Congratulations Alexandra!

Firstly I’d like to clarify that unfortunately for personal reasons (boring stuff like getting married, honeymooning, moving to a new country etc!) Alex Biesse was unable to complete her interview, which of course happens sometimes. So Alex, bon voyage and congratulations on the marriage!

The man who broke a thousand hair brushes.

Now, to ease the disappointment of not being able to discover the inner workings of a fine French woman, I bring to you, a somewhat fine Dutch man! That’s right, the 2^nd ever interviewee (eventually!) becomes Jerry Hopper of the flat country known as The Netherlands (or Holland as some know it best).

Many words have been spoken about how important the community is as a whole, the talent that the community collectively brings forth, to provide us with many things that keep ArmA alive, whether that be addons, mods, missions, campaigns, squads, websites or simply just some damn fine conversations on the various medium out there.

Most of the time it would be unfair to pick out one or two examples of the best that the community has to offer, but then as they say, life's not fair! To that end we can officially announce the first stage in the 2008 Community Awards, these awards will be a chance for the community to nominate and then vote for their favourites in a number of areas (see below), The category winners will each receive prizes and to hopefully ensure that as many people nominate/vote as possible there will also be 5 randomly awarded prizes of ArmA posters, the posters will be given to 5 names of people who nominated/voted during the awards process as drawn from a hat

Release of the beta patch 1.09

Firstly, most people are aware, but for those that aren't, we released a beta patch 1.09 a few days ago, this patch contains a number of bug fixes, performance fixes as well as anti-cheating improvements amongst other things, first indications are that the majority of ArmA users are having great success with this patch so that's obviously very pleasing to all of us. As this is a beta patch your feedback is really useful to us to make sure that the final version is as stable and complete as possible.

Here are a few links to visit: 

• 1.09 patch page on the Community Wiki (download links, patch contents etc. etc.)
• Forum thread for discussing this new patch on the official forums
• Forum thread for troubleshooting issues related to the new patch

People who changed the world (well our little corner of it)

The history of BIS/Flashpoint/ArmA has been shaped by a number of special and dedicated people, some from BIS, some from the various companies that produced, packaged, published and promoted BIS and our games. To that end what I plan to do in these community blog posts is interview various people from within BIS, within the companies who were part of Flashpoint/ArmA being brought to you guys as well as various people from different walks of life in the community.

When choosing the first person I wanted to interview it wasn’t a difficult choice, of all those people past and present who have released addons/mods there is one person who helped shape the past and present of the community, that person is Kegetys, to anyone who has been around since day one of the original Flashpoint demo you cannot fail to know the name and the contribution he has made, to those of you who perhaps didn’t become too involved in the Flashpoint addon scene, or are "Johnny come latelies" to BIS' games then here is an interview with Kegetys which I hope will be interesting and educational to all.

Click the image to view the original trailer released by Kegetys that caused such a buzz within the community (and BIS headquarters!)

Welcome to the first (and hopefully not last!) of regular community blog posts, these will serve as a means of looking at all areas of the community, the people in the community and the works that the community is doing with regards addons and mod making, mission making and things like that. In these community blog posts we'll also look at other community sites out there, as well as chatting to a number of people who have directly or indirectly affected the lives of people within the community.

This first community blog post is ideally meant to start a "this is what we want to do, thoughts?" mentality happening, it's your community so we need your feedback to see what you want from the community, how can the community blog best represent you? How are you the community member feeling? What do you like about the current situation? What don't you like? In this first blog post there's a summary of the rise of the community as seen through the eyes of someone who was there during all the heady and exciting days, and weeks and months and years. Also included with this first community blog post is an interview with one of the addon/mod making revolutionaries Kegetys.

The clues lead to the not so secret identity of the community blog's first interviewee