Q: When will the extension appear?
ArmA: Queen's Gambit expansion is planed for the end of third quarter this year.
Q: Will there be a new island?
Yes, there will be a new island calle Porto. It's not very large but it's really nice tropical style island and we put a lot of effort to make it really useful long term contribution to ArmA that we hope will be very popular. It can fit very well between Sahrani and Rahmadi.
Q: Will the expansion add any new vehicles, if so which?
The addon brings very little on the vehicle side. Our plan is to have tools out ahead of the expansion pack and creating vehicles and weapons is something we feel the community will be very fast. While creating quality environment or larger campaigns is more difficult to achieve for hobbyist.
Q: How much will the addon cost?
This will depend very much on local publishers and distributors but I would estimate the price will be somewhere around half of the price of the original game. Currently, there's distribution secured for 505 game territories and Eastern Europe and it's yet to be seen about distribution in German speaking countries and North America. But it's also very likely that the expansion will apear on sprocketidea.com as paid download.
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Q: Is the Vista compatibility improved with the add-on ?
The expansion pack and Windows Vista compatibility is not directly related. Vista is quite young platform and ArmA is very unusual and demanding game due to its nature (the engine dynamically allocates on the go very large amount of data and reaches a lot of limits). Graphics card drivers are probably one of the main sources of problems in Vista OS but for now, Windows Vista is not officially supported platform for ArmA.
Q: Will players who did not purchase the add-on still get future patch support ?
This expansion is completely unrelated to patches.
Q: Will you release the linux server with the Queen's Gambit expansion, or before?
This addon is also completely unrelated to linux server which I hope is now very close beta stage.
Q: Will you release the editing toolset with the add-on, or before?
As mentioned before, tools time is very near (I know, finally, but we were overloaded by other work, esp. patch 1.08 was extremely big and demanding task for us), there's no relation to the expansion pack either.
Q: A lot of user complain about incompatibility due to the copy protection. Are there any plans to simply remove it with a future patch ?
It would be great move for us as a developer and also for users from technical and compatibility standpoint