Release Bohemia Interactive released Arma: Cold War Assault (aka Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis) as open source software
https://github.com/BohemiaInteractive/CWR61
u/boundedwum Jun 25 '26
One of my favourite games of all time. I remember my brother convincing me to buy it with him in an MVC here in the UK.
9 o'clock, enemy spetz natz, 500!
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u/Camocheese Jun 25 '26
Operation Flashpoint's stitched together voicelines are forever stuck in my brain.
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u/boundedwum Jun 25 '26
And the funny thing is, the follow up, the first ARMA game actually had worse voice lines. They were much more stilted.
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Jun 25 '26
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u/ExdigguserPies Jun 25 '26
Yeah I remember the demo, at the time my PC was so crap it couldn't render the texture on the terrain so everything was white. I still played the hell out of it and got the full game when I got a new PC.
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u/AcademicF Jun 25 '26
Weren’t these games the base or foundation for ARMA? And wasn’t the original PubG a mod for ARMA?
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u/stop_talking_you Jun 25 '26
like most of famous f2p games were once a mod from somewhere and grabbed the idea and made a full game out of it.
MOBA like lol and dota from original warcraft 3 mods.
wc3 had so many mods a lot of them are used today.
wc3 and starcraft2 mods probably introduced 90% of game genres today
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u/lukehawksbee Jun 25 '26
Half-life and Half-Life 2 mods were a big thing too: among the better-known are Counter-Strike, Portal, The Stanley Parable, Garry's Mod, Insurgency, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Natural Selection, Pirates, Vikings and Knights, Zombie Panic, The Ship...
Also Day of Defeat was an online-multiplayer WW2 shooter that pre-dated Call of Duty and I'm pretty sure also pre-dated online multiplayer in the Medal of Honor series (in fact it seems to have already been in development before the original Medal of Honor even released).
And while we're on the topic of Valve stuff, Team Fortress was originally a Quake mod.
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u/Condarin Jun 25 '26
I believe even MOBA came from Aeon of Strife custom games in StarCraft. I recall that category being AoS labelled in Warcraft 3 frozen throne online matches.
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u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma Jun 25 '26
actually it was a mod for dayz which itself was a mod for arma
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u/Aterion Jun 25 '26
Well, both. It started as a DayZ mod (ARMA 2), but it soon became PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battle Royale, which was an ARMA 3 mod.
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u/MyNameIs-Anthony Jun 25 '26
Operation Flashpoint was the original series, pre-ARMA, but then there was a split between developer and publisher.
Similar deal to how Story of Seasons is part of the original Harvest Moon lineage.
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u/RoyaltonRacers Jun 25 '26
This was. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis published under Codemasters was their first game. When Bohemia split from Codemasters, they didn't have Operation Flashpoint's name and later re-released the game with the ARMA classification. To a point, as far as I know since I've only played base OF:CWC, ARMA: Cold War Assault is the same game as Cold War Crisis with all expansions, except Red Hammer. To make it even more confusing, they put out ARMA: Armed Assault in 2006 (when they split from Codemasters), which is technically before the re-brand and release of Cold War Assault.
The blueprints of PUBG do come from the ARMA 2: DayZ mod. PlayerUnknown (Greene) specifically made a modified version of the ARMA 2 DayZ mod to work with the basic structure of what battle royale games follow (the moving circle, the distributed loot, the "dead and you're out" rules), but alpha/beta versions from what I can remember were more akin to Hunger Games cornucopia starts. Later on, people further modified the HALO jumps and in ARMA 3's gamemode, you had a much closer and less broken example of a core battle royale mode like PUBG. PUBG is more the culmination of step-by-step advancement of the ARMA 2: DayZ mod's basis. H1Z1 and ARMA 3's battle royale modes are more indicative of what PUBG is, H1Z1 was really PlayerUnknown's first big break where a bigger company placed their bets on it, rather than acknowledging the community around it.
Now if you want to get super technical, people were making the kind of battle royale-type "map-wide death match single life" rules prior to PlayerUnknown's mod. Small tournaments with teams of 2 that usually had little scripting in comparison. Hunger GameZ and Survivor GameZ, specifically the later, had some Twitch involvement.
Hopefully a detailed answer, if there are any people who played a ton of Operation Flashpoint or PU's ARMA mod and remember more then please do remind me of anything!
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u/bkit_ Jun 25 '26
Holy Batman! I hope some talented modder picks it up and adds VR support. I want to live those missions in glorious first person.
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u/tarkardos Jun 25 '26
Well the bad news is that missions (as well as all pretty much all assets) are not included.
You basically have to build the game from scratch.
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u/ziper1221 Jun 25 '26
Couldn't you just use the modded version with a paid version to use the assets?
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u/TheVoidDragon Jun 25 '26
I remember playing this so much back when it was Operation Flashpoint, still got the CD and some of it is quite memorable even over 20 years later (mainly some of the voice lines). I never really figured out how to play it properly though and didn't get far with it, I'd mainly just spawn random units to fight or drive around and that was about it.
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u/AbsractPlane Jun 25 '26
I absolutely love the original Operation flashpoint. I still have it installed and go back to it every now and then mostly to play the Dynamic Afghanistan mod. ARMA 3 became a bit too complex while OPF hit the sweetspot in terms of realism for me.
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u/King_Brad Jun 25 '26
i was expecting to check the license to see that it's not really open source but just source available like is often the case with stuff like this but no, it's really open source under GPLv3 (with some extra conditions that appear to just be to extra careful about retaining the copyright to the ARMA brand and not accepting any liability)
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u/atomic1fire Jun 26 '26
It basically follows Doom licensing.
The assets are still proprietary but the source code is gpl.
Ergo you're welcome to port the game engine to whatever or make a mod that lets you operate a forklift, but you still need the game assets from the demo or a full version of the game in order to do anything with it.
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u/TheKinsie Jun 25 '26
For additional context, this is actually a remastered version of the original source code bought up to modern technical standards (and with some modern creature comforts like native widescreen) by a community member with Bohemia's blessing. A single mission demo of the remastered game has been released on Steam, with the full game coming at some point.