Well this is the very very rough VTE future plan or release schedule so to speak.
Alpha Release - timeline unknown
- All units, vehicles (tanks/aircrafts) and weapons in.
- Most of the features in like vehicle scripts etc.
- OFP ports, several textures per model, etc.
Beta Release - timeline unknown
- Merged textures, 1 texture per model (goal, not always possible).
- Normal and Specular maps for all textures.
- All functionality for vehicle scripts and similar features.
- Possibly improved models.
- All models checked for proper LODs and techniques.
Final v1.0 - timeline unknown
- Vehicles and Weapons etc balanced for best gameplay.
- Features like scripts for vehicles etc fully working.
- All models with completely optimized condition.
- Minimum of arma.RPT errors.
First Release for ArmA 2 - timeline 2008 (or when ArmA 2 released).
- ArmA model / terrain ports to ArmA 2, what ever it means.
Thats the plan
Its bit difficult to put this subject into easily read format, I mean I know pretty much what I want with VTE/ArmA but its difficult to explain clearly. But the above four stages of development are at least providing basic undersanding what we must do.
At the moment we are in pre-alpha stage which I did not list there, I'm hoping that from this point on until unknown time we can add all missing vehicles/units/weapons in so we can have feature freeze for the real alpha release. After that we would have some breathing space until we start to develop the beta. The making of the beta would be mostly just working on the existing stuff, improving, tweaking, fixing and that sort of thing which I believe is bit easier not to break things while editing.
I guess if we make another list of stages which is even shorter, we could say that alpha is where all the shit is in but broken in so many ways its not funny, beta is where all the stuff starts to work properly and final is the last stage where all the stuff works as they should be and there are no bugs or nuisances anymore including modeling/texturing techniques used which cause stress to ArmA engine.
Feel free to ask questions or throw in suggestions.
