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I actually worked on the Poseidon engine back when I was at BISim for serious game Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) which was the spin off built for military training.
The codebase here is so much cleaner and better organized than the version I remember wrestling with on a daily basis, and if you remember how buggy and unstable the DayZ launch was for users it can all be traced back to this since it was never envisioned to live as long and scale as far as it did. Fun fact Poseidon was the original internal game name they were building in 1999 before changing the game name and renaming the engine to Real Virtuality.
It's also easy to forget just how far ahead of its time this was since this shipped large open worlds with maps that were 12.5 km × 12.5 km and that was really easy to mod with a runtime scripting language SQF, not a separate mission editor. This was all in 2001, which is three years before Half-Life 2 would come out.
Yeah, that lines up. We had something similar happen with a client contract years back - guy walked with the brand name, we kept the codebase and the actual userbase. Codemasters got the name, Bohemia got everyone who actually cared. Arma proved which half mattered more.
Not being a big gamer, I can'comment with much authority. I've played a bunch of Modern Warfare(s) and Battlefields, and Squad. But they all feel pointless to me when ARMA 3 exists.
It's _so_ janky but in my mind way more immersive for reasons I just can't fully explain, though they are something to do with the fact that good comms is the key to fun and success. It's also got a pretty major learning curve...
I agree. I've played Arma 3 for more than a whole decade now. Most of it comes down to the open large scale combined arms experience not being available in any other recent video game from a first/third person perspective. There's now Arma Reforger, but it understandably lacks content.
Reforger's lack of content is the same story as OFP2:DR or the early Arma 2 days, minus mods carrying it. Combined arms sim market's always been this niche BI has basically to itself since Op Flashpoint 2001, nobody else wants the janky physics tradeoff for the scale.
playing on a certain private server using sog:pf cdlc + the alive mod with a group of people who knew our shit was genuinely some of the most intense and immersive gaming experiences i have ever had.
you're pinned down as a 10 person group in a jungle clearing, everyone hunkering down behind some fallen down trees cos that's your only cover ... you're surrounded by enemy in all directions, the whole team is running low on ammo, tracer rounds flying over everyone's heads, your medic is wounded and trying to patch himself up ... you're trying to call in air support using only grids and compass bearing desperately hoping that you've got the grids right and the human pilots don't fuck it up and wipe out the whole team ... you've gotta try to organize some sort of extract helo in all of this mess, but chances are they'll get shot down if they try to extract you here ... suddenly mortar rounds start going off all around you because the ai have communicated your location back to the mortar installation you were trying to recon ...
as team lead, what do you do? what's your decision? how are we getting out of this mess? you don't get to think, there's no time to think, thinking is death. what do you do?
COD/Battlefield and Arma are two different genres. Squad is somewhat in Arma's genre. I can't stand Arma's movement anymore. The closest thing I've found to the unique parts of Arma is Hell Let Loose
I believe this game had some interesting anti cheat, it would still let you play if it knew it was cracked but would just make your aim worse and worse until you gave up.
One thing is 120bit RSA (readily broken with a graphing calculator at the time of release), another thing is the provenance of the RSA implementation code in the original binary.
Confusing FADE with something else. FADE messed with your aim gradually and mocked you in-game, it wasn't a HP that turned you into a pigeon. That was Arma 2's anti-piracy, different game entirely, different studio decade.
I learned HTML thanks to Operation Flashpoint so that I could write mission briefings in the editor...one thing led to another, and I have a successful career as a software developer. Thanks, Bohemia Interactive.
Same trajectory here! Started wanting to make missions in jr high. The community was great about having tutorials for the scripting engine and mission editor. Learned all sorts of programming concepts from doing that, then learned HTML from making pretty-looking briefings for the missions. By the time I started taking some programming classes in HS, I had some decent foundations.
It’s also great that they’ve been consistent about keeping their scripting commands wiki up to date with each new engine update.
The one thing holding Reforger back IMO and why I always go back to Arma 3 is the lack of mission editor/Eden that made it so easy to just try out some mission idea in the OFP/Arma/RV engine.
I remember the day I bought that game at my local dealer. It looked amazing and nobody told me about it, my friends were playing FFVII and stuff like that. After installing it, it was mindblowing, the mission editor was incredible with infinite possibilities. When you think about it, that engine and it's SDK were really advanced features and concepts. I mean Rainbow Six had a mission planner, but OPF, with it's editor and addons was an inifinite sandbox. Good memories.
I used to open up mods (I seem to recall them being in "PBO" files) and tweaked around the script code to change things and make my own weapons and such. Also a formative experience on my path to becoming a developer.
Minor nitpick: those briefings weren't real HTML, just a subset BIS's parser accepted, no DOCTYPE, weird tag handling, broke in a real browser half the time. But yeah same story here, that "close enough" markup was still enough to get the concepts to stick.
This game was on my cousin's dad PC about 20 years ago. There were no name on the icon, it was just titled "war" (assumingly by cousin). Later I got Arma: Armed Assault on Steam, when all my friends played Arma 2/DayZ and I couldn't, because my PC was a potato. Spent hours on sandbox editor making big warfare.
This is what stop killing games seek turned up to 11.
From Steam demo description:
> This release is free, and it is two things at once.
> A playable demo
> A self-contained slice of Cold War Assault you can download and play right now - the classic open-world sandbox, vehicles, AI and mission system that defined a genre, running on a clean, modern codebase.
> An official asset pack
> The demo doubles as a sanctioned asset pack for the Arma community. The bundled game data is provided as raw material you are free to study, modify and build new Arma content from. If you have ever wanted to learn how a Bohemia game is put together, or wanted clean reference assets to start a mod, this is for you.
Cool they ported it. Now watch someone spin this up on a 20 year old build system nobody touched since XP, and guess who's debugging the makefile at 3am.
The codebase here is so much cleaner and better organized than the version I remember wrestling with on a daily basis, and if you remember how buggy and unstable the DayZ launch was for users it can all be traced back to this since it was never envisioned to live as long and scale as far as it did. Fun fact Poseidon was the original internal game name they were building in 1999 before changing the game name and renaming the engine to Real Virtuality.
It's also easy to forget just how far ahead of its time this was since this shipped large open worlds with maps that were 12.5 km × 12.5 km and that was really easy to mod with a runtime scripting language SQF, not a separate mission editor. This was all in 2001, which is three years before Half-Life 2 would come out.