Tigershark_BAS

In the famous words of Principal Skinner: "Wise council Willy....but the potty talk added nothing."

Anyone see the Eulogy Bill Clinton gave at her funeral. Politics aside, he is an excellent public speaker and paid wonderful tribute to her memory.

Did anyone read recent stories surrounding the launch that mentioned that MS was intentionally making them "sold out" in stores on release to increase the "exclusiveness" of being a first buyer. In some cases they have contractually made retailers "sell out" their stocks. I'll try and find the link. Microsoft Plans Deliberate Xbox 360 Shortage

Something that has always confused and mystified me...and perhaps someone has some insight on this as I can truly confess to having no idea... but why is it that when poorer and oppressed communities protest they feel the most appropriate course of action is to trash and destroy and their own neighbourhoods and infrastructure. Isn't that car they are burning possibly their uncle's or sister's boyfriends? Isn't that movie theater the one which offered temporary escape from the difficulty of their life. Isn't that corner store the one that gave them a weeks credit when they were waiting for a welfare check to come through. Why destroy the little you have? Or is it that they believe by destroying it the government will be forced to replace it with new stuff. Anyone?

This was classic Tex....thanks for the chuckle

The Avon lives!!!! Long live the Avon!

For a WIP it looks pretty bloody good. Keep it up BB.

I'm sorry:( What pioneering achievements would they be out of interest?

As Napoleon once said: History is a set of lies agreed upon. As controversial as the Japanese PM's visits to the Yasukune shrine are I do believe they have the right to honor their war dead as much as we do. The victor in war is always given the opportunity to rewrite the history books as they see it. In this modern day their has been much speculation on such topics as: 1. Did the US really need to nuke Japan when the regime was in it's dying throws. 2. There is some evidence to suggest that the US manipulated Japan to the point it felt threatened and then attacked Pearl Harbour. I'm not justifying these acts at all and some of these are just postulation but I guess the point is, whoever wins dictates the rules and history but I don't think that doesn't mean the losers can't remember things in their own way. However, this is a fine line. None of would want the losers to remember the ideals that caused the war in the first place but they all made sacrifices as well. I think I'm rambling now...it is Monday morning

Sorry. Personally I'm waiting for Game2 more than I am ArmA. Shoot me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that ArmA is an updated OFP with improvements to the engine. Also if the release of Game2 is early 2006, then the lifetime of ArmA for most OFP fans will be shortlived, as they will be delving into the glorious depths of Game2 and modding their little hearts out. When the two games were announced and I saw that Game2 had destructable buildings, I concentrated on other things rather than DIB. However DIB is not just destructable buildings, it is a method of object placement that means one piece aircraft carriers, and large buildings can be made easily. The DIB project isn't dead. I'm still improving on the methods, and I'm sure at least some of it will be adaptable to Game2. When I get my greasy mitts on ArmA I will incorporate DIB into that. Perchance if Game2 is delayed and DIB works without problems (I now have the ability to MP test locally now), then it is possible DIB may be released for ArmA. I'm with you there Col. I also hope there will be a quicker lead time between release of Game 2 and the dev tools which help us make new content for it.

