Hi everyone!
We've been talking with a lot of communities recently about Mike Force, how they play and what they want to see in the future. We've been getting some fantastic feedback, and will be working to start building some of that into the gamemode in the coming weeks.
One common requests we've been having is: "Can I modify the mission? I want to add my own X". Up until now, we've not been allowing any changes to the gamemode in order to help maintain a healthy community. We want all of the people hosting Mike Force to keep up to date with the latest versions, and avoid a whole host of community variants so that players joining servers get the full experience, and can be sure they're not missing out on fixes and cool new features. That's a whole lot harder if there's a hundred different versions out there!
However, we also acknowledge that many communities want to make changes to the gamemode to better fit the style of their unit, or to provide instructions on how to access services such as teamspeak.
With that in mind, going forward, we'll be allowing people to make minor changes to Mike Force so long as those changes meet the following criteria:
- The changes must only be to the mission.sqm or a config file (.hpp, .inc, .ext). Code (.sqf) is totally off limits. That's because there's a high risk of communities accidentally breaking the mission, or making changes that will break future updates.
- No changes can be made to: The welcome screen, the version number or the authorship information.These are essential for communicating with players where they can get support, report issues and for us to know which version of the mission an issue exists in. Changes to these actively make fixing and improving the mission harder!
- The gamemode name must be kept in its current format, with the addition of an (modified by X)
section. For example, Mike Force (Beta v0.65.03) (modified by 2nd Cavalry)
.
- The mission must not be redistributed. Not via the steam workshop, or any other means external to Arma. We don't want to create confusion and fragmentation in the community.
- The mission must be kept up to date with the latest version on Steam.We don't want communities making custom changes, then staying on old versions of the mission out of convenience - we don't want players to be stuck on stale versions!
- Any bug reports should be accompanied by a list of changes to the mission, or a copy of the mission where possible.This is so we can avoid losing precious update time to chasing bugs that don't exist in our code!
That's it! We hope this makes it possible for communities to adapt the mission to their own needs, while also helping us keep the wider Mike Force community up to date, healthy and happy!
Enjoy the game!
The team at Savage Game Design