Taviana Island History

Some of the Mod history and background.
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Waffeleisen
Posts: 233
Joined: 31 Jul 2014 19:07

Taviana Island History

Post by Waffeleisen »

Hello survivors,

Taviana was made by Martin:

"Here's my story (Martin):

Taviana Island is the product of a very old dream which I had since 2003 when I first started playing Operation Flashpoint. I was fascinated by how much Operation Flashpoint reminds me of the place I come from, I remember I was playing the 1985 campaign; I was in the mission where David Armstrong is lost in the forest and has to get to Morton but gets captured by the resistance, anyway as I was playing that mission I came to the village of Figari where I found a old red Å*koda car, I used it to try and drive around a tank which was just below the village, the game lagged so much on my Pentium II machine that the tank never managed to hit me anyway, but as I was driving that car I just became so fascinated with how they made the game, so I went to an internet cafe (I didn’t have internet back then) and I looked around on Google and found this website called "OFP Base" where I downloaded lots of add-ons and tutorials and I began to learn how to make add-ons myself.

My first attempts at add-on making where probably some of the strangest work I've ever made but nevertheless I continued to get better and better. Over time I learned how to make my own islands and I got very addicted to island making. I had many dreams about what I could make but I couldn't put them together. So I focused on making add-ons instead.

Later in 2007 and 2008 when everyone played ArmA 1 I still played OFP because my PC was too slow for ArmA and so I started to make Taviana Island for OFP (Thanks to a guy called Hevoc100 for helping me think of the name), but as I worked on it I lost motivation because not many people played OFP anymore, it didn't look good like ArmA and I just never finished it. Finally when I got a PC that can handle ArmA 1 I noticed that I don’t like the game at all, only when ArmA 2 came out I found the same magic like I did in OFP and I decided not to let this opportunity slip away from me and I started to convert Taviana Island from OFP to ArmA 2, I also met a guy called Richard Thorne (The co-founder of Riptrough Studios), and because we can understand and work with each other so well, the progress we made on Taviana since then is remarkable.

And here's Richie's story (Richard):

I first started my "career" as a flash movie maker back in 2002 on a very old 97 PC. When movies, which I didn't finish because of constantly changing new ideas, seemed to have reached the boundaries, I discovered ActionScript and started to make games with flash. In 2004 friend showed me Operation Flashpoint and its mission maker which I really liked. In 2006 I started going to a programming school as after lesson activity. Since I didn't have internet at home, I used to check OFPEC (which still had that old OFP editor design) at programming. I really enjoyed making my own missions and playing them, but my game was Russian (although it said English in settings), so I found stringtable.csv and started translating the game to English looking at nothing, but variable names. It was my first, never published, addon which was done overnight.
Since the game my friend borrowed me was cracked (even though it was bought in the store), I was not able to update it or install any addons. In 2008 I bought a legal Game of The Year edition and fed it with addons till it crashed. Then I tried making my own addons.

In late 2009 early 2010 I met Martin, who was struggling to make a trolleybus addon work for Operation Flashpoint. I offered my help as a scripter, but later got myself into generating ideas and making some models. In 2010 whole Taviana project got ported to ArmA 2 and it was a big hit to me since I had a bad computer. But later that year I got myself a brand new PC and joined the project once again! I also started working on the trolleybus once again.

Since then the road to making Taviana Island was bumpy but we managed to pull it off and even make some new addons along the way, such as the Mi-15 and Screwdrive.

Thanks for reading, now sit back as we some screenshots of the making of Taviana! "

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