| Work in progress - What progress? |
| Wednesday, 30 May 2007 08:23 | |||
Work in progress - What progress?
 Work in progress - What progress? We haven’t really gotten much info about Armed Assault yet. As explained in the “What can we expect” article, BIS is holding their cards very tight. In this article, I have collected some images from the old Poseidon engine, Operation Flashpoint till the newly released pictures of Armed Assault. I will analyse these screenshots as best as I can. But since the information we have received is very small, much of it will be pure guess work. The first pictures are taken directly from Operation Flashpoint. Later in the article, we will discuss some of the community made modifications with Armed Assault.  First, let’s see on some of the vehicles out there. Here is the M1A1 Abrams on the right. On the top you see the Abrams from Operation FlashPoint, while the Armed Assault version is on the bottom. The improvements are tremendous. Check out the lighting differences on the two screens. It’s very obvious to see what DirectX 9 has done for the game. Look at the shadows on new picture. The tank casts shadow on itself, the detail on the tank are very nice as well. Although it doesn’t look like the commander gun made it into Armed Assault. This might mean that multiple gunner positions aren’t available in Armed Assault. If we look at the screenshot with the tank. We can see some new effects as well as new vegetation. New palms are now on the Island 'Sara' as well . A user (Uziyahu--IDF) on the BIS boards noticed that the name is the same as Abraham’s wife. This means that ArmA will probably be a Middle East conflict. From the terrain images this could be correct. On the picture below, we can see the Sigma M1. This is a usermade M1A1. As you can see, it’s very beautiful as well, and a lot prettier than the OFP standard M1A1. Although I think the textures are very nice, the lightning just isn’t enabled in this engine. On the other hand, I must admit that some of the usermade addons out there, really have some impressive textures and models. I can’t wait to see some usermade addons released to the new engine where there will be fewer constraints (improved scripting engine has been mentioned).  Talking about the graphics just isn’t enough. Most OFP fans care more about gameplay than nifty looking sprites. So what gameplay changes will be made to the engine? Well, a nice improvement would be the AI – but we don’t know if that will happen (no official word). Although it would be very weird if it isn’t upgraded. We do, however, know that collision detection is fixed. This means that we now have close combat in ArmA!!! We had this in OFP, but it was more or less a fight against not getting stuck in a building instead of a real enemy. We also had a word of an physics engine upgrade, which includes weather effects (which actually influence the environment). A lot of these features are explained in the What to Expect 
Article! Another great factor is, that Armed Assault is built with
multiplayer in mind from the beginning which will surely open up a
whole new world in OFP.Anyway, take a look on these screenshots below (they are the latest released), to see some of the new graphical improvements. Now all we need is a video! Watch this space!
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