Posted by dewey 2 days ago
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.
I worked with a guy at the Research Park in Central Florida who used to work for Bohemia Interactive (I forget on what). That's kind of funny, I remember him noting that it was a PITA to work with the Arma codebase.
Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.
I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.
I was rather disappointed when I heard that they had been acquired by BAE Systems, but on further inspection it seems like that was only the BI Simulations arm (responsible for VBS), now rebranded as OneArc. My guess is that a release like this wouldn't have happened were they not still independent.
I wish other game studios would release their software so many years after release.
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...
The learning curve just acts as a filter that results in more like-minded people sticking with it.
It was later turned into the Arma series and re-released with this name to fit the series branding.
I've played them all - this was the best of the lot IMHO.
Multiplayer is nice for others I guess, but not really for me.
But where ARMA3 really shines is single-player sandbox mods like DUWS-X.
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.
Also anybody remember when this used to be called Operation Flashpoint ?
it had this weird paperish/dried out flat texture look that was quite characteristic and major appeal for me.
even now im amazed how much depth this game has , many many fun nights online