Arma3 EXILE

Release Notes
August 1st, 2015 by Eichi
Hello future inmates,

As the summer is almost over and we have made awesome progress in the last weeks, Exile is going to be released this month!

Our internal plan is to finish required features within the next two weeks, followed by a full week of bug fixing/balancing only. After that, we will release Exile as a 0.9.9 version (or so), since we have no “real world” experience to release a 1.0.0 version. We expect some minor issues after the release, but we will be online every day to correct them as soon as they occur.

Speaking of dates, our expected release date is the 21st of August. Since vacations, business trips and families keep us busy in the meantime, this date could vary a little bit. In case we have to move the release date, we will inform you here. But we will do our best to keep this date locked.

Another important thing is: Please do not expect Exile to be finished on release. If we would integrate all the features we would love to have in there, we would have to delay the release by a year or two. Thus we have decided to throw in all the features that make up a nice foundation and then add more features over time. Here is a list of things that you can expect on release:

I will not list everything here, as this is waaaaaaaay too much. Instead, here are the things that I have in mind right now:

New Arma Feeling
Exile will come with a brand new HUD for Arma, a new and more realistic ingame coloring plus a new soundtrack. You will be surprised how Arma can feel with these changes!

Looting
The loot spawns directly on the ground/floor, not in containers. You will be notified ingame once loot spawned for you. You will be able to find building-category related loot, thus military buildings will spawn military loot ect. There are high-loot areas where you can find rare items.

Survival
Exile uses simplyfied survival mechanisms, which boils down to hunger and thirst. Both of them are bound to your ingame activity. If you like to camp, you will not become thirsty/hungry fast. But if you run for ages, you will become thirsty very quickly. As a side note, we have removed fatigue completely, so you can basically run forever, forest!

Items
All items in Exile are separated into four levels: one, two, three and over-9000. The higher the level, the better the item. A level two magazine does always more damage than a level one magazine. A level two backpack can always carry more than a level one backpack. These levels are separated into different colors. Level one items are white, level two items are blue, level three ones are green and ultra-super-duper items with level over 9000 are pink.

On top of that, you can double-click an item to see the main attributes of it. A magazine will show the damage, tracer count, maximum speed etc. while a vest will show attributes like armor and capacity. If you ever wondered which backpack is the largest or which sniper has the highest range, now you know.

Chopping Wood
You will need an axe to chop down a tree. The higher a tree is, the more wood will come out.

Shopping
Our ingame currency is called “Pop Tabs”. Thats the tiny thingy that you use to open a canned drink.

There will be a trader city where you can interact with NPCs. This trader city is the “Mafia” of Exile. There are different types of traders for different types of items. You will have full control of where to buy to or sell items from. For example, if you are not wearing a helmet and buy one, you will equip it automatically. If you carry a weapon with attachments and sell it, the weapon will be gone but the attachments will still be in your inventory. On top of that, you can directly buy and sell things from your vehicles cargo. Also, there is a “waste dump” where you can sell the content of your vehicles at once, so you can “clean” your base much faster.

There are also vehicle traders, where you can buy the base version of a vehicle, aircraft or boat. Beside the respective vehicle trader, you can go to the “vehicle customs” trader and buy new skins for that. We have planned to add more customizations over time, like custom car horns, bottom lights, nitro boosters, smoke defense systems etc.

Construction
Exile will feature three building modes (free, grid, snap) that allows changes to rotation, elevation, distance to the player and the option to build with or without physics being simulated. The option to build with or without physics is great to have full control. For example, if you want to build a ramp, lift a wood floor into the air and enable physics so it will fall down. If you want to create a helipad, disable physics and the floor will float.

Respect
Respect is some sort of score that your character will gain over time. If you frag someone, you will gain respect. If you kill a bambi or a mate, you will lose respect. Respect is required to interact with the Mafia. For example, if you want to extend your territory, you will need respect. Thus you are forced to leave your base if you want to extend your base.

Territory Control
Territories can be purchased from the Mafia. You need to pay protection money every now and then to keep your territory. The larger your territory is, the higher the protection money.

Crafting / Cooking
We have defined a couple of crafting recipes that you can craft. Some recipes require tools, like a cooking pot or special environmental conditions, like a water pump. You can craft multiple items at once. Crafting itself is always instant, so you could craft 300 wood floors with a single click.

Vehicles
Exile spawns two different types of vehicles on the map. Normal vehicles like cars and choppers off the spawn zones and vehicles, like bikes, close to spawn zones. Both of them are non-persistent, so they will de-spawn on server restarts. If you want to keep a vehicle forever, buy a codelock for it. Vehicles that you buy at traders will be persistent out of the box.

Clans and Parties
Basically, there are two different types of groups in Exile. Parties are temporary groups of players who want to play together. The only thing that a party offers is ingame markers of your party members. Clans are saved in the database and will persist. Clans are meant for friends to share ingame pin codes, persistent map markers (thats on our todo-list!) and such. Also, both parties and clans can have a name, where as clans can also have their own territory flags. There is a no member limit for both clans and parties.

Special Operations
You can control UAVs for spotting. They are a bit expensive, but offer thermal vision sights and can fly in a couple of hundret meters.

Also, you can construct static machine guns to integrate air defense. They are also portable. So if you ever felt like “If I only had a big caliber now…” you can have that. It requires two players to carry a mountable machine gun though.

Anti-NVG base installments. If you combine portable generators with flood lights, you can light up your base during the night so attackers can not use NVGs without getting blinded.

Diversity
Server owners are able to affect the loot ingame. Loot tables, spawn rates, high loot areas and so on will differ per server. Also, servers are able to add or modify crafting recipes. Exile does not include any AI, quests or missions. However, we have prepared a mission and AI framework server side, so server owners can add them for you. If you like zombies, go join a server with zombies. If you like close combat, go join a server with a tiny map. If you like IKEA missions, join a mission server. If you like PvE, go join a PvE server. You get the point We have also defined different difficulty levels. So if you feel the Bambi-Mode is too easy to survive, try the “Oh-My-Gosh-Mode”.

Tech-Stuff

Exile is based on extDB2 to connect to a MySQL server.
Our test server can run for days without a restart with 9000 construction parts ingame. There is no real construction limit known (yet).
The average server FPS is 47 so far.
Players have reported (up to three times) higher FPS than in other common mods.
Exile will not require a custom launcher.
Our client files will be approximately 200 MB in size.
We will not uglify or minify our code, so it will be easier to editors to understand what is going it.