Why must BIS use a lot of workarounds in A2 ?

[mr.g-c 6]

Hi guys, i just listened to the "old" interview with Arma2 lead-designer Ivan Buchta again and there was one particular sentence which i didn't really noticed the last time i was listening to the Interview....

He said something like:

"...We are using a lot of workarounds to achieve Features in Arma2 and we hope you won't be mad at us because of it/that...." or something like that....

This is my question:

Why must the game developers itself use (a lot of) workarounds in their own engine?

Don't they have maximum control with the core programming language (probably C++) and be able to change virtually anything and to even hard-code it?

I understand that modders/scripters/mission-designers use (many and sometimes "heavy") workarounds, but the core developers too?

Who can shed some light into this and illuminate the old Mr.G-C.... ?

[max power 21]

What they are trying to do may not be possible with their current engine or with the realities of graphics technology. They do have ultimate control, but building a program is not infinitely flexible. Sometimes patching something in in a creative way is more time efficient than rewriting the whole thing from scratch. For instance, if they are trying to shoehorn in some BIA technology, these features may not have been designed in from the start. The ArmA2 engine may not have the necessary input or output nodes or whatever, so they have to hack in some interpretation instead of redesigning a portion of the program from the ground up, leading to a redesign of everything that is broken by the change.

[Pulverizer 1]

They put in a script that makes the AI randomly playMove sidesteps and leans in CQB and wave their hands like a traffic police when they get stuck in the middle of an intersection. It's called microAI.sqs

[shinRaiden 0]

Feature, not a bug. By implementing simple generic engine commands and then making all the features and stuff in scripts, it gives you more flexibility, not less. Of course that doesn't help if you can't be bothered to even demand that life hand itself to you on a gilded platter.

[Second 0]

What they are trying to do may not be possible with their current engine or with the realities of graphics technology.  They do have ultimate control, but building a program is not infinitely flexible.  Sometimes patching something in in a creative way is more time efficient than rewriting the whole thing from scratch.  For instance, if they are trying to shoehorn in some BIA technology, these features may not have been designed in from the start.  The ArmA2 engine may not have the necessary input or output nodes or whatever, so they have to hack in some interpretation instead of redesigning a portion of the program from the ground up, leading to a redesign of everything that is broken by the change.

Yeah. This indeed isnt' very unique in gaming industry, from what i've read. One question is that how flexible BIS's engine ultimately is, will they have to face utter reality that new engine needs to be written from scratch after ArmA2 or ArmA3... Or ArmA10? As by my understandment you can't go on forever just by re-writing necessary parts. Or at least can't gain good healthy engine by that.

[-Total- 0]

Unreal, Quake, Refractor.....

None of those engines have been re-written from scratch. Just continually revamping the previous version.

Economics

[Pulverizer 1]

It's one thing to systemically do a near-complete rewrite of the engine part by part (as in id tech 1 -> id tech 5), another to add a little touch-up paint here and there on old design that didn't even work in the first place.

[raedor 8]

I doubt that BI added the scripting language for the community, instead they did it to have more flexibility in their missions.

I don't see a problem with them exploiting the scripting language a bit more...

[mr.g-c 6]

Thanks for all your answers guys....

I don't see a problem if they use their own scripting engine a bit more too, however question is at what feature they use so much workarounds and if these workarounds are made via scripting engine then/combination with configs or whatever....

[raedor 8]

Thanks for all your answers guys....

I don't see a problem if they use their own scripting engine a bit more too, however question is at what feature they use so much workarounds and if these workarounds are made via scripting engine then/combination with configs or whatever....

We'll see when it is released... Afaik there's no info available about these questions.