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- Hacker News
- this game was quite popular here in Estonia
Also anybody remember when this used to be called Operation Flashpoint ?
it had this weird paperish/dried out flat texture look that was quite characteristic and major appeal for me.
even now im amazed how much depth this game has , many many fun nights online
by zuzululu - This is great, I wish more studios would do the same with their games, and also under the GPL3.0by fishgoesblub
- - would love to see some ubisoft games like this from old times like splinter cell 1,2,3by vivzkestrel
- This game was on my cousin's dad PC about 20 years ago. There were no name on the icon, it was just titled "war" (assumingly by cousin). Later I got Arma: Armed Assault on Steam, when all my friends played Arma 2/DayZ and I couldn't, because my PC was a potato. Spent hours on sandbox editor making big warfare.by romandr
- I learned HTML thanks to Operation Flashpoint so that I could write mission briefings in the editor...one thing led to another, and I have a successful career as a software developer. Thanks, Bohemia Interactive.by dvratil
- I used to open up mods (I seem to recall them being in "PBO" files) and tweaked around the script code to change things and make my own weapons and such. Also a formative experience on my path to becoming a developer.by ch_123
- I remember the day I bought that game at my local dealer. It looked amazing and nobody told me about it, my friends were playing FFVII and stuff like that. After installing it, it was mindblowing, the mission editor was incredible with infinite possibilities. When you think about it, that engine and it's SDK were really advanced features and concepts. I mean Rainbow Six had a mission planner, but OPF, with it's editor and addons was an inifinite sandbox. Good memories.by Hypergraphe
- Same trajectory here! Started wanting to make missions in jr high. The community was great about having tutorials for the scripting engine and mission editor. Learned all sorts of programming concepts from doing that, then learned HTML from making pretty-looking briefings for the missions. By the time I started taking some programming classes in HS, I had some decent foundations.
It’s also great that they’ve been consistent about keeping their scripting commands wiki up to date with each new engine update.
The one thing holding Reforger back IMO and why I always go back to Arma 3 is the lack of mission editor/Eden that made it so easy to just try out some mission idea in the OFP/Arma/RV engine.
by jaxefayo - I believe this game had some interesting anti cheat, it would still let you play if it knew it was cracked but would just make your aim worse and worse until you gave up.by tombot
- I think that was arma 2. It also turned the player into a pigeon after a while.by rythmshifter
- It was copyright protection, not anti cheat, and I thought it was fun/interesting as well!
It was called FADE <https://kotaku.com/now-this-is-how-copy-protection-should-be...>
by jaxefayo - It had, another thing is that it used somewhat questionable system for CD key validation, which is stubbed out in this release (https://github.com/BohemiaInteractive/CWR/blob/main/engine/P...).
One thing is 120bit RSA (readily broken with a graphing calculator at the time of release), another thing is the provenance of the RSA implementation code in the original binary.
by dfox - WASM port: https://motionmark.itch.io/poseidonwasmby Stevvo
- Not being a big gamer, I can'comment with much authority. I've played a bunch of Modern Warfare(s) and Battlefields, and Squad. But they all feel pointless to me when ARMA 3 exists.
It's _so_ janky but in my mind way more immersive for reasons I just can't fully explain, though they are something to do with the fact that good comms is the key to fun and success. It's also got a pretty major learning curve...
by jefc1111 - The community makes the game. The actual game is much less important.
The learning curve just acts as a filter that results in more like-minded people sticking with it.
by Tuna-Fish - COD/Battlefield and Arma are two different genres. Squad is somewhat in Arma's genre. I can't stand Arma's movement anymore. The closest thing I've found to the unique parts of Arma is Hell Let Looseby ranger207
- playing on a certain private server using sog:pf cdlc + the alive mod with a group of people who knew our shit was genuinely some of the most intense and immersive gaming experiences i have ever had.
you're pinned down as a 10 person group in a jungle clearing, everyone hunkering down behind some fallen down trees cos that's your only cover ... you're surrounded by enemy in all directions, the whole team is running low on ammo, tracer rounds flying over everyone's heads, your medic is wounded and trying to patch himself up ... you're trying to call in air support using only grids and compass bearing desperately hoping that you've got the grids right and the human pilots don't fuck it up and wipe out the whole team ... you've gotta try to organize some sort of extract helo in all of this mess, but chances are they'll get shot down if they try to extract you here ... suddenly mortar rounds start going off all around you because the ai have communicated your location back to the mortar installation you were trying to recon ...
as team lead, what do you do? what's your decision? how are we getting out of this mess? you don't get to think, there's no time to think, thinking is death. what do you do?
so fucking cool.
by dijksterhuis - I agree. I've played Arma 3 for more than a whole decade now. Most of it comes down to the open large scale combined arms experience not being available in any other recent video game from a first/third person perspective. There's now Arma Reforger, but it understandably lacks content.by RavSS
- Operation Flashpoint (for anyone who bought it on release back in the day).
It was later turned into the Arma series and re-released with this name to fit the series branding.
I've played them all - this was the best of the lot IMHO.
by fdgfgfvffdv - I think Bohemia parted ways with their publisher Codemasters, who retained the Operation Flashpoint trademark.by Maakuth
- I'm a bit sad they never managed to make an equally enjoyable campaign in any of the later installments.
Multiplayer is nice for others I guess, but not really for me.
by izacus - Not only Bohemia Interactive released the code, they cleaned it up and ported to Windows x64 and Linux x64. That's amazing.
- I was a member of the arma 3 on unix (mostly linux) community before Proton was released and somewhat usable. The BI community managers were very forthcoming when we had questions and they also enabled proton support for battleye as soon as it became feasable. Definitely not the worst game studio regarding linux support.by preisschild
- Seconded. I applaud BI for doing such a clean open source release. So many things to learn from!
I wish other game studios would release their software so many years after release.
by wuschel - I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Bohemia Interactive. Their games have always had a charming “designed by a software engineer” feel, which I appreciate.
Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.
I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.
by beaker52 - I actually worked on the Poseidon engine back when I was at BISim for serious game Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) which was the spin off built for military training.
The codebase here is so much cleaner and better organized than the version I remember wrestling with on a daily basis, and if you remember how buggy and unstable the DayZ launch was for users it can all be traced back to this since it was never envisioned to live as long and scale as far as it did. Fun fact Poseidon was the original internal game name they were building in 1999 before changing the game name and renaming the engine to Real Virtuality.
It's also easy to forget just how far ahead of its time this was since this shipped large open worlds with maps that were 12.5 km × 12.5 km and that was really easy to mod with a runtime scripting language SQF, not a separate mission editor. This was all in 2001, which is three years before Half-Life 2 would come out.
by murdockq - I discovered Arma 2 when I was around 12. Its insane how much content was created with the limitations of the game engine. I also got into SWE partly due to hacking together SQF scripts :)by preisschild
- Wait, did you work in the Orlando office? ;)
I worked with a guy at the Research Park in Central Florida who used to work for Bohemia Interactive (I forget on what). That's kind of funny, I remember him noting that it was a PITA to work with the Arma codebase.