v2.3 - AA

F (Q-Course) /Supposed to be fall 2004/
* Players who successfully complete SFAS during the summer and fall will advance to Special Forces Qualification Course (Q-Course) missions to explore new roles such as 18D – Medical Sergeant, 18B - Weapons Sergeant, 18C – Engineer Sergeant, 18E - Communications Sergeant, and 18F – Intelligence Sergeant. As players successfully complete each phase of the Q-Course they will gain new attributes and capabilities that will propigate across operational missions in America’s Army.[Dev]nXain wrote:
"Q-Course" is a major expansion focusing on the SF experience. It is due out in the fall of 2004.
[Dev]AceKilla
A couple of the maps for v2.3 are going to have some sweet urban combat.
[Dev]DJ-MonkeyBoy
Yes and we hope to improve the old ones. In the near future SF training of ODAs will be expanded. For example in Q-Course there is Language Training where players will learn critical components of the America's Army "OPFOR" (Opposing Force) language. Players will also go through SFAUC (Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat) training, which is modeled after actual Special shoot house environments. There is also SF Weapons Familiarization where players will learn how to employ new Special Forces weapons within the game.
[Dev]Cyan
Q-Course weapons. At E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) this last May, we unveiled the PDM (Pursuit Deterrent Munitions), Door Breacher and BDM (Bunker Defeating Munition). The PDM is a frag grenade that you can drop on the ground which sends out small trip-wires and detonates if anything moves through the proximity of the munition. When the PDM is triggered, it pops up about 5 feet in the air and detonates. These can be tripped with other grenades, bullets, M203 grenades and rockets. The Door Breacher consists of duct tape, det-cord (which is a tube of explosives) and fuses. The Door Breacher is taped to a door and automatically blows up after three seconds. There is a very small kill radius on the outside of the door where the Door Breacher is taped to it, but on the inside, there is a large arc referred to as a "cone of death". The BDM is modeled as a really large AT4 / RPG rocket and does about twice the damage. The BDM is not for use against human targets and will not benefit the player unless it is used against a destroyable wall or building. It will destroy walls or small buildings to gain access to areas that were previously blocked off and will add different routes to change the flow of gameplay but cannot be used to kill players.
- v2.4 - AA

F (Overmatch) /Supposed to be in Spring 2005/
* AI, driveable vehicles, heavy weapons, new gameplay elements.[Dev]nXain wrote:
"Overmatch" is a major expansion focusing on the SF's ability to control the battle space when faced with superior numbers of Opfor. It is scheduled for the spring of 2005.
[Dev]nXain
Our primary goal in designing the Overmatch release is to bring a taste of how the Army really fights battles into the game. Overmatch is about a group of well trained soldiers using their training and resources to dominate the battlefield despite being outnumbered in men or materials. Achieving this means taking a very different approach to creating the Overmatch levels than what we've done before and thinking of vehicles and heavy weapons as very important strategic resources that must be used intelligently. I'll put it another way... you don't want to loose your Humvee to enemy fire. It'll put a hurting on your ability to accomplish the mission, not to mention getting home after the battle.
We will not be following the current game design fad by loading up the game with all kinds of vehicles that you can jump in and instantly become a one man armor offensive. There are a lot of examples of that approach available right now in the marketplace (some of them very fun and some not so fun...) Overmatch will include vehicles and heavy weapons in a limited way that keeps the game infantry-centric for the players, offers mobility and access to items that can't normally be carried around, and expands the types of encounters players will have on the battlefield. You'll need this as the enemy will have some pretty heavy hitting weaponry on his side aimed at you.
In the long term (past Overmatch), I think it's fair to say one of the underlaying goals of the project is to continue to expand the battlefield playspace and to make it more and more represenative of the Army experience while keeping the game in tune with the realistic paradigm that has been successful for it so far. Since the Army has such incredible ability to be anywhere with whatever firepower it needs to fight and win, this is going to be an ongoing challenge for us devs.
[Dev]AceKilla
Expect to see several useable vehicles in 'Overmatch'. They will be designed to be as realistic as possible (yet still be fun) and their use in-game is designed to closely resemble the way the real U.S. Army uses these vehicles.
