SITREP #00205

FROM: High Command
TO: Arma 3 Users
INFO: Third-Party DLC Pitch Invitation, Community Wiki Update
PRECEDENCE: Flash

SITUATION

We're now in localization lock for the Tac-Ops Mission Pack, which means we've now officially entered its final stages of development. Currently, all texts, dialogues, and transcripts are being sent to translators. In the meantime, our designers are busy finishing and polishing the content of the Mission Pack. In parallel, the development of the upcoming Tanks DLC continues and we're approaching the Beta milestone.

INTELLIGENCE

Having been in development for many years, the creators of the popular community mod (and Make Arma Not War finalist entry) have released version 1.0 of Epoch! It's great to see the many new additions that were added to this full version. Be sure to check it all out on the Epoch forums. You'll also find Client and Server files available for download in the same forum thread. Congratulations to the Epoch team on this splendid release!

PCHelicopters.com, a web portal focusing on helicopter simulations in games and other software, recently interviewed none other than Joris-Jan van 't Land. As former Project Lead of both Take on Helicopters and Arma 3, as well as a huge rotary flight enthusiast, Joris went out of his way to provide some interesting insights about the flight model mechanics and flying in Bohemia games. He also got to pick his favorite chopper in the Armaverse!

OPERATIONS

After more than four years of post-release development, the Arma 3 team is gradually moving onto new projects here at Bohemia Interactive. This also means that Arma 3 Tanks will most likely be our final, official, DLC release. Nonetheless, we're convinced that Arma 3 will remain active and relevant for many more years, thanks to our splendid community of both players and content creators. However, with Arma 3's development slowing down, which should result in a more stable and predictable content creation platform, there's one more idea that we wish to pursue. Namely, we'd like to work with external development teams, including the splendid developers in our community, to publish their Arma 3 projects as third-party premium DLC on Steam. As some of you might already know, this concept is not entirely foreign, as Arma 3 Jets DLC - a collaboration with BRAVO ZERO ONE STUDIOS - represented a first opportunity for us to become familiar with third-party development partnerships. And, even though there will be some differences in the intended approach, this experience has made us confident about extending such an opportunity to other external developers as well. Right now, we're mostly looking to get the ball rolling by inviting external developers to send us their pitch and prototype. We welcome you all to read our entire "pitch invitation" for more insights into this initiative, and feel free to join the discussion on this topic on the Bohemia forums.

Arma 3 Dev-Branch is continuously being updated with new additions, fixes and improvements. Recently, Designer Jiří "Warka" Wainar has taken a look at Eden Editor's modules and came up with a few significant adjustments. The Zone Protection module now offers more settings (such as width adjustments), as well as newly extended support for synchronizing with triggers. The Edit Terrain Object module has received some additions as well. For example, it's now possible to toggle an object's damage state in the module's UI, set the locality of code execution on the object more easily, and the 'Object Variable Name' attribute was added to the module for an intuitive manipulation with terrain objects. In preparation of the upcoming Tanks DLC, views of Picture-in-Picture screens are now linked in all vanilla MRAPs. By pressing 'RCtrl + N' even outside the optics view, it's now possible to switch the PiP screen's view mode. When locking back in to the optics, the selected view mode remains, making it more consistent when switching between these views often.

LOGISTICS

After a (slightly prolonged - our apologies!) period of maintenance, the Community Wiki was updated to a newer version. This introduced some significant improvements (including the support for Bohemia Accounts). As with every major update, there might be some issues that still need to be ironed out. Our web development team is working on them as we speak, and you can follow this forums feedback thread to see what's being worked on. Thanks again for your patience!