FROM: Creative Director
TO: Arma 3 Users
INFO: Firing from All the Things, Recoil Overhaul, Make Arma Not War Jury
PRECEDENCE: Flash

SITUATION

With Our Dear Leader indisposed for the next couple of weeks, the honour of REPdating the community with development progress once again falls to a crack team of REPlacements (Pettka and yours truly). The puns only get worse from here on in, so buckle up!

Speaking of which, passengers using their weapons in vehicle cargo positions now face a bumpier ride, following the release of 'Firing from Vehicles Inertia' (FFV Inertia) to Dev-Branch. We outlined the basic goals of this feature last week. Now we're on the lookout for feedback. Two key values are open to tweaking: the magnitude of the sight misalignment (versus vehicle velocity), and the stabilisation of the aim-point (versus vehicle turning).

Sticking with the theme of FFV (not to be confused with a popular JRPG), an Elite Task Force has been working hard on 'Turned Out' cargo positions. This means, for example, Commander positions can use personal weapons (and, if everything goes according to plan, their binoculars) if they 'turn out' of the vehicle. Programmer Krzysztof 'Klamacz' Bielawski hopes to deploy updates later this week. QA Specialist Vojtěch 'Iceman' Kovařič stands ready to crush those dreams.

INTELLIGENCE

Last Friday, we revealed the line-up of judges for the Make Arma Not War content creation contest - and what a handsome bunch of devils they are! We expect to announce the winners at the end of March, which means that the jury members have a lot to look forward to, as they pick from 50 finalists across 4 categories: singleplayer game mode, multiplayer game mode, addon and total modification .

This week's random dev photo teased the work being lead by Nelson Duarte on a small-scale MP mode, which we hope will contribute to Marksmen DLC's free 'platform update' content. While we aren't ready to release too much info, the team's goal is to use this mode as a vehicle for some experimentation. This effort, we hope, will help bring some improvements to multiplayer systems more broadly.

OPERATIONS

As we mentioned in our Scanning the Horizon blog post, there are some changes in store for weapon recoil. Let's take a quick look at what's involved. Overall, our team want to improve the look and feel firing a weapon. The goal is not to make it more difficult; rather, more natural: a mechanic that rewards the intelligent use of stance, movement speeds, and combat behaviour. This involves correcting some existing behaviour, such as the muzzle rise, introducing new configuration options, such as lateral drift, and visualising more fluent kickback.

Although we're adding more depth to the setup of each weapon, we want to make it relatively simple to configure new recoil coefficients across different weapon types and specific firearms. We're quite close to staging the feature to Dev-Branch, but - with a few pesky issues to resolve first - it may slip into next week. Our plan is to package its release this together with Weapon Resting, which we outlined in a bit more detail last week.

LOGISTICS

As promised, our Audio team started to migrate samples to a new structure. In the long term, this will help us to better organise the data in a more logical structure. For now, we'll maintain the existing structure, but we consider it be 'deprecated'. The new addons will be published over the next week or two. In the long term, we plan to remove this (duplicated) data; we'll be sure to announce this action well in advance.

Again, for content creators, there are some updates to report that we hope will make your lives a little easier. In short, previously each weapon required 8 icons to be created, as there needed to be one defined for each combination of having or not having a muzzle / top / side-rail accessory. Now it's only necessary to create one icon and attachments as overlay icons to be set in configs. The documentation is already live, and the implementation is set to be released to Dev-Branch soon™.