Hi folks.

Firstly thank you to everyone who submitted nominations for the 2008 Community Awards, we've had 100s of nominations and have now removed the nomination submission form. Shortly there will be a new blog entry with the list of the finalists as well as information on how to vote for the finalists. 

While the previous Developer's Blog entry announced the release of our latest community project, Warfare, it only briefly touched on the main thought that drove much of its development. In most game communities a huge new Player versus Player multiplayer mode, would simply be ... well, played. But the ArmA community has always had the incredible mindset where the public release of missions or addons is considered the start of their development, rather than the conclusion.

Some say war never changes, but I think we've come a long way.

Up until not too long ago we were playing online skirmishes at best in our tactical shooters. Small bands of Reds, Blues, CTs, Tangos, Charlies and Deltas, usually confined to the equivalent of a schoolyard playground compared to the scope a real battlefield. The release of Operation Flashpoint saw these skirmishes grow to scenarios that finally created space for real maneuvres, involving dozens of troops and vehicles at once. But it wasn't until the release of Armed Assault that we could finally put this space to proper use and deploy up to hundreds of soldiers in our scenarios, online and offline.

Právě byla zveřejněna poslední aktualizace hry ARMA: Armed Assault* od Bohemia Interactive. Mimo množství vylepšení a oprav herního enginu obsahuje ARMA update 1.14 také něco navíc: nový herní mód WARFARE a některé nové jednotky a vozidla.

Za poslední rok od vydání urazila ARMA kus cesty. Společnost Bohemia Interactive věnuje mnoho úsilí podpoře a péči o své tituly, poslední aktualizace hry ARMA je ovšem skutečným mezníkem. Z hlediska stability, výkonu i hratelnosti se jedná téměř o novou hru. (Marek Španěl, Bohemia Interactive)

So what's the progress since the last blog entry?

All generated vegetation is nearly done, after we totally reworked the scripts for conifer trees for better results. There will just be a final color tuning on the vegetation. You can see some ingame screenshots showing how it looks now. There are some small issues with multiplication of sections when trees are blended, problem is in some trunk lightmaps that are not shared through LODs, something easy to fix. But the main focus is now on special vegetation LODs. We also found problems with LOD switching on bushes, because LODs were too different, we reworked the algorithm for choosing representative polyplanes and made this algorithm more controllable and flexible, there was also another bug, Linda never inspected the whole branch when finding topology similarity- this was fixed. This bug was not specific just for bushes, but bushes as more chaotic structures then trees, were much more affected by this problem.

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).