BAS2 - Digital Diary

Came across an interesting article talking about player content in the world of gaming. Although it is biased to MMORPG's we have all witnessed the success OFP has enjoyed through community addons. Article can be found here.

Came across this today in my web travels. iRobot, the company who brought the vacuuming robot Roomba, have teamed up with the UA Army to develop a sniper spotting robot. Details here.

Interesting discussion happening in the official forums with a reply from myself on some pertinent observations. You can find the discussion here.

For those of you who want to follow the BAS2 Digital diary and are also Apple owners running OS X Tiger, a BAS2 Dashboard Widget is in the works.

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For those of you who consider yourself net savvy and have begun subscribing to RSS feeds using Firefox (the BAS 2 team's preferred Internet browser) or other news collation tools, this BAS 2 blog also comes as an RSS feed for your convenience. You can access the feed by clicking this link.

There is very interesting article about game scripting with Python over at Sylphis3d.com. It talks about how game engines should be structured as operating systems with actors being the processes. The proposed design is based on a special version of Python called Stackless and already successfully implemented in their own Sylphis3D game engine.

Kill or crawl, that's the choice; and if you plan on crawling, it better involve placing some satchel charges. So, more accurately, it's kill or crawl-and-then-kill. Talking and posturing are not options; but maybe they should be.

A few years ago the British Army ran some rather thoughtful recruitment adverts on television. In the most memorable the viewer sees through the eyes of an officer on the ground in a nameless African country. During an obviously tense situation an African soldier is shouting at the officer and beginning to wave his rifle about. Then the whole colour balance of the picture changes abruptly and we realise the officer has removed her/his sunglasses to make eye-contact with the soldier, who appears to calm down almost instantly.

The advert was an attempt to illustrate the human aspect of modern soldiering, and to play upon the viewer's natural prejudices, but I think it also holds some valuable lessons for our community as well.

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Came across a very interesting idea in the BIS Forums submitted by FatNinjaKid. Thought it was interesting enough to make mention of it in today's blog entry.

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A while ago I stumbled across this very well designed and stylish online gaming magazine called The Escapist. What attracted me was a link to an article called "Culture Wargames". The whole magazine however, is very well put together with extremely well thought out articles and excellent commentary from many industry pundits and observers.

Its presentation is nothing short of gorgeous and once again it is difficult to believe that something of this kind of quality is sitting out there on the Net for free and for all to enjoy.

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It had to happen eventually. Call it burn out, call it frustration, call it boredom, call it any number of things actually but around this time in '04 Ballistic Addon Studios announced it would no longer be creating addons for Operation Flashpoint.

There were several reasons for this, some understandable, some perhaps simply due to BAS being a team of perfectionists each with a drive to out do the last effort only to then react (some may say poorly) to community feedback.

It is always a fine line when creating new material for an online community. Addon making began to (and perhaps still does) polarizes the community into those that are grateful for the efforts of anyone who contributes and those who believe that if you can't stand any form of minute criticism then you probably shouldn't be releasing stuff for the public to use. Both camps have their points but I don't really want to open up that can o' worms in this post.

With the impending release of Armed Assault and the community looking to the horizon for a hugely anticipated OFP2 it is time to look to the future. More importantly, I would like to address the question; What does the future hold for Ballistic Addon Studios with the promise of a new OFP engine to work with?

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