Arma 2 - Operation arrowhead - Game page insight #1 - Captions

There is some talk between the gamers that after the expansion for ARMA 2 you are done with military simulations. Your next game is supposed to be cartoon-ish, cute, full of fluffy things. Is that true? Well, OK... I think that after ArmA there will be fArmA. It will be fArmA. There will be a lot of animals and finally we won't have to shoot anybody, Instead we will be taking care of chickens, dogs, sheep and such. See, see, I told you! It's obvious, this going now. The creators of Hitman could tell you about it. (Mini Ninjas review follows) As I told you in the beginning, Jirka got a draft notice to take part in preparations for Operation Arrowhead in Brdy. Our camera was indeed with him. Jenik, you are the first to let us look inside your new project - an expansion for ARMA 2. Will you tell us anything about it? What is it about? Where it takes place? What will the story be? We're interested. We can take it from the beginning, let's go. Well, in the start the idea was to create an expansion for the game. To bring something more for the fans of ARMA 2 to the released game. But as everyone knows we're a bit of megalomaniacs here in Bohemia Interactive so the expansion Arrowhead will have a new story - new character in the campaign. New setting - something in the style of Afghanistan or so, however the country is again fictional. It will contain new soldiers, weapons, vehicles, helicopters, tanks. Just out of the interest, I suppose you already heard it from somewhere, but it's been a while. A minor part of the story will be played by the Czech Army, inspired by the units serving in Afghanistan. So even a Czech player will find it interesting. As you can see there are their own vehicles, soldiers, all after real documentation. The story is almost complete, at this time we do just minor changes because of missions and the campaign. "How long does it take you to write one campaign?" That's hard to say, but write all the texts for one mission takes about 2 days. "Vojta, what do you do?" Well, my task now is to teach the soldiers to finally have some sort of expanded inventory. That means teach them to pick up backpacks. Here, look at this AI, it walks to the bag, picks it up, puts it on his back. And me, as a different unit I can walk up to him and look in his bag, so he can provide some support. I can take some things out of it. Or I can just take my own backpack. "And what do you do, what's your responsibility?" Well, because we have an empty island with no objects now, I'm working on town generating, every time differently. We won't use that in the campaign, but in other missions, like in multiplayer missions. The players will be able to fight, other than random weather or random day time, also in a randomly generated town, meaning nobody will have the advantage of terrain knowledge. A whole new challenge for the players. - "So the town can change endlessly?" - Exactly. Of course, they can have it generate every time the same town, they can choose this, but if they want it totally random there is nothing to stop them. I'm here to implement thermal vision, it's a system we're porting from VBS and I think the best will be if I just show you here on the screen how it works. It's basically a system for night vision. We have a helicopter here and the system works by highlighting hot parts. As we can see here on the monitor the helicopter is static, it shouldn't be heating up, so all we see is black color. As soon as we start it parts like the engine should highlight. Let's speed up the time a bit. And we can notice that in these part the helicopter is starting to heat up and is becoming more visible. "Will you see this on infantry too?" Yes, it is planed for the soldiers too, where the hottest parts are face and hands. At the moment we are working on 2 maps for the expansion Operation Arrowhead. This is the Takistan map that will offer the player about 160 square kilometers. Here we can see the data I prepared. These are height and satellite maps in high resolution. From the satellite map we are able to get vegetation map, as you can see here. We will use that to automatically generate trees that Honza will make us. To give you a bit of insight I prepared this for you... When we started working on the expansion we knew we'll use Afghanistan as inspiration so we found this vegetation map made by German botanists. And now here we can see what is the dominant vegetation types there. The designers have decided it will be set between spring and summer so we did an analysis of what types we need to make, based on how frequented they are in the area and I started on preparing the mathematical models for each of the vegetation type. Here we can see how it's being computed, it will take a while. Here we can see the additions, which will stop at some time, because we set that in the game the model can't have over 7,000 polygons. That means the system cannot generate the branches fully, but at some point it has to substitute them with a special geometrical shapes we call "polyplanes". We need to realize it simulates a 20 year old tree and it takes just seconds or minutes to do it. Here we can see the simplified geometries that hold the simulation of leafs and blossoms. Then it projected these into the geometries that represent the volume. Otherwise we'd have a huge polycount and the computers wouldn't be able to handle this. That is all for today about the ARMA 2 expansion. We will keep an eye on its development and soon come back with new information. "I play an interesting trading game and I thought, because I'm successful at it, I'd buy you too." "What is your price?" Incalculable value. You know, our software is used by armies all around the world and so on. I think you'd have to start to mine oil so you could buy us. "Wait, I can offer a lot." "60 tons of cotton, 20 tons of tobacco, silk, pottery, do you accept?" Well, let's talk about that oil production and we will see. "Well, think about it." "I'll go earn a bit more now, and I'll come back later and we can talk again." (East India Company review follows)