M.Ryan
-
Posts
3 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
M.Ryan's Achievements
1
Reputation
-
Enfusion Engine Bohemia Interactive has been talking lively about their up and coming game engine, Enfusion, that will be used by Bohemia for its newest releases. It looks to be one of the more capable and Next Gen TM game engines out there and allows for extensive community involvement. Enfusion combines the Real Virtuality and Enforce Engine, now allowing for modern graphics and a whole suite of modding tools integrated with the Engine. Mil-Sim & ArmA 3 Arma 3 is around 8 years old now and it inherited a rich Mil-Sim community from ArmA 2 and has been able to take Mil-Sim to the next level. Modding has exploded in Arma 3 to support and grow various Mil-Sim groups. Whether its private mods for Units to specialize their uniforms or weapons, or complete revolutionizing mods like those that provided for the emergence of the Star-Sim community of Arma 3. That is not to say that Arma 3 has been the perfect platform for large Mil-Sim communities or for extremely involved mods. Arma 3 itself is a game that can be very taxing on computer hardware and has not been built for easy to access modding. Yes, Arma Tools does exist, but many who attempt to get into Arma modding will confirm that it is a sharp learning curve. Mil-Sim units that have the community to host 60-100+ player Operations understand this limit all too well. They need to find the right mods for their Unit theme, and then sift through those mods for conflictions, or assets that cause server/client crashes. Following that, during the Operations, assets and units need to be watched and controlled for strain on the server or clients in range of the target area of engagement. Enfusion & the Future of Mil-Sim The Enfusion Engine looks to be the next big stepping stone for video games and especially for the Mil-Sim community of the Arma Franchise. Not only would a new entry in the Arma Franchise bring back many old members of the community and revitalize the scene with newer players, but the Enfusion Engine brings a lot more to the table. The Enfusion Engine and games made with it will have access to the Enfusion Workbench, the suite of tools available to those wishing to create and modify assets with the Enfusion Engine. The Workbench will allow for an explosion in the Arma modding community. It will allow for many more people to get into asset creation and texturing using the Workbench’s Texture Editor and other tools. These tools are available through the Engine and seem to be built for user accessibility and likely will allow for ease transfer into Enfusion Engine games. This leads into another reason why the Workbench will revolutionize Mil-Sim: Experienced Modders. Experienced Modders have long been able to make amazing mods using the Arma Tools applications and external applications such as Blender or Audacity. Now, with Enfusion’s Workbench suite, these experts can take less time maneuvering around Arma Tools and making assets the hard way, they will now have In-Engine utilities to allow them to take their old works into the new games as well as upping their modding game. All of this is the second greatest boon for the Mil-Sim community after the next Arma entry itself. All we can do is look on and wait, wait for Bohemia to release the next Arma Franchise Entry and to see how the Enfusion Workbench integrates in practice. The Arma Community and its dedicated Mil-Sim sect is brimming with excitement for a big new entry in the Franchise and especially for the Enfusion Engine. Mil-Sim may never be the same with the release of Arma 4 and Enfusion Workbench.
-
Enfusion Engine As of the beginning of 2022, Arma 3 will be over 8 years old and has been running on an engine that started when Bohemia released Operation Flashpoint and Real Virtuality is now in its 4th version. RV4 has allowed Bohemia to do a lot of amazing things with the Arma series but it has had its drawbacks. Its an old engine overall, and as some people can attest, Arma 3 and its modding community have been pushing the limits of RV4 for years now. Enfusion is where the potential for future Arma games is. Enfusion engine is not wholly a brand new engine like some may think at first glance. Enfusion is taking and modernizing assets from Bohemia’s two current game engines: the previously mention Real Virtuality Engine, and their Enforce Engine. Bohemia themselves claim that “It fuses the clear architecture, portability, and user friendliness of Enforce Engine with the scale, multiplayer capabilities, and simulation depth of the Real Virtuality Engine.” Enfusion Engine is the combination of the Enforce Engine and the Real Virtuality Engine Benefits of a New Engine Everybody has trouble running something in Arma 3, whether its somebody’s budget PC always needing to run at low graphics or 100+ man Units needing to restrict their server size and assets to protect not only the player’s PC’s from crashes but also the server box from overloading. Enfusion seems to be the solution to that, with Bohemia highlighting an increase in performance across numerous builds and console generations. That compounds on another selling point of Enfusion is that now with a modern engine, and from the images and clips released by Bohemia, texture and overall image fidelity and quality will be increasing almost exponentially to bring the company and its products up to modern graphics standards. High quality graphics of an asset rendered in the Enfusion Engine Likely the biggest boon of the introduction of the Enfusion Engine will be its moddability and user interface. For many, the Arma 3 modding scene may look like a hard nut to crack, and for some that is true. Arma 3 modding and asset creation largely requires that the Modder have a fair amount of experience with coding, texture creation, and even a complex bit about how computer files work. Not anymore. Enfusion Engine will come with multiple, in-depth mod creation tools that will allow even the layman to be able to create a simple mod for the future Enfusion Engine based games. Workbench The key to this ease of use for modders is The Enfusion Workbench. The Workbench is like Microsoft Office, it is a suite of tools and applications that tailor to a certain aspect of the engine where creators can build, customize, and export assets and more from the Workbench and almost seamlessly into the game it was built for. It comes with support for legacy content, it melds well with Blender and other asset applications that modders have been using for years now, supports plug-ins, and comes with a new Object-oriented scripting language that is “faster and more capable than SQF”. Part of the Enfusion Workbench, the Workbench editor is just one of the tools available to modders within the Enfusion Engine The Future Its safe to say that the Enfusion Engine is an ambitious project and has more than its fair share of potential to bring about a new Epoch of military simulation style video games, and others for that matter. All new things come with their quirks, bugs, and broken bits. But for those who have been playing Arma for a long time, and especially Arma 3 and how evolved the Arma 3 experience has become over its lifetime, The Enfusion Engine will be the breath of life that the series needs to become bigger than it ever has been, and may even pave the way for the future of gaming.