[Dev]blaster5k
Since Overmatch will offer a new mode of play, it's safe to assume that there will be new scenarios for you. What they will be, or how many, I'll leave it up to you to wonder about.
[Dev]skyhuntr
The SF variant of the HMMWV will appear in Overmatch in 2005.
[Dev]nXain
The Stryker will not go into the public of "America's Army" until after version 2.3, "Overmatch" (to be released next year.) That release will introduce heavy weapons and vehicles to the game. More infomation on future releases and included features will be released during development later this year. //NOTE: old post - shift it to 2.4//
Future Maps and Trainings:
- SF Blizzard, SF Extraction, SF Compound
- SF Hospital XE, SF Sandstorm XE ( ? XE - Random spawn points ? )
- SF SnG, Hanklin Live Fire Range, ? SF Water Treatment ?
- Language Training, Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat Training, SF Weapons Familiarization (Training in Q-Course)
Current beta version is 2.2.7.[Dev]Cyan
I have been working on a CQB (Close Quarter Battle) urban mission in my own time between maps I had to release for a couple of months now. It just recently became part of the next release, SF Q-Course and I am now getting art and code feature support from the rest of the guys on the team. The map is based in a foreign city in the middle of a factory-warehouse district. The Assault spawn out on the street and in the alleyways around the edges of the building they must Assault. The Defense spawn inside and must protect the objectives down in the lower levels of the building from the Assault. The setting is based at night, with the use of Nightvision Goggles. It has not been decided whether this will be SF-IF, SF Exclusive or Rangers. There is long distance advanced marksmen, close quarter room clearing and large outdoor gameplay included in this map. The BETA team is really enjoying it and have remarked that the community will love it.
Weapons:
- M4A1 Sopmod - laser, flashlight, thermal scope (ANPVS10), ? bayonett ?
[Dev]AceKilla wrote:
Unfortunately, you most likely not see the M4A1 SOPMOD side rail mods in this version of the game. However, they can likely show up in a future 'next gen' version of America's Army. We experimented with side rail mods for a while and we found that they were going to take a ton of development time to do right while not really doing that much for the player in-game.
- 3D-Ironsights for all weapons
- Remington 870 Shotgun, MP5SD6 & CZ-61 "Scorpion"[Dev]Kermit wrote:
We added some stuff for the MP5 awhile ago, as a test, but then decided against adding them - kind of like what happened with the shotgun. That's not to say we're never going to add the MP5 or the shotgun, just that we're not working on it now, so don't expect it in the next few releases.
- "Door Breacher" - explosive charge to open doors
- BDM - shoulder-fired bunker demolition muniton (no official statement)
- PDM mine (Pursuit Deterrent Ammunition)
- XM25 Air Burst Assault Weapon (AAFA - Future Application)
- Javelin - man-portable, shoulder-fired, anti-vehicle weapon (AAFA - Future Application)
- TALON Robot - all-terrain, all-weather, radio-controlled robot to destroy explosive devices (AAFA - Future Application)
Vehicles:
- Stryker, HMMWV
- Apache Helicopter
- ? Jeep & Bradley tank ? (found in the texture files)
- UH-60, FMTV and HMMT trucks
Jerry Heneghan wrote:
We are also adding FMTV and HMMT trucks. Our government applications will also soon have UH-60 helicopters for troop transport.
Tribnet.com wrote:
Chambers and Heneghan said their team is looking far down the road, beyond Special Forces, even beyond Stryker, to the next version of the game. They talk about many kinds of vehicles that could be included and smile slyly as they allude to aircraft.
- Single player componenet

hillip Bossant wrote:
We are seriously interested in making a single player and cooperative mode part of the America’s Army game. We have always felt that this would be a very natural and desirable addition to the game. They would certainly lend themselves well to communicating Army Values and provide players with a greater variation of game play objectives and styles. First we would have to implement a decent AI system of course but we are exploring this and would like to see these playing modes in future iterations of the game. The Overmatch release will feature our first advances in this area.
