SITREP #00239

FROM: High Command
TO: Arma 3 Users
INFO: Art of War DLC / Creator DLC Updates, Live Ops Status
PRECEDENCE: Flash

SITUATION

We are rapidly reaching the end of a mad year, and so we feel this is a good time to inspect the current state of Arma 3 development. Offering a distraction from the frequently grim reality around us, gaming has certainly seen a massive boost this year. Arma 3 is no exception. We are constantly humbled to see how many of you continue to play, and to welcome the hundreds of thousands of new recruits. The game is meanwhile in a Live Ops mode, rather than active development. Even so, this year saw two primary platform updates with 1.98 Old Man and more recently 2.00, on which we'll reflect a bit in this report. And we'll be looking ahead, providing updates on what's still to come: Art of War charity DLC, Creator DLC, and more platform support. We suspect to be seeing plenty of comments asking about the future of the Arma series, but we hope there are still many of you interested to learn about Arma 3's extended tour of duty. Thank you for the splendid support and stay safe out there! o7

INTELLIGENCE

Early in the year, we released the open-world "Old Man" scenario. Its more experimental exploration of freedom in gameplay was received well by many players. Though we could not afford to support it with major updates, one of its designers did publish a retrospective as OPerations REPort. We recommend reading this behind-the-scenes peek by Václav 'Sarge' Kerber, which goes over the systemic approach to populating the world, catering to parallel work within the team, and quest design to name a few things. To cap it off, Sarge also posted documentation to Community Wiki on how the main Old Man systems and modules work. While these were only created for the singleplayer environment, there is a big potential for you to build a similar scenario on its framework.

After the 1.98 Old Man release, we knew that update 2.00 would naturally follow. Many years ago we devised a versioning system that we believed would be quite future-proof. Even versions were main branch releases, whereas odd versions were reserved for our Dev(elopment) Branch (needing to be different to deliberately make them multiplayer incompatible). Little did we know that Arma 3 would still be updated so many years later. On top of that, this version was slated to be a fairly standard maintenance update on our roadmap. We wanted at least to try to make it a little bit more special, and so went around to see what we could achieve with our really rather small Live Ops team.

Ultimately we built a modest package of free additions and improvements. Included were a new CoF: Gray Firing Drill, a few reskins, the "Arma" Eau de Combat fragrance finally brought 'alive', the ability to publish Eden Editor compositions to Steam Workshop, Linux 64-bit Dedicated Servers, Steam Achievements, script commands, and the usual fixes. We know some of you wanted more or different things, but we're still very happy to have been able to support the game and community in this way. Doing so this long after a game's release is not always possible; it may even be an exception in the market. And it's great that the support of the game and its modding has made such longevity possible.

With CoF: Gray, there is more than meets the eye. Those replaying the drill a few times, may have uncovered its many little secrets and hommages to literally all main releases so far. Pay special attention to the so-called 'Binary Jukebox' towards the end. It became a celebration of the Armaverse that some fans may enjoy. We'd also like to thank community top shot Ceb.Cin for the excellent pre-release testing and feedback. That 01:07 benchmark run was quite something! And since an even better time was uploaded recently, we probably should ask Miller to update his whiteboard. Speaking of beating the best times, we want to point out that in this particular case, it may actually be mathematically possible to get very close to 00:00. See how close you can get. Want unchallenged bragging rights? Prove your skills with a video!

Being able to publish not just entire scenarios, but also entity compositions to the Steam Workshop has long been on our backlog. In fact, the original team behind Eden Editor had already prepared parts of the architecture for it. They unfortunately had no time to wrap it up, but we were finally able to do so. Thanks to Senior Programmer Lukáš Gregor, building on the work of Karel Mořický and Filip Sádovský, you can now share your creations with everyone. This lets other scenario designers be quicker and take inspiration from your creativity. The feature has also been documented on the Community Wiki, and we'd like to draw your attention to the 'vertical mode' setting especially. Perhaps you've already encountered placing subscribed compositions and having certain objects float in the air. This can likely be prevented by toggling the appropriate vertical mode (or surface snapping) toggle in Eden Editor. A common situation where this is the case: objects stood on a table. We may still find a nicer way to address this, but so far have opted to preserve full designer freedom.

Topping things off in update 2.00 are 3 cheeky new Steam Achievements. Besides beating the gold medal (faster than 02:00) in CoF: Gray, you will unlock This is War 2.00 by just playing the game after the 2.00 update. And so far well over half a million players did, which just shows again how many individuals still or freshly jump in! The last Achievement created a little bit of confusion, so let's clarify what it requires. You need to have actually played the game for over 200 hours (see a pattern here?). Playing truly means 'boots on the ground' playing, so not even menus (including the Eden Editor interface) count. Do not look at your Steam 'playtime' for this, because it counts all time the application is running. Still, there are close to 200 thousand players having unlocked this so far, splendid Loyalists!

OPERATIONS

Now then, let us take a look at what's next. One other big event this year was the Art of War contest, which wrapped up with a selection of top-notch 2D art and screenshot category winners. We'd like to once again congratulate all winners and thank all other contestants for their cool contributions. It's nice to see the prizes have also started to arrive to the winners finally!

