Franze's Addon Compedium

[franze 196]

A long time ago, I used to make addons. A lot of them! In fact, it's been almost 15 years since I first started modding for Operation Flashpoint; about half my lifetime. I've learned a lot from this great community, met some very interesting people, and have done things that I never would have thought possible way back in 2002. But things are different; things have changed, and with it, so have I. In 2002, when we first got O2, it was incredible the opportunity that tool presented to us. Unless you had the big money for Maya or 3D Studio, you didn't have many options for making 3D models. Blender was only just starting to become a free piece of software and wasn't widely known, while other options like Milkshape were considerably clunky and difficult to work with. Today, not only do we have more advanced free tools that rival commercial offerings, but also widespread knowledge regarding content creation. It's an incredibly different world in what we can do with software today, not to mention how much more straightforward it is to learn compared to 15 years ago. Sometimes I wish I were 15 years younger so I could start again, knowing what we have out there now!

 

Alas, time and technology marches on, and life has passed me by. I've determined that I no longer have the desire to create content for the ArmA community. It's time for me to move on and let go. But before I do that, I thought I'd showcase a few things that I've made over the years, released open source for you, the community, to check out!

 

None of these addons are complete and some are not even working; a number are just empty meshes. The intent behind them is just to tell a tale, a story of how far we've come over the years. Much as an artist builds their skills over time, so do we. Our first projects are almost always cringe-worthy, and no matter how hard we tried, they never turned out the way we imagine them to be. That feeling never leaves you -- it's there whether it's your first or your most recent.

 

My first showcase is of a number of fixed wing aircraft I've made over the years. My first was an A-10 and it was quite shoddy; sadly, I no longer have any pictures or files from it, so I can't share it here. The next time I seriously tackled fixed was with an F/A-18A, after I and Nodunit had already made the AH-64D for Flashpoint. That eventually evolved into the F/A-18E/F, released right at the tail-end of the FP days:

 

 

In those days, we had limitations like only one bone per selection (!) and a max named selection count of 128! It was the dark ages of modding in the FP community! Still, we managed to do things like a (at the time) working cockpit:

 

 

As well as customizable loadouts:

 

 

ArmA1 cleared a lot of those limitations -- we got multiple animations per selection, a huge boost in named selection limits, much more flexible proxies, and a suite of new scripting capabilities. I forward ported the Super Hornet, though at the time it was poorly received. Still, I kept going, and rolled into an Su-17M4 as my next dedicated project. I'm skipping over other minor projects like a MiG-29, F-22, and some others I played with but never really finished for Flashpoint.

 

 

The Su-17M4 was an ambitious project; I had intended to create a whole 30 mission campaign around the aircraft, using my own map and units. This was foolhardy and I ended up getting bogged down with everything, since I had to create all the assets by myself. I ended up being unable to finish it before ArmA2 was released, so it ended up in a very alpha state for ArmA1. As ArmA2 changed a lot of the scripting elements, it didn't port very easily and so never took off. Some of the assets I made for this project were a basic MiG-23 and an An-12.

 

 

For ArmA2, I tried to move into an F-16C and while the model went together pretty well, the rest didn't really follow. Still, it served a purpose: much of the systems and scripting made for the F-16 were rebuilt for use on the AH-64D. The missile guidance scripting has its origins as a JDAM/GPS script from the F-16, while the IHADSS was built from a JHMCS script!

 

 

 

From that point forward, I and Nodunit dedicated ourselves to the AH-64D and associated content. I never accomplished what I wanted to with fixed wing mods, but there's no doubt I learned much from all the attempts.

 

For now, I have the F-16, Su-17, and MiG-23 working in ArmA3, though not with all the current features (they were ported to ArmA3 before we got a lot of the Jets DLC upgrades).

 

F-16

Su-17

MiG-23

 

The F-16 and the Su-17 have customizable weapon loads, though there is no structured menu available for either. The MiG-23 operates like any other pre-Jets aircraft and has a fixed load of 4xR-60 and 2xR-23. The F-16 has the old, original JDAM scripting I made for it many years ago, plus some other very basic stuff. The Su-17 was actually ported with intent of exploring what CreateSimpleObject could do in terms of loadouts, but I ended up doing some other things with it like CCIP and gunsight parallax experiments.

 

As for the other stuff I have, I've clustered them into a single package that is mostly just models; don't expect any of these to work in ArmA3, though a little config work can get them in game.

 

Franze's Jets

 

I'll update this again in a few days detailing the history I have with helicopters!

[kremator 1065]

Thanks for all your work over the years franze !  I've spent many, many happy days flying the jets (not to mention the AH-64D, of course)

[Unchained 12]

Thanks for the hard work to you and Nodunit! I have known your work on the Apache only but I'm quite impressed to see your take on Fixed wings, still, glad to read on this, may future endeavours go well for you man :)

[wolfbite 8]

This is fantastic! Just reinstalled mod tools as my new pc is running swish and gave a few a quick spin haha. Any pointers to any mod creation guides especially with info on integrating new jets DLC stuff. Hope I can pick up on a project I started years ago but  never finished.Thanks for all the hard work over the years.

[lennard 447]

Just found this and noticed how little reactions were made to this.

 

Thanks a lot for your work in all the years and being open to share your work 🙂