Greets to everyone who is reading or replied to this thread. I just thought I'd share some reflections on some of the many posts made in this thread. (Disclaimer: I am the founder of BAS and OFPEC and also started TJP in conjunction with Jellybelly for those who don't know) First of all let me say that it is indeed very flattering to be remebered fondly by so many and I think I speak for the team when I say that, as proud as we are of our work, it is always humbling to hear how much enjoyment it brings to the community. It for this reason we first began making addons. In part it was because we wanted to see our own types of units in game (such as MH47's, MH60s etc.) but what really drove our quest for quality and excellence in what we do was providing the community with addons which were made to the best of our ability. No arrogance in that statement. I'm not saying they are the best just that we strove to make them the best that we could make them. Having said that, there are many interesting points brought up in this thread which I would like to comment on, hopefully, objectively (well as objectively as I can given my potential bias on the subject). Better Addons Today vs. BAS ====================== Hey, you are right. There are better addons out there today than some of ours. Ours may have been pioneering at the time but naturally peoples skills increase and the bar of quality gets lifted. This is a great thing! We like to think our addons may have participated in the process of addon evolution within the community. One upmanship and healthy competition can only benefit us all. A couple of points to note are that in some cases (not all but some) these great new addons you see today are a result of bits and pieces of BAS work (such as gear models) that have been "borrowed" and improved upon. Again, not a bad thing really but a little credit where it is due. Again, I hope this doesn't sound arrogant as it is not meant to be. I'm glad to see that our work lives on albeit in new higher quality addons by the community. BAS being the only pioneers in the community ================================== Look...we did some great stuff but we were not the only pioneers. As mentioned in other posts I personally (and I think most of the team agree with me) tip our hats to CoC, DKM, FDF, SJB and a number of other mods who introduced some fantastic stuff! However, I do take isssue with the post that mentioned that we just "borrowed" stuff and re packaged it as our own. Almost all of our scripting was written by TJ, Rom and SelectThis and if we did borrow an idea it was executed from scratch with engine performance 100% in mind. That is not to say other mods did it worse or even that their stuff was not pioneering. Like I said, we have a lot of respect for the efforts of others. Our spirit of co-operation with Earl and Suchey led to JAM which was a great initiative for the community and I'm glad to see it in it's 3rd version recently. Note: I agree with gandalf the white the DKM's work tends to get overlooked. They were the silent achievers. As Hellfish mentioned (and thanks for your kind post) I think where we differentiated ourselves in the community was our strive for quality. Our goal of releasing addons as "polished" as we could make them. Making them more of an "experience" rather than just a new skin. Did we get it right everytime. No. Were there porblems we never saw? Yes. We are human and despite our best beta testing efforts problems did slip under the radar. Unfortunately, due the popularity of our addons we were inundated with emails and posts complaining about this and this unfortunately would effect our morale. Not making excuses for it but we are human and already very self critical of ourselves so it was hard to take extreme community criticism sometimes. Why we left and other comments ========================= This addresses the points raised by MilitiaSniper, STGN, Homefry and CanadianTerror. We left because of both reasons. Yes, unfortunately we felt like the "bullshit" as MS put it, was getting to us. It shouldn't have but it did. Simple as that. At the end of the day, as much as we appreciated the support we got, the constuctive criticism and the excitement over new releases I think we became weary of the complaining and bickering. Again, not excusing this but stating it for the record. We were also a little frustrated with engine. We felt we had reached a wall and our last project which never got released but which we felt had enormous potential could never get over the engine limitation hurdle. So we decided to take a break until we saw some improvements in OFP2 (or even ArmA if there are any). AsHomefry pointed out we also did a lot behind the scenes for the community which also never got publicised but it was for the love of the game. However, CanadianTerror raises an issue which I recognise. This was a critical flaw for us which developed over time and wasn't there in the early days. We began to take negative posts very badly and this contributed to our unfounded (in my opinion) criticism of being "arrogant". Dedicated to quality? Yes. Protective of our work? Yes. Arrogant? Well...no...but I can see now why people would have thought that way. This break has been good for us and hopefully if we come back we approach this differently. Matt Rochelle