3 Commando Brigade

3cb Servers

Hello all, can someone give me a quick update as to what is going on with the clan servers at the moment. We seem to have switched from a popular public / private setup, with a concerted effort to limit the amount of mods we use, to two public servers that are barely used, a private, a dev server where most people are these days, a 3cb mod pack and ACRE, an incomplete beta medical system and TFR. I am not opposed to using any of these new mods, so this is not a gripe about ACRE over TFR, AGM vs CSE etc.., it is more to highlight that there does not seem to be any official announcements as to what is happening. I was looking to create an ALIVE map for the public as I have some time off work, but I have no idea what mod sets (apart from ALIVE) to use so I am reluctant to make a start as I don't want to waste time creating something only for us to bin a mod set in the near future.

Is there any chance of getting some clarification on the way forward?

That would be great.

Thanks. 

Indeed - Currently (and painfully) working on OP and would appreciate any heads up so I know what to accommodate for . 

This is my take on it, personal opinion only...

ArmA 3 is in a state of flux. It's still having new features added (fatigue, weapon sway, muzzle mechanics etc).
This causes mods to quickly go out of date / break / regularly change.
In particular the medical systems are extremely difficult to get right.
No one mod set has been universally accepted yet; people are still holding out psychologically for the magical ACE or ACRE's to be released, expecting them to be golden bullets.

Given these difficulties I don't believe it is currently possible to find a stable set of mods that are guaranteed not to change, even in the short term. This makes mission creation tricky to say the least.
Goodson is trying to get @3CB tied down with the Op Killwave trials (this week and again next week). Clearly a defined set of mods which don't change is what mission designers need, but I'm slightly pessimistic that this will be achieved during the next few months because of the reasons given above.

I have stated it before, but I believe we need a public server coordinator, in the same way that we have a private Ops coordinator. Without this coordination, we end up in the mess we have today.

From my perspective, I've been working on Capraia, and because it uses TFR and CSE, I didn't feel it could go on the public server, because it uses "non-approved" mods not on our mod page. Hence I put it on the DEV server for people to play with and see what they thought of TFR and CSE - it's been quite a bit more popular than I expected and has become the de-facto mission for the day. The DICE mission is also nice, but again requires a completely different mod set, hence it's not on PUBLIC either.

No one else has taken on the update/creation of the public server missions, probably because of the bugs in ACRE and AGM, and the feeling that we won't be using them for much longer anyway, so why waste the effort?

Summary
It's currently a difficult time for mission designers, but with very exciting prospects as the game matures.
Keep existing members happy and don't worry too much about recruitment until we have a more stable platform.

For now it appears we will be using the [3CB] Dev set of mods. The only mods that have been changed/replaced are ACRE and AGM.

AGM has proved to be very buggy for many (group switch issues, hud disappearing, crashes etc), whereas CSE appears to be more stable (although it still has its own bugs of course).

ACRE has been causing major issues for the last few ops we've had, so we've switched to TFR.

Everything else has remained the same. @3CB is not currently in use (has only been used for testing so far). Bottom line - use the [3CB] Dev mod setup for missions (for now, at least).

I hope this clears up some confusion.

I've seen news that ACRE 2 maybe being released next week.  That would be a huge step for us if it was.

The Public Server 1 (Modded) is now up and running ALiVE on Capraia.

Use the [3CB] Public Server 1 Repo which has been updated and includes CSE and TFR. We will be using these mods until something better comes along.

Our MODS page has been updated to reflect this.

The mods list also includes Reshmann and Namalsk maps. The intention is to convert existing missions from ACRE/AGM to TFR/CSE and run them in rotation on the public, plus anything else that is created using this mod set.

We made a pretty big break-through this evening when we discovered that initialization lines on player units within mission code were being executed incorrectly multiple times due to an unresolved bug in ArmA. On removing these code lines, all the crashes to desktop and missing name-tag/sthud issues stopped. In addition we were able to run without -nologs at high FPS and rather than getting 20Mb report files (.rpt) they were just 200kb! This is not to say that every problem with stability will have been cured, but it's certainly a massive step in the right direction.

The Dev Server (+Dev Repo) is now free for development and testing again.
The Private Server (+Private Repo) will be used for Mid-Week and Weekend Op's.

It was supposed to be an attempt at running a "vanilla" style public server, with  no mods required, and only ACRE/STHUD allowed. I think it's pretty safe to say that it's not been a success so far
The first true pubbie we got started griefing almost immediately xD

*mumble... grumble... get's no credit for finding the fix... mumble.. grumble...*

Yes, I'm not claiming credit.
Goodson is fully to blame for not telling us about it earlier.  ;-)

Feeling happy today.

Ah nicely done guys!