- Game Engine:[Dev]AceKilla
We are currently finishing up the laborious code merge to the UT2004 game engine (UE2.5 or UnrealEngine2.5). This new code base to America's Army will be debuted in v2.3 and will inherently bring with it game optimizations, bug fixes, new features, etc. For example, in our preliminary testing, in some cases we are seeing almost double the frame rates on some maps. During this code merge we are revisiting several of the games core components, i.e. the game's UI (user interface) is being totally rewritten. The minimum system specs for AA v2.3 will not increase and in fact the game will most likely run better on most systems than before. A little background on Epic Games Unreal Technology: We started the game using the UE2 (UnrealEngine2) which was unfinished at the time of the game's original development for AA v1.0. We then performed a code merge into the UT2003 code (which was an enhanced UE2) for AA v1.6. We are now integrating the game engine with the UT2004 code base (UE2.5) for AA v2.3. However, when we start development on the UE3 game engine, we will not 'merge' the code from this engine. We will have to start from scratch to build a new (and very improved) America's Army game.
If and when we build an America's Army game on the UE3 (UnrealEngine3) game engine - it will be a totally new game from scratch. That game engine is going to be far advanced of what we are currently using that you could not simply 'port' the game over to that engine. Yes, this will include all new textures, models, maps, etc.
- Dynamic Weather:[Dev]AceKilla
[Dev]Psychopod wrote:
The UT2k4 engine merge gives us Xemitters which will allow cool weather effects. We're working on implementing them now in certain maps.
[Dev]technoloG wrote:
That is a great question (re: dynamic weather). However, it would be sowe work to make it change each time you play.
- Improving 'Personal Jacket':[Dev]AceKilla
As developers we definitely want to explore integrating more 'RPG elements' into a First-Person Action game. The U.S. Army experience provides a great template for us to use in accomplishing this. The 'Honor System' was the beginning of this and we want to expand on that system. Eventually, we would like your game experience as a specific MOS in-game to closely mirror your experiences, skills, and responsibilities to your team as they are in the real Army. Due to the complex infrastructure that needs to be in place in the game code to support these features, most of these game features will most likely show up in our future 'next gen' versions of America's Army.
- Random Spawn + A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)[Dev]AceKilla
Random spawn points, random objectives, and even roaming AI civilians are all features on our wish list too. America's Army is not going anywhere, so I'm hopeful that these features will make it into the game at some point in the future.
- Bipod on edges:[Dev]AceKilla
Never say never....
Resting bipods on objects while standing or crouched is a feature we would love to see in the game too. It's not on the plate for v2.2, but that certainly doesn't mean it will never be in AA.
- Modding AA:[Dev]AceKilla
We have been discussing releasing the map editor for some time now. However, no final decisions have been made yet. We would like to release it eventually, but it must be handled with sensitivity to many issues. We need to make sure there are security features in place to help protect the U.S. Army from being 'officially' represented by user made content. We have some ideas on how this could be accomplished, but they need to be fully flushed out. If we did release the map editor, it might be released concurrently with a community map making contest - where maybe the winner's maps are made 'official'?
Phillip Bossant
This is something under consideration at the present and we all feel that this would be a positive development. There are many details to work out before such a thing could take place but we are exploring this possibility.
- Footprints:[Dev]Kermit
Actually, I think footprints would be pretty cool ;-)
We actually at one point started working on some code to add footprints, but it never got completely finished.
To be honest, footprints really wouldn't be that hard, and most systems really wouldn't suffer much performance penalty if we did add them...but there are a lot of cool little things that are like that, we can't do them all
- New branches:[Dev]DJ-MonkeyBoy
We have started some development on an integrated stats tracker; however with an entire back-end infrastructure necessary to support this feature, it will still be a while before this is totally implemented. As far as what we can track - that is really up to what we want to track as every single event in the game can be recorded and logged. From every shot fired to every objective taken. It simply becomes a matter of which events we want to parse out and display.
- Official Tracking System:[Dev]AceKilla
We have started some development on an integrated stats tracker; however with an entire back-end infrastructure necessary to support this feature, it will still be a while before this is totally implemented. As far as what we can track - that is really up to what we want to track as every single event in the game can be recorded and logged. From every shot fired to every objective taken. It simply becomes a matter of which events we want to parse out and display.