Cold War Rearmed - Another Milestone Approaches
A look back over the past year as we approach a new milestone!
Two Years
Wow, the time has really flown by, I looked back the other day at the CWR developer blog I wrote back in September 2007, the team was just 6 months into the porting of Cold War content over to ArmA. At the time we had high expectations, things seemed to be moving quickly at the time in terms of some of the core developement. We were confident at the time that the community would help us out with the needed models to complete the conversion, we also thought we would pick up a couple of quality artists and modellers over time to help fill in any gaps. We did pick up one or two great guys here and there who stepped in to help us out. This stratgey howeverwasn't paying off for us, and after a while the core work was really completed, we just needed to fill in those last few gaps.. right..?
New Leaders
Raedor was becoming increasingly busy with RL and his real job @ VBS, so he asked me to step in for a while, unable to say no to a good cause, I thought I would be able to keep the momentum going. Reality set in and my real life workload and my work at OFPEC was really starting to take its toll in terms of time, basically there wasn't enough hours in the day to do a good job at any one of the dozen projects I had on my plate. The real problem that had been plaguing us for such a long was finding community members willing to help us out. There was alot of aminosity growing towards the CWR mod and managing the project was becoming a part time job along just communicating and motivating the current team. In the summer of 2008 after some long discussions with W0lle, I decided to step down as the leader of CWR and allow W0lle who had a seemingly endless amount of engery and a decent repoirt with many community modellers and texture artists. W0lle slowly started bringing people back together, filling gaps, he eventually crafted a plan of attack, set some stakes in the ground for goals and basically re-engergized the entire team back into shape. Kudo's to him for keeping us going!
Resistance
Time was becoming a factor, 2 years after project started we only had the initial release. The original mile stone was to release the Resistance content after the '1.46' released. ArmA II was quickly approaching and we had originally planned to release the Resistence ReArmed portion later, so it left us wondering about what to do with the Resistance content. For the most part, the content already resided on the svn, but it needed some TLC and plenty of time to figure out the best way to incorporate into the already existing mod. Do we release 2 mods or just one super mod? Most of the missions out there, the really good 'fan made' missions were already using the Resistance content, so we made some plans to just integrate resistance into the whole ball of wax. Good news for the fans!
Missions and Campaigns
Towards the begining of March the team really started to focus on the missions and campaigns conversions, some of the team had created custom tools which did alot of the leg work, you know adding ;'s to the description.ext and fixing up the strings and other mondane tasks. As it happened though alot of the cutscenes were broke and required delicate adjustments by people who were intimately familiar with the versions from Operation Flashpoint. It turned out that the units in ArmA are a bit taller then they were in OFP, not to mention slightly wider, and this presented some problems in the cutscenes, in OFP the camera may have been pointing at the face but in ArmA+CWR the cameras were pointing at the chest area. The lack of the grass in OFP allowed the camera to move smoothly along the ground, but in ArmA the grass in some cases completely blocked camera views. Those were just some of the challenges that we were faced with in the missions conversions.
Community Contributions
Over the course of the development, the CWR Team accepted alot of content from various people. Some of these generous artists have left the community over the last little while, and a new batch of people years later have stepped and offered thier models, thier talents, thier time to help out the ColdWar ReArmed Mod. The list is so long that I wouldn't want to chance missing anyone by name, so kudo's and many thanks go out to all those people who will have helped us shaped ColdWare ReArmed.
ArmA II
Back in February, the team took stock in the pending ArmA II release expected sometime this year. We really needed to reach one of our milestones, preferably before Armed Assault II hit the retail shelves. With an expected 1 - 2 months of testing and campaign work, we really needed to make some hard choices. We could delay the release till after ArmA II came out. Or we could release something for the people who created and donated content for CWR in ArmA. I guess some of those questions will be fully answered in the coming weeks as we reached the final milestone for Armed Assault!
