ATTENTION

A lot has happened since our last Dev Report, and we’ll attempt to catch you up on everything. From the release of 0.9.6 Stable and Experimental updates, through server renaming and disabling the private options in the Workshop, to our latest news and plans. We even have a few sneak peeks of our next big thing – the first Milestone update.

INTELLIGENCE

To start, let’s review some of the latest updates. Less than a month ago, the 0.9.6 Stable version brought multiple network traffic optimizations and other gameplay fixes. For example, players don’t need to press “deploy” numerous times to respawn anymore, no frozen fire animation when a weapon is dropped during firing, and turning left in trucks should be much smoother now. This update was shortly followed up by our minor update 0.9.6.60, which also improved 0.9.6 by fixing crashes on detaching weapons or memory leaks on dedicated servers related to widgets. With 0.9.6, Modders might appreciate the option to show/hide layers without showing entities in the World Editor or the addition of links to documentation embedded directly in the Workbench UI. To see the complete list of all that was changed, fixed, removed, added, or tweaked, be sure to read our 0.9.6 Stable changelog. If you want a highlighted list, browse through the features added below.

  

Moving to the Experimental build on Steam, we released four updates since our last Dev Report, ranging from 0.9.6.54 to 0.9.6.64. You can find those changelogs on our forums (or the Steam Experimental application update announcements). The most recent one, 0.9.6.64, brought fixes to some regressions during the release of 0.9.6. Zeroing for M60 and RPG was fixed, and generic kill handling was improved, hopefully making the game experience neater. Besides that, we improved grass flattening for vehicle passengers and fixed a few possible blocking issues in the Tutorial. The update was small in scope but more focused on improving the current 0.9.6 playability.

As with any updates, minor or major, we’d like to take a moment to address some known issues and provide players with some possible workarounds.

When choosing servers where you want to play, we realized the ping information was not always reliable. There might have been occurrences where you connected to a server with a much higher ping than shown in the server browser. Due to this issue, you were playing on a distant server without knowing you were connected to the server on the other side of the planet. As a result, you could get kicked from the server with the messages saying Replication stalled or timeout. To remedy this situation, we’ve also decided to rename servers to include the location. Now you can see something like this:

It consists of the [OFFICIAL] flag, followed by the Game Mode being run, our ID of the server, and finally, the location (US-NY), which in this case is: the United States – New York. We believe this will help you choose the correct server and communicate better with your friends on which server you are playing. We want to remind you; you can join a server your friend is playing on directly from Steam or Xbox friend list. Select a friend already playing Reforger and use the “Join Game” option. The game will connect you to the server your selected friend is playing on.

For modders or content makers, we want to explain how you can share addon ownership within a group of modders.Addon ownership is not linked to the Bohemia Account. The owner of the mod is Identity (unique identifier) – on PC – it is associated with your Steam account. So you don’t need to share one Bohemia Account. If you want more people to be able to update an addon, you would need to share your Steam account.

With Steam integration into Workbench, Bohemia Account unlinking will not work from within Workbench, this is a known issue. If you want to unlink your Bohemia Account from your Identity, you have to unlink it in-game (this will soon be fixed). It is currently impossible to link a shared Bohemia Account to multiple Identities or one Identity to multiple Bohemia Accounts. If you have problems with linking your Bohemia Account then:

• Your Identity is already linked to a different Bohemia Account. → You have to unlink in-game.
• Your shared Bohemia Account is already linked to some other Identity. → The other person has to unlink in-game.

We are preparing documentation for the Community Wiki that will cover this topic further.

Lastly, many of you have noticed the Workshop disablement of private mods. First, we must highlight that no mod has been automatically turned from private to public. We temporarily disabled the functionality because the feature hasn’t yet been finished – the privacy term was misleading since the private and unlisted flags meant the same. We will re-enable this feature soon, but mods will possibly be marked as unlisted until the privacy feature is finished. As mentioned, all mods with the private/unlisted flag set stayed the same. Only newly published mods (including the republished ones) don’t have the option to set them as private/unlisted.

OPERATIONS

While we’ve spent a lot of work refining 0.9.6, much of our focus is now on further updates – specifically our first Milestone Update – Ground Support (0.9.7). As we’ve said in previous Dev Reports, many features have shifted along our schedule, such as some Ground Support items being brought into 0.9.6 early. With that said, we know already that some features will be shifting (or swapping) between 0.9.7 and future updates on our Roadmap. This is primarily due to feedback processing, both internally and from the community, which allowed us to prioritize the work better. There is much on the horizon to share, but for now, we would like to give you a tiny sneak peek of what is to come.

 

LOGISTICS

Creating a terrain in the Workbench is no small task, but rewarding nevertheless. For all of you who want to dive into it, we published a Terrain guide that will show you the way through a series of meticulously detailed steps that should lead you to your own terrain!

Talking about creating, our community is always coming up with new fantastic ways of expressing themselves in the realm of Arma Reforger. Please read our latest Community Radar, COMRAD #5, to witness their outstanding work.

We recently started a new series called #ReforgerTips on our Arma Platform Twitter, where devs share their wisdom to provide helpful game knowledge. The first tip will teach you a sly climbing trick that could save your life, and the second will show how to destroy a vehicle efficiently.

• New weapons & attachments
• New missions & game modes
• New map “Arland”
• Improved scenario framework, healing system and much more.

These are the most important innovations in the Arma Reforger update “Ground Support

The three most important new features of the current update are probably the new map, weapons and missions, which we will be able to play soon. But when does it actually start? The content from the update for Arma Reforger will be playable from December 01 at 15:00 CET.

This is the new map, Arland

Arland is the new island in Arma Reforger and is playable separately from the main map Everon. Arland is 16 km² in size and offers a similar environment, flora and fauna as Everon itself. Comparable to the map Stratis and Limnos from Arma 3, the new map is divided into military zone and two civilian villages. For the new terrain in Arma Reforger, the team has even adapted the Conflict game mode once again according to the size of the map.

Key features of Arland:

• Large airfield and military base in the northwest.
• Village in the northeast.
• Village in the east.
• 148 meter high mountain dividing the island.
• Radio station on top of the mountain.
• Small neighboring island.
• Hidden places for you to explore.

What does the new game mode “Combat Ops” offer?

In this new cooperative game mode of Arma Reforger, a maximum of six players compete together against the AI. At the start of each round, three different missions and tasks are placed on the map for you to complete. Once you have completed these missions, you must then make it to a randomly placed exfiltration point alive. While Combat Ops is meant to appeal to co-op fans, you can also play the mode completely solo!

The new weapons & attachments in the Reforger update

A total of two new guns have made it into Arma Reforger’s Ground Support Update. Both weapons are loaded with 7.62×39 mm ammo and are intended for the FIA side:

• SA-58P
• SA-58V

In addition, there is a new attachment for the Blufor side of Arma Reforger. You can now equip your M16 with a carry handle scope. This option was previously only available as a modification for Reforger.