An open letter

KdjaCL

Dear Operation Flashpoint community,

Thank you for your continuous interest in Operation Flashpoint. The excitement and support you share with the rest of the community is invaluable and we’re glad that so many people understood our vision for realistic and open style computer games and started working on so many missions, addons and modifications of their own.




It has been a busy 4 years since the first commercial release of Operation Flashpoint (OFP). We successfully released the official expansion pack Resistance, developed a specifically tailored version of our technology for serious military training users (VBS1), released many updates to the game until 2004 and at the same time we were working on research and development of our second generation technology. While all this was happening, the community created many different conflicts, covering everything from Napoleonic to current militaria and beyond. There are now thousands of addons available with new content being created every day, including mods which change virtually every facet of the game, converting it into something new and fresh looking.



Now, we are near the beginning of a new period and it provides a good opportunity to give you a direct update as to our views and plans. First of all, we would like to assure you that we’re fully dedicated to the game world we created in OFP and fully dedicated to you, the community that assembled around the game. Your passion and creativity never ceases to surprise and astonish us and your passion always drives us forward.



As you’re probably aware, we currently do not have a publisher for our upcoming games and also, the Operation Flashpoint trade mark name is an intellectual property of Codemasters and thus we cannot use the name or directly control what the name will be used for. It means that unless Codemasters were to publish any of our upcoming games (which is still a possible scenario) it definitely wouldn’t be named Operation Flashpoint. But whatever names we will use our dedication to complex, realistic simulation and large open ended game environments will remain the same.



We have almost finished the special new version of our military combat game for Xbox. Considering the system’s limited memory we’re really proud that we haven’t removed a single feature, nor did we limit any aspect of the original PC military game and we fully kept the spirit of the original whilst managing to improve the graphics as well improving and adding to many aspects of realism, environment and ambient life. It’s different to anything console gamers have ever seen and that’s another reason for us to finally have this game published. We’re confident no other game on console offers this level of realism, scope or freedom. Playing a realistic military simulation in your living room, sitting on a comfortable chair, watching a large TV screen and listening to high performance surround sound speakers is definitely a unique feeling, even if you’ve already played the game a lot on PC.




Armed Assault (working title, aka ArmA) will be our next title for PC with an expected release date prior to the end of 2005. It will bring you a new engine with numerous improvements, including a completely new Direct X 9 graphics engine with support for detailed vegetation and dynamic water, reworked physical simulation and collision detection. Not forgetting of course, support for join in progress multiplayer. It will also contain a brand new environment and campaign set in the recent past. We also keep in mind all of the great community content created so far and we’ll try to make it as easy as possible to convert and use any OFP content in ArmA. Good news for addon makers is that porting their work into ArmA will help prepare them for future releases of our engine, which in the coming years will expand over many areas the ability of our technology.





On behalf of Bohemia Interactive

Marek Spanel


http://www.bistudio.com/flashnews/OpenLetter/openletter.html


kdjac

marco murphy

Applause