This work is licensed under the Public License Share Alike

Across the Fence, a dynamic recon experience for individuals and teams of up to 6 players.

Inspired by the namesake book from RT Idaho One-Zero and SOG Prairie Fire adviser John “Tilt” Stryker Meyer, in Across the Fence you'll explore hostile NVA territory to investigate and locate enemy sites, before you try to extract safely and prepare for the next mission.

As you gain experience fighting the NVA, you'll develop your skills and abilities while gaining access to new weapons and equipment.

In order to streamline building, the project can be built as both a mission, and as a set of mods (client, server, mission)

This is facilitated by having a custom folder structure, which is compiled into the usual Arma folder structure by the build tools.

Currently, the client mod is not used.

The top-level folders are:

build - Build tooling

game - All gamemode files

mod - All mod-specific build files (mod.cpp, etc)

Within game, we have:

Binary assets, such as textures, models, sounds.

General-purpose configs. Broken down into client, mission and server. Each set of configs is only used in its respective PBO.

config_client.hpp, config_mission.hpp and config_server.hpp are the files that are #included in the relevant PBOs, any files added into the folders need to be included in their respective config_X.hpp file.

All functions, for both client and server. These are organised by functionality.

The way the build tool will eventually work when building as an addon is to search down, looking for client and server folders, and split them into their appropriate PBOs.

When building as a mission, all folders are simply copied into the mission.

One folder for each map the gamemode will be on. Each folder includes the mission.sqm, as well as description_map.inc which is included into description.ext and MapConfig, which contains map-specific config stored at missionConfigFile >> "MapConfig".

One PBO is produced per map.

The root of the mission PBO. Includes necessary mission skeleton files, as well as placeholders for files the build system will insret.

Within mod we have:

The client mod build files, including .hemtt config, mod.cpp and the base config.cpp for addons.

The server mod build files, including .hemtt config mod.cpp and the base config.cpp for addons.

Copy build/config.example.py to build/config.py, and edit the settings to point to folders on your local system. Copy build/arma_server.example.hpp to build/arma_server.hpp, and add your Steam64 ID to the admins section.

It's recommended to set the mission output folder to your Arma 3 profile's mpmissions folder.

• Python (3.12 or later, must be windows MSC python¹)
• HEMTT (On windows: winget hemtt)

The build will need running each time you update the gamemode. It will copy the files to the specified output directories, with the conventional Arma folder structure.

To build as a mission, run python3 build/run.py build. You likely want to add --overwrite to overwrite any existing files in the output folder.

The mission (in the output directory) can then be opened in the Arma editor, e.g using python3 build/run.py launch client --editor.

Most build commands accept the following options:

• --overwrite - Overwrites any existing files.
• --clean - Removes the existing folder (e.g mod output folders, mission folder)
• --version - Accepts a version in the format: v<version>@<hash> <text>, e.g v1.2.3@abcd indev. All components are optional, so @abcd indev is valid, as is v1.2.3 or just indev.

Internally, there are two steps to building as a mod:

• Copying the gamemode files into the correct folders (client mod, mission, server mod).
• Building the mods as PBOs using HEMTT.

To prepare the mod folders, run python3 build/run.py build --mod. This will output the raw mod files into output/mods. You can add --pack to then to run HEMTT and pack the mods into PBOs.

The PBOs can be found in .hemttout folder of the mod output path. Typically output/mods/@<mod_name>/.hemttout.

The build script provides commands for launching Arma for development:

• python3 build/run.py launch client - Launches the Arma client. Use --connect to connect to a local server, or --editor to launch straight into the mission in the editor.
• python3 build/run.py launch server - Launches the Arma dedicated server locally. Use --mod to automatically build and load the server mod.
• python3 build/run.py launch dev - Runs a development build, then launches the client and server (unless --no-client or --no-server is used). Use --mod to build and load the server mod.

The server commands will also:

• Set up filepatching using HEMTT
• Symlink the mission into the server's mpmissions folder
• Make the server automatically load the mission

For further details on build script commands, run python3 build/run.py --help.