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Wait, did you work in the Orlando office? ;)

I worked with a guy at the Research Park in Central Florida who used to work for Bohemia Interactive (I forget on what). That's kind of funny, I remember him noting that it was a PITA to work with the Arma codebase.

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Yes, that was the the place, I was one of the first engineers in that office but we got up to about 50 full-time devs at the peak before they started getting moved over to Europe for lower cost labor.

It was a total PITA to work with but not due to the engine itself but some choices that were made over time to use IN CODE FEATURE SWITCHES since it was before git and branches. There were thousands of features added and controlled with statements like this:

#define ENABLE_FEATURE

#ifdef ENABLE_FEATURE // New feature implemented #else // Old code that is left around but probabbly won't work if the feature gets disabled #endif

Then multiply this choice by every...single...line...of code that had to be changed for one feature. It was nightmare until we could adopt and transition to Git with branches and clean it up.

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Hehe, yeah I'm not sure when John Stewart would have worked there or what the pain points were for him, but he worked there for a bit. I met him when we both worked for KeyW (which got bought out by Jacobs) back in 2017. I think Bohemia is still in Orlando, I met someone in 2021 ish that was trying to get me to apply to work there, but I had just become the tech lead for the eCommerce Platform at Red Lobster at the time so I passed on that suggestion, plus I was fully remote.

That does sound like a nightmare to work with, especially since there's a lot of context switching going on too. Too much mental overhead.

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The team is still there. BISim was sold to BAE Systems now and they go by OneArc (onearc.com).
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I discovered Arma 2 when I was around 12. Its insane how much content was created with the limitations of the game engine. I also got into SWE partly due to hacking together SQF scripts :)
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I'm a bit younger than you (started playing at ~17), but I attribute SQF in Arma 2 and Arma 3 being my gateway drug into SWE too :)
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