ATTENTION

Welcome back to another week of updates from the team. In this Dev Report, we continue to inform you about our ongoing short and long-term activities as we make progress on bug fixes, optimizations, new additions, and more. In particular, our team wanted to provide some details about how we plan to continue delivering our updates. We've also got some exciting new information on our upcoming release of crossplay, useful additions for modders, and our plans to publish a Release Candidate build for players in the near future.

INTELLIGENCE

As many of you have probably already seen this week, we've introduced a number of new fixes and changes with the latest 0.9.5.101 Update. While there is a lot to cover, we wanted to highlight some notable items.

In this latest update, we found and fixed some issues related to how weapons were synchronizing their state, specifically the fire mode selector. This led to problems with hitting targets, as sometimes the server would think you have a different fire mode than on the local player's machine. The only way to notice it was that targets weren't dying even when hit directly with multiple shots. The same effect can be caused by animation desync as well, so we don't guarantee that the inability to kill people is completely gone, but it's partially solved. We'll continue to investigate this further.

Additionally, we've provided a fix for not being able to switch to the third-person perspective. It was happening for singleplayer games which use respawn on the map (i.e., Conflict and Game Master).

Workarounds with reinstalling BattlEye should no longer be necessary. We updated the BE files and will keep updating them with future updates. This resolved some of the connectivity issues that players could encounter.

We've even gone as far as to provide a fix for a feature that we don't officially support yet. By this, we're referring to the inverted controller not working vertically with helicopter pitch actions. So now, some users can fly their modded helicopters a little smoother.

While we're on the topic, our team has done a lot to tweak, fix, and add to game controls for our players, such as the following:

• Gamepad combos are now properly displayed in the keybinding menu;
• Smoother input curve for aiming using a gamepad;
• Weapon inspect keybindings, and default bindings have been adjusted;
• Ability to rebind Hint, Hint Details, Objectives, and Current Objective; and,
• Removed default joystick bindings until joystick rebinding is supported.

📻 Dear community,

We are going to update the Steam version of #ArmaReforger. There will be downtime of the servers between 12:00 - 15:00 CEST.

Read more here 👇https://t.co/sQ3Arcm27d pic.twitter.com/ZO1dDlEuEk

— Arma Platform (@ArmaPlatform) July 20, 2022

Lastly, modders might appreciate a couple of our added additions in the latest updates.

The first improvement has been made to the serialization system. We reworked how the serialization system works for modders, and they can serialize any kind of value without difficulty. On top of that, we've added binary serialization. Which takes up less disk space and is quicker to operate with but is not human-readable.

The second improvement relates to those that make use of navmesh. We implemented a way for scenario makers to make partial changes or additions to navmesh data. This allows multiple addons to modify Everon's navmesh as necessary, and they don't have to publish full data but only differential. Conflicts between mods are resolved by generating the conflicted tiles at runtime. You can read the detailed documentation available on our community wiki.

OPERATIONS

To begin talking about our upcoming operations, let us explain how we're planning to approach releases and updates going into the future. We basically have three stages:

• Minor Updates: These will be just like the ones you've been receiving since the release of the game. They're focused on bug fixes, stability, optimizations, and tweaks. Basically reacting to your feedback and fixing the game so it's a better gaming experience with current content.

• Major Updates: As you'll see in a few weeks with our upcoming release of version 0.9.6, these updates will bring new features, content, and an even bigger list of fixes and improvements.

• Milestone Updates: Similar to major updates, these milestones will include a set of related features and content which fulfill a certain topic or theme for players. These types of updates and their contents will be touched on, in more detail, in the near future!

Until now we've only been releasing minor updates, but we want to bring you new content as well! That's why we'll be switching to a two-week update cycle, and the remaining 0.9.5 updates will be smaller in scope. That's to allow us to focus on preparing major updates for release. This change in the update cycle will also allow us to release our planned Release Candidate build, available for you to try before updating the main game branch. These changes will give us the ability to test larger-scale multiplayer, gather your immediate feedback, and make sure that the public, stable version isn't affected. More details on this process will be provided when the first major version is ready.

However, we don't mean to worry you about currently known issues; we still have plenty of plans for optimizations incoming, especially for network traffic issues related to items and inventory, and bug fixes in the short term that we'll be working to resolve.

We're planning to change the profile directory for the Workbench application so it's separated from the game profile. We noticed some users may have unpacked mods into their profile folder, which leaves them unable to connect to a multiplayer server due to data mismatch. Additionally, we'll change the server browser and divide the server list between official and community tabs. This may be confusing at first glance, but don't worry, if you look at the tabs you'll still find your favorite servers right there.

And more importantly, as introduced in last week's Dev Report #8, we're continuing our efforts in testing crossplay. We're in the final stage before delivery, testing it internally. Everything seems to be going well, but we're checking for edge cases and how it will impact general network stability. We may need to do more open testing with you, the players, on both platforms before fully releasing.

LOGISTICS

Something that might interest those working on animations, we've recently updated the BIKI to include a demonstration of how our Procedural Animation Editor works. You can find a step-by-step tutorial on the BIKI here. We know some of you have been interested in more examples of our tools, and we'll continue to release more of these types of demonstrations over time.

Introducing new mechanics, assets, textures, and more.

The only limit is your imagination. Reshape the game and share your own creative vision!

Read more https://t.co/PXpXPmCIHz pic.twitter.com/amFherUq1X

— Arma Platform (@ArmaPlatform) July 17, 2022

We look forward to providing you with more insights about our upcoming plans and stay tuned for details about additional content in the near future.

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