GAME 2 high level design

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

Since ArmA is sold to us as an intermediate step towards Game 2 I would like to start NOW rather then to late a controlled way of gathering the community demands for possible consideration by BI

Before the usual guys jump on me: I do not tell BI what they have to do, I would like to start a controlled process by using the BTS.

I do not expect dramatic changes to the current ArmA engine, but most of the dramatic oddities inherit from OFP requiring a huge change. Hence we should gather what we see as a MUST in the next engine to help BI to tune their development roadmap.

The best way would be dropping change requests in the current BTS where we put "GAME2" as affected release. The descriptions of what we want should be very detailed at least like this:

http://bugs.armed-assault.net/view.php?id=1936

Please do not drop things like " I would like to see Mi28 in Game2"

I would rather concentrate on enabler for functionality.

Maruk, Suma, does BI work already on Game2?

Edit: Sorry for the last stupid question, with small amount of devs you can't do ArmA debugging, Game2 development and maybe VBS support at the same time...

When you finalise the content freeze for Game2 until you consider feature candidates?

[hoz 0]

In case you didn't notice there is a whole Next Generation Game forum. Moving...

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

Oh, now I noticed!

[hardrock 1]

I don't want to spoil the fun, but I highly doubt that any community requests have influence on any ground-breaking changes in the engine. Small pieces and ideas maybe, but I guess that the main concept is pretty much made by the BI heads. That's only reasonable, since for them it is a question over a future or no future in the gaming industry, while for us it is "I like that, you like something else more".

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

See it like that: We do market research for them. With OFP they were lucky that their dream was almost 100% in line with ours.

With ArmA it is...different.

Now I offer a platform to express dreams in detail.

If they ignore and develop away from the market or for a different market segment - fine, another dev might serve the demands sooner or later, but then everything is written down for possible consideration.

With the current voting in the BTS we have a powerful tool to express the importance for the community.

Of course BI will skip insane demands like model the earth with exact GIS data as one map (hey, why not! :-))

But there are tons of design oddities left over in ArmA which could be solved with Game2 and a lot of ideas easy to implement, but never flashed into the brain of a BI employee.

[baddo 0]

I'd first need to get an update from BIS as to how Game2 is progressing, what kind of features it has and what features do they plan to do for it.

And hey, don't say "demand" if you don't mean it

[ArchangelSKT 0]

I'd first need to get an update from BIS as to how Game2 is progressing, what kind of features it has and what features do they plan to do for it.

And hey, don't say "demand" if you don't mean it  

Same goes for me, it has been quite a while since we have heard anything at all, allthough it is fully understandable in regards with the work that has been going on with Arma.

[churnedfortaste 0]

I also think we should have an update, that is if BIS are actually working on GAME 2....

[Freshman 0]

I totally agree with INNOCENT&CLUELESS.

How should they know what we want if we don't tell them?

I am always surprised that there's almost no activity in the bugtracker but everybody is arguing about bugs.

It's worth a lot to BIS.

I really don't think that they can be stupid enough to ignore this offer.

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

Ummmm there is enough activity in the bugtracker actually, most issues are addressed, with over 800 TTs BI has enough to do (keep in mind that a lot of TTs addressing the same issue, they are aggregated under meta-bug-TTs).

At the moment I assume that this year is not enough to trouble shoot all of them. And for some issues there is maybe no solution within the current engine. But if the community for example expressing the wish for more advanced ballistic and physics, it might be considered in the next engine design.

There are already a few change requests, but I would like to gather technically more advanced design/solution proposals for BI.

And it is not so that BI does not consider one or the other proposal, the issue is that we do not know what they consider and when it will be implemented.

Spread of several forums there are tons of high valuable suggestions, but there is no way of collecting it in a professional way in a forum.

The BTS can be the platform to collect and vote proposals.

[mrj-fin 0]

Of course I am not telling what u should do but the small dev team couldnt work so efficience than bigger what cause more longer developing/coding time and left out many features without proper testing. Hiring more employees will be the only answer to get better result or doing things like 25-heads big Remedy Entertainment which use alot in their games from other companies stuffs like physics engine, Ai engine, game models/textures.

And the most important should be however still BIS keep listen ur main consumers without us ur works will be much less than its had been so far.

[dmarkwick 261]

K, lets stop arguing and start discussing

As is being discussed in the ArmA forum, the inventory system needs looking at. Rather than have slots for classes of objects, why not use "space" that users can use drag & drop style, allowing the player to arrange whatever equipment he wants to carry within the space? It can be representative of how a soldier would arrange equipment around his body.

Doesn't have to be hyper-realistic, just a rectangular space that any object can be placed in. The idea is that it's REPRESENTATIVE of how a soldier would decide what he's able to carry. Each object can have an encumbrance value to make him think about weight as well as bulk.

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

http://bugs.armed-assault.net/view.php?id=2487

http://bugs.armed-assault.net/view.php?id=309

http://bugs.armed-assault.net/view.php?id=308

http://bugs.armed-assault.net/view.php?id=1936

Feel free to add comments or open new CRs

[dm 9]

Did you actually get "permission" to use the BUG TRACKER for feature REQUESTS, or are you just filling it up with "unimportant" information (relative to the "important" info, which are bugs which need to be addressed in ArmA)?

[dmarkwick 261]

Did you actually get "permission" to use the BUG TRACKER for feature REQUESTS, or are you just filling it up with "unimportant" information (relative to the "important" info, which are bugs which need to be addressed in ArmA)?

Looks to me like feature requests is a class of input that's allowed.

[INNOCENT&CLUELESS 0]

DeadMeatXM2: The possibility to tread CRs in the mantis BTS was introduced on my request by boecko a long time ago.

We assumed before that some may do not like this and hence kept it more separated. Usually it should be enough to give a TT the category "enhancement" to make clear it is a CR and not a TT.

Since it lead immediately into misunderstandings with the other managers we separated it by using a different Project name.

The powerful tool does not contain any "unimportant" information since everybody can select its "important" information by proper use of filters.

The amount of data in MB really doesn't matter.

If you strictly use as selected Project "Armed Assault" and not any other the CRs doesn`t exist in your world and hence can not bother.