Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
development company based out of Prague, Czech Republic, and a member of IDEA Games.
Bohemia Interactive was founded in 1999 by CEO Marek panl, and it is best known for PC
gaming gems like Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, The ArmA series, Take On
Helicopters, and DayZ. The questions are answered by ArmA 3's Project Lead: Joris-Jan van
t Land.
PCPerspective: How long have you been at Bohemia Interactive?
VAN T LAND: All in all, about 14 years now.
PCPerspective: What inspired you to become a Project Lead at Bohemia Interactive?
VAN T LAND: During high school, it was pretty clear to me that I wanted to work in game
development, and just before graduation, a friend and I saw a first preview for Operation
Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis in a magazine. It immediately looked amazing to us; we were
drawn to the freedom and diversity it promised and the military theme. After helping run a fan
website (Operation Flashpoint Network) for a while, I started to assist with part-time external
design work on the game (scripting and scenario editing). From that point, I basically grew
naturally into this role at Bohemia Interactive.
PCPerspective: What part of working at Bohemia Interactive do you find most
satisfying? What do you find most challenging?
VAN T LAND: The amount of freedom and autonomy is very satisfying. If you can
demonstrate skills in some area, you're welcome to come up with random ideas and roll with
them. Some of those ideas can result in official releases, such as Arma 3 Zeus.1 Another
rewarding aspect is the near real-time connection to those people who are playing the game.
Our daily Dev-Branch2 release means the work I do on Monday is live on Tuesday. Our own
ambitions, on the other hand, can sometimes result in some challenges. We want to do a lot
and incorporate every aspect of combat in Arma, but we're still a relatively small team. This
can mean we bite off more than we can deliver at an acceptable level of quality.
PCPerspective: What are some of the problems that have plagued your team, and how
have they been overcome?
VAN T LAND: One key problem for us was that we had no real experience with developing a
game in more than one physical location. For Arma 3, our team was split over two main
offices, which caused quite a few headaches in terms of communication and data
synchronization. We've since had more key team members travel between the offices more
frequently and improved our various virtual communication methods. A lot of work has been
done to try to ensure that both offices have the latest version of the game at any given time.
That is not always easy when your bandwidth is limited and games are getting bigger and
bigger.
1
2
http://arma3.com/dlc/zeus
http://dev.arma3.com/dev-branch
Another issue weve had is that it has sometimes been hard to keep developing the live game
post-release. We have the opportunity to still improve, expand, and fix the game, but we need
to keep backwards compatibility in mind. It's not just our content that should keep working
while we improve the game, but also a huge library of user-generated content. This has
meant that sometimes we simply need to make compromises or take more time to implement
a new feature in a more complicated way. This has been the case for the Firing from Vehicles
feature, which could have been done more quickly if we didn't want it to be backwards
compatible.
Lastly, updating the game can be a bit of a frustrating endeavor. Our intention is obviously to
improve things, but it's such a complex system that a fix in one area can easily cause a new
problem elsewhere. We're still improving our quality assurance methods to prevent this,
focusing on things like automated testing, larger scale multi-player testing, and longer release
candidate testing periods ahead of releases.
PCPerspective: Where do you see Bohemia Interactive in 5 years?
VAN T LAND: The company has grown a lot these last few years, and, within the next five
years, I imagine well have overcome some of the growing pains. Bohemia Interactive should
be a fun place to work, with several full teams developing a number of big projects. And, even
though we'll be bigger, we do want to preserve our identity. There are things people have
come to expect from Bohemia Interactive, some good and some less ideal (the latter we will
have defeated of course!).
PCPerspective: How is Bohemia Interactive different from competitors like DICE and
Activision?
VAN T LAND: The fact that we are independent means that we have the freedom to explore
and pioneer new genres, methods, strategies, business models, and more. We can
experiment, fail, and try again without other parties dictating to us. One very specific
difference is our modding scene. We've always had moddable games, and many of our
developers come from a modding background. Admittedly, such an open platform can cause
some headaches. Broken mods can make the game itself appear broken, and testing for all
possible things modders can do is a huge amount of work. The benefits far outweigh the
problems though!
PCPerspective: Bohemia Interactive is known for supporting its community through
patches, free tool kits, and DLC/Expansions. With the level of support Bohemia
Interactive receives, how much community input goes into the games you produce?
VAN T LAND: There are many kinds of feedback that we use to improve our games. First,
there is compatibility testing. Even with our growing internal quality assurance teams, we
cannot replicate all the combinations of hardware, software, and peripherals that are out in
the wild. Public pre-release testing lets us find and hopefully fix issues like these. Weve had a
lot of successful fixes, such as an issue that affected a group of users with a specific network
http://forums.bistudio.com/
http://feedback.arma3.com/
http://www.reddit.com/r/arma
http://makearmanotwar.com/finalists
http://makearmanotwar.com/jury
http://www.bistudio.com/blog/roadmap-14-15-dlc-strategy-blog
https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3_Headless_Client
cores). Our new engine (not for Arma 3) will likely use more modern approaches and handle
advanced hardware more efficiently. Meanwhile, we'll continue to see how we can improve
Arma 3's performance on various kinds of hardware.
PCPerspective: Will you be joining us for the next VLAN?
VAN T LAND: Probably not the next one, but who knows, maybe a future one!
Many thanks to Joris-Jan van t Land for providing us with more insight into ArmA 3 beyond
what is available in Bohemia Interactives 2015 road map blog. The future of ArmA 3 and
Bohemia Interactive looks bright, and the Marksman DLC looks to be a real game changing
update! I am a little disappointed that Bohemia Interactive has no plans to release a Linux
client in the future, but the fact that Bohemia Interactive provides long term support for its
current game clients is always a plus in my book. I highly recommend picking up a copy of
ArmA 3. It can be found on Steam or you can find a nice deal on the ArmA 3 sub-reddit.
I would like to thank Bohemia Interactive and Joris-Jan van t Land, in particular, for taking
time out of his day to answer questions for us. I hope we see more of Bohemia Interactive in
the future.