As we mentioned in the winners announcement, unfortunately there were not enough entries to the 3D art categories to feature them in the upcoming Art of War charity DLC as planned. We did however send some selected entrants a participation prize, and hope to have found some other subtle ways to still recognize their efforts in the DLC Showcases. Due to this, we also decided to buff the DLC a bit ourselves with some extra assets befitting the themes. Being created in-house by Bohemia Interactive artists, this has taken a little bit longer than our original schedule catered for. For that reason we'll be shifting the release to early 2021, to ensure we can wrap up the package in the best way. We do think this will be worth it for the benefits to the platform. Remember that all of our revenue from this DLC will be donated to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and that after a fundraising period of about 10-12 months (also shifted), it will become free to all players. We'll update you with specific dates closer to the release.

Back in September we revealed the second Creator DLC: CSLA Iron Curtain. Developed by third-party CSLA Studio and published by us, this DLC takes players back to an alternate version of the Cold War in 1980s Czechoslovakia. Immediately following the announcement, an invitation-only closed beta test was organized to receive feedback on the project. CSLA Studio invited various members of their own community as did we. We would like to thank everybody involved for their honest and constructive feedback. After evaluating the results of this test and discussing them with CSLA Studio, the decision was made to give the DLC more time in its development phase. Everybody is excited to deliver the best possible experience and so the team will take some more time to polish their content. This means the DLC is now targeting a release in 2021, but we will rather provide more concrete timelines and pricing details next year. For more information about the Creator DLC program, check out this page.

After several requests from the community, we have finally published documentation and guides on how to create your own Challenges (Firing Drills and Time Trials). But what's better: in future update 2.02, you will be able to create self-contained Challenges and share them on Steam Workshop. Once subscribed, these will also appear in the correct menu and show personal best times. This functionality can already be tested on Dev-Branch and we look forward to your creative drills and trials! One thing to consider for anyone who has used the FiringDrill or TimeTrial Workshop tags in the past: please evaluate whether your content really matches your assigned tags. The tags are used for filtering in which menu they are listed, so setting them correctly will help players finding and trying your splendid content.

This is probably a good time to remind you that general platform support and broader Live Ops for Arma 3 is relatively small and limited in scope. We refer you to a previous report in which we detailed this. Having said that, we are happy that a few of us are still able to push out fixes and improvements, while the majority of Bohemian developers are focused on our future Enfusion-based projects. The primary people in this Live Ops team do also fluctuate. We are saying goodbye to Associate Producer Radek Pazdera, who has supported Mastering, Deployment, and coordination tremendously over the past years. Thank you for your hard work, Radek! o7

At the same time we are also seeing some modest extra reinforcements. Previously externally contracted programmer Dedmen, now supports Arma 3 full-time from our Amsterdam studio. And Killzone Kid is also still doing cool additions in support of the community. Of the Bohemians who still spend quite some time on the game's development, we want to put the spotlight on Maciej 'Reyhard' Pham, our Technical Designer who is often going out of his way to help out. And of course we cannot forget our QA Tester Miloš 'Wulf' Miko, who frequently takes on the daunting task of testing this incredibly massive and complex game. We are also recruiting a new Live Ops Engineer in Amsterdam to take over Radek's duties, and to generally still optimize some of the pipelines. If you are interested in supporting the game and platform, be sure to check out the job listing and apply!

The result of having this modest Live Ops crew available, is that in 2021 we still want to do our best to support Arma 3. That of course means the Art of War DLC release and enabling various Creator DLC to get ready for their releases. In addition, we will continue to add new script commands, Event Handlers, optimizations where possible. Dedmen, for example, has various promising start-up time boosts in the pipeline for 2.02 and beyond, some of which are already in testing via the experimental Profiling Branch. Don't expect massive 'magic bullet' gains though; we are still limited by the underlying technologies and backward compatibility. Another goal we've had on our backlog for long is the publication of Arma 3 Licensed Data Packages. This too is something we want to target next year.

LOGISTICS

As we're getting to the end of this report, we'd like to remind you of another release that happened hot on the heels of the previous SITREP. Creator DLC: Global Mobilization - Cold War published their update 1.2 last summer. It brought an impressive range of new vehicles and much more content free to all owners. Those community creators who are developing GM scenarios and mods may be interested in the updated Community Wiki overviews. And the Steam Workshop compatibility data for multiplayer servers was of course also updated to version 1.2. What's more: GM's soundtrack is available to listen to on SoundCloud.

That just leaves us with a friendly reminder that we are all in this community together. We all have our wishes and priorities, but in the end, time is limited and each of us do our best to keep Arma 3 the best mil-sim game out there. Please treat each other with respect, ask for permission to re-use other people's work, respect Intellectual Property, and just be good to one another. You'll often find that by just discussing these topics, you can find common ground. The community creators - from lone wolves to established teams - are doing their hard work because they love it. Show them how much you appreciate their efforts, let them know how bad ass they are! One method you can consider too are Steam's Community Awards. If you've got any Steam Points to spare, you can award your favorite creators on Steam Workshop and show them your appreciation. Take care everyone!