Firstly, I’d like to extend a warm “Welcome Back” to everyone joining us again for the new year. I hope everyone has managed to rest, relax and unwind over the holidays and is feeling absolutely ready to tackle what’s to come. For those only joining us now in the new year: Welcome to SAEF. I hope your stay is lengthy and enjoyable. As we’re now a few missions deep, I’d like to take a look at what we've established, and what we’re expecting for the year.

Missions

At the core of our focus, for obvious reasons, are our regularly scheduled Arma missions. We’ve already kicked off our first deployment (Separation Anxiety, as the Russian VDV), with approximately 9 more deployments in different theaters to come. We haven’t settled on the theaters for the rest of the year yet, so if you have an exciting idea, or a theater you’d like featured pop me (Angus) a message with the idea and I’ll add it to the list.

In terms of core missions, Fritz continues his loosely Ghost Recon inspired campaign as the Green Berets, we’ve been having some serious “classic Arma” fun with that one. I have just kicked off my first Campaign for the year “The End of the World”, which seems to have been taken quite well. In addition to that, we have our usual special missions to look forward to: the April Fools mission, the Halloween Special and the Christmas Special. Rest assured, I’m already conceiving the idea for Halloween this year…

Survey Feedback

For those that saw my feedback last year, I’m going to repeat myself a bit, feel free to skip over this section.

I would like to say a very big thank you to everyone who took part in the survey last year. I know that it's always difficult to make changes to what is considered routine, so the jump to spreadsheet and then shortly after to the website were likely very disruptive changes, and I’d like to apologize for the haphazard nature in which these changes were conducted. In the future for changes like these, we’ll establish a more formal process to get everyone moved across in a timely and smooth manner.

The response was pretty clear, the website is a push in the right direction, though there are a few things we still need to streamline in order to make the process as straightforward as possible. As we iterate through the design the aim will be to reduce the interactions by the user as far as possible, ideally making your slotting process as simple as it was to type "yay" in the announcements chat. That being said, the process thus far has already taken a large amount of admin away from the mission makers, and making their lives easier is a net win for all of us.

I would also like to thank everyone who gave additional suggestions to some of the website's functional questions, and a few things have been noted for future development. We'll make those features known as and when they're available for SAEF consumption, though there will be a few "shadow" patches that introduce soft functionality updates, which I have been doing since the initial release.

As always, when you see new functionality pop up, feel free to give feedback to me on how it feels and flows. The idea of this website is to make everyone’s lives easier and if something really grates your gears then let me know, and I’ll see what I can do about making that feature better.

Exciting Developments

Anybody following the conversation on “Gen Chat” over the Holidays would have noticed some talk about the Enfusion engine. Without going into too much detail, it’s Bohemia Interactive’s new game engine and it looks incredible. That coupled with the leaks for “Arma: Reforger”, we’re all very excited about the prospect of a new Arma game coming this year. While taking the news of “Arma: Reforger” with a grain of salt, it’s still something worth keeping an eye on this year.

Admin

Thankfully, there’s not too much to say in terms of admin. With regards to mod-sets, Modern has been left entirely unchanged and Historic has had a slight shift with the “Secret Weapons Redux” update on steam and the “IFA - Full Quality Texture” version releasing as well. Should give a nice shiny coat of paint to our Historic missions this year. We do not foresee any imminent changes to the mod-sets, so we should be at a point of stability for the next few months.

In conclusion, 2022 looks to be another promising year for SAEF. I hope each and every one of you has an excellent year, both within and outside of the context of SAEF.

- Angus 

PS: With Covid restrictions relaxing here in South Africa, we’ll look into setting up another SAEF braai sometime in Q4 2022.