It has been a while since the last ‘Report In!’, but we’re back and kicking off a fresh new series with no one other than Arma 3’s Sandbox Design Lead, Lukas Haladik!
As we stand on the verge of revealing our plans for Arma 3, there is one big topic we'd like to get out there first. A long four months ago, I took over as Project Lead for Arma 3, having previously worked on the game as Lead Playable Content. As a team we were facing two quite serious situations: we were not happy with how the project was going, and on top of that two of our colleagues were suddenly arrested for alleged espionage in Greece. The first two months on the job were all about taking an inventory of the project and team, seeing what was going well, what was not, and coming up with plans to fix it all. The mission set by our CEO, Marek Španěl, was clear: do all we can to release Arma 3 in 2013.
One of the steps in this plan has been to select Valve's Steam as our primary platform. Not only is Arma 3 PC-exclusive, but now we have decided to make it Steam-exclusive as well. Since we expect this will upset some of our fans, I'd like to take the time to honestly explain our motivations.
The bottom-line: we feel that without going Steam-exclusive, we would not be able to release Arma 3 in 2013.
Community has always played a major role in our game development. Our games were always open by the nature, easy to modify and extend. This time we have decided to perform an experiment and to take one little step further: we are trying to open the development process a bit.
Recently we were looking for a memory profiler. We have evaluated several commercial tools, but we were not satisfied with any of them, as they were unable to provide meaningful results for our games, or they have degraded the performance of the game too much. An idea was born recently that with the allocator already being external to the game, it should be possible to replace the allocator with something which will monitor the allocations, while passing the real work to the allocator.