and our release policy =========================== Believe it or not, this release policy is something I would battle with the team constantly and the responsibilty for our release policy (or failure thereof) rests on my shoulders. You see, I think one of the things that made us successful (and also perhaps hated by others) was our success at not only building great addons for the community but also how we "marketed them". I believed that by informing people of what was on the horizon we would strengthen a growing fan base. It worked and I think BAS' reputation is cemented firmly in the community but the side effect is that there was a lot of dissapointment in both the time between release and advertising and also the fact that some addons never got released. My team constantly told me that they wanted to limit the "marketing" to just before release but I kept on pushing through. I can arguments for both sides here but I still believe that without our "marketing" activities BAS wouldn't be remembered as it is today. However it has been a great learning experience and our strategy will change if we come back again. Wa va voom makes some good observations on our demise and I can promise we have being reading and listening and hopefully we can do better next time around. We all must accept one thing though. We all know that sometimes merely being successful and "elevated to gods" by the community is enough to stir up feelings of jealousy and hatred. This unfortunately is human trait we see in everyday life. Unfortunately some of this shit being thrown around landed and stuck on us tarnishing our image. I'm not saying we are not responsible for some of the criticism leveled at us but we must also admit that some of it was just motivated by feelings of jealousy. Tonal and other achievements ======================= Glad someone borught this up as I still believe Tonal to be the most complete island addon first released for OFP outside of BIS. You got an island, background info on it, African rebel and government units and equipment, a campaign, custom soundtracks, comprehensive readme on how to use the island, easter eggs throughout, new structures and textures. It was quite an achievement. (FDF made a great followup to this concept btw) I say this not to blow our own horn (well...maybe a little) but more so to help people understand our achievements rather than talk about us as mere "repackagers" of other peoples ideas. As mentioned before, we also paid much attention to the mechanics of addons. Each had a full set of LoDs made specifically to address performance. Poly counts were as low as could be. Every addon was crafted, yes CRAFTED, to offer a maximum experience at maximum performance. I hope this doesn't come across as arrogant. It really is not meant to be. I am just trying to illustrate how much effort and love went into these addons and why I guess we so fervently defended them in the face of fair and unfair criticism. This is not to say we were the only ones doing this. Other teams and individuals do the same and there are many addons out there who share the same attention to detail both behind the scenes and in the "eye candy". The future for BAS ============== Like I mentioned at the begining of this post. It is indeed very cool to be remembered by many even if they feel some of our addons have aged. Again, I would like to think that BAS helped in some small part to make these new crop of addon the high quality that they are through the constant "raising of the bar". Some of our addons may have slipped under the bar but we are proud (as Ebuds posts demonstrate) of our achievements and we hope one day to build on that. Just because we haven't been making addons for OFP doesn't mean we haven't been honing our skills. We have made some stuff for VBS and in the background we have been developing our skills and techniques in preparation for maybe getting back into the game. We'll see.....we are still working on things internally and we have many cool plans in the works but we can't say we are definitely back for ArmA. Once again, I hope this post is taken in the spirit it was written. These are reflections and not meant to be arrogant. Seriously. I wanted to thank those who had good stuff to write about us and also acknowledge to those who criticised that they make some valid points which we will take on board for future activities. Kind Regards to you all, Tigershark PS. I just wanted to say a big thankyou to all members of BAS past and present. I may be the public face of BAS but it is really the drive, creativity and dedication of the other teams members that made/make BAS what it is. Some of the pioneering features of BAS owe their lineage to people such as SelectThis (incredible knowledge of engine and modeling), Ebud (the texture master), TJ (mission and scripting guru), Rom (one of the smartest people I have met and scripting genius), DM (an incredibly agile character who has increased in skill and knowledge of the OFP exponentially), Nagual (his vision and superhuman effort on Tonal has left a lasting legacy on OFP), Cassandra (the music on Tonal was her baby), Eviscerator (early pioneer of model editing) and the scores of advisors, testing and ideas people..Damocles, OFPEditor, Fer, Katerina, NedFox....the list goes on! Hats off to you all.

By all means...keep em coming.

Great read. Thanks for the link and the post.

Shin and quiet man. Enjoyed reading your posts! Nice to have great discussion on such topics

Battlefield 2 released tools before game as well.

*rubs temples* I'm having a premonition....I see....I see.......I see....a moderator.....clicking a pen....no...clicking a......mouse...yes...clicking a mouse and......locking this thread.

Surely you can't be serious? I am, and stop calling me Shirley. The hospital! What is it? A big white building with sick people inside it. But that's not important.... Does anyone here speak jive?

Remeber that movie with Tom Selleck in it about robots being programmed to kill. Was it called Runaway? It had Gene Simmons (of KISS fame) in it as well. They had those cool heat seeking, hand gun fired missiles trained to the heat signature of the individual. I'm sure the days of point and shoot/guaranteed kill aren't too far away.

I stumbled across this on the weekend as well. It looks like it might do a good job keeping with the general tone of the book. But I did notice they couldn't help but Hollywood-ise it by throwing in combat scenes. You'll recall in the book he rarely saw any combat. A few harrowing moments such as being under arty fire and observing a minefield from a hide. But other than that Swofford comments on how anti-climatic the whole war was for him. Oh well....gotta sell it to the masses I guess. What makes the timing of this perfect though is the anti-war sentiment in the US. Should be a film that I hope triggers more debate between pro and anti war parties.

Great stuff dragging that out Hellfish. Such great concepts. It would be great to have a persistent campaign server for OFP. With the advent of MMORPGs I truly believe we are at a point where the technology and programming techniques are there. The problem will be that it will not be able to make money like the RPGs and therefore no one will spend dollars making it. Another argument for why we need an open source project for the killer FPS game......hey...I can dream can't I?

Found this today. John Carmack's take on the PPU at Quakecon. Physics acceleration's prospects Carmack said he considers the prospects for the upcoming physics acceleration chip on the PC iffy, because physics presents a very fundamental problem that graphics doesn't have: it isn't easily scalable for level of detail. Either an object in the game is a true physics object with which other objects can interact, or it isn't. Carmack predicted this constraint would lead to a number of physics-accelerated titles where acceleration affects only elements, such as flowing water, that are peripheral to the core gameplay experience. Another of his concerns about physics acceleration was speed, not in the sense of peak processing throughput but in terms of the immediacy of real-time interactions. Carmack recalled that the first pre-3dfx graphics chips made Quake feel slower due to lag between user input and visual output. He worried that the first generation of physics chips could cause similar problems, leaving us with games that are fragile and slow. He also happily conceded that he is more of a graphics guy than a physics guy, and admitted that his worries about the bar being raised in physics are probably similar to the worries other have had about his own standard-setting work in graphics.

You guys got me started. I read before about the rules associated with getting shot down in F4:AF. But...imagine having a game where you fly as the pilot, get shot down and then escape and evade while you call on the radio for a SAR mission. This mission gets generated by the server and assigned to a unit, which like in F4, can be computer controlled or taken on by a human player. Missions get assigned to a helo crew but also the CSAR crew and a human can either play the role of the helo or the grunts rescuing. This would truly rock! I would love to see the dynamic war campaign module of F4 being implemented in a broader sense for a product as powerful as OFP. The gameplay possibilities are very exciting.

What you guys are talking about is VERY similar to a concept introduced around the time F4 was released. Only you have taken to it to another level. It's funny that the ideas from F4 can only be realised using current technology and already you guys are coming up with ideas that might not be ready for a couple of years. Basically, they were pushing something called the "Electronic Battlefield" series, which in theory looked GREAT on paper. You would buy Falcon4 which had the dynamic campaign, and there was talk of selling separate products such as an A-10 sim and M1Abrams sim that would "plug in to" the electronic battlefield. So in theory, you were supposed to be in a tank and could have your buddy assigned to a dynamic campaign mission that would offer you CAS. Now, OFP came along and implemented that to a degree. You could be a grunt or tank and have buddies watch over you (albeit with less flight sim qualities available). But imagine tying in all these elements with a server that runs a persistent, 24/7 campaign like F4 does. Where you can pick missions as grunts, ships, planes or armor. That would rock! Even if you guys are dreaming in this thread, I am right there dreaming along with you

Yes I know what you're thinking. How exciting can this be? Well, this keyboard which seems to be a prototype for the moment has some far reaching implications for all sims. I encourage you to visit the link below and see for yourself. Basically each key is embedded with colour OLED screens (OLED is brighter and thinner than an LCD screen). Each key works as a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling and can store images and configurations. This lets you customise the keyboard to software such as Photoshop or a PC game, such as OFP. Check out how this is configured for Quake. Say goodbye to keyboard overlays or searching for that elusive keyboard shortcut. I must say this is one of the more exciting pieces of hardware I've seen in quite some time. Answers to FAQs from the website (some of them are just weird): More info here: Optimus Keyboard

BWahahahahaha....good one Ralph :-)