer, too. Although we've recently experienced some hiccups that have prevented us from publishing the very latest dev-branch executables, we're still on course to deploy the new flight model at the beginning of August.
All of our 'vanilla' helicopters should be ready to fly soon™, and we're keen to give all players the time to try them out and and offer up their feedback. Unleashing this new feature early will, we trust, provide enough time for mod makers to prepare their own precious assets, too. The configuration of the flight model XMLs should be mostly the same as it was for Take On Helicopters, and custom-created assets should work fine in Arma 3.
INTELLIGENCE
Back in May we released Arma 3 Karts DLC with the intention of testing out our new approach to Downloadable Content. Since then, we've received a variety of feedback and now we're ready for even more! Eager to know your views on this important tech, Platform guru, Jiří Zlatohlávek has put together a splendid questionnaire regarding our DLC strategy: http://arma3.com/survey. We'd really appreciate your continued feedback!
Next up, we can report further progress on the Arma 3 Launcher, which now supports a news service. You should be able to find this SITREP directly in its feed (or, indeed, you may be even reading it there right now, hello!). We hope this will further help players to stay in touch with improvements, adjustments and additional features. Of course, the Launcher itself remains work-in-progress; currently, we're progressing with localisation and, in the near future, we hope you'll find it in your own game language .
OPERATIONS
Last week, we managed to add sounds to opening and closing doors in game. The work is still in progress - all doors currently have the same sound - but we're looking to add different samples for distinctive types of door. Although it's a fairly minor feature, it's something that's been omitted for many years. Furthermore, this (relatively) safe/simple work has been a good learning experience for our new audio designers, who are still getting to grips with the engine. With this in mind, Audio Lead Jan Dušek has started work on a blog that outlines the recent changes in his department and communicates his vision of the future of audio development in Arma 3.
Aside from that, for your video-configuration-variety pleasure, our programmers have also added the 'sharpen' post process as a separate option. However, please note, due to some potential conflicts with older configurations, if the game suddenly appears too blurry, the sharpen setting may need to be changed to a different value.
LOGISTICS
Some more updates are on the way to the Arma 3 Tools development branch. Tools engineer Julien Vida is working on a new tool called Game Updater, which aims to improve the experience of switching between branches of the game by avoiding the fuss of additional downloads every time you change. Artists may use another tool - Bulldozer Configurator - which enables users to configure the Bulldozer viewer for Object Builder. We plan to release the new version of Arma 3 Tools at roughly the same time as we deploy RotorLib integration to the development branch.
Last but not least, Senior Designer Karel Mořický continues on his tireless crusade to improve Arma 3's documentation for the community. This time, he's taken aim at the script functions and broadened the documentation for all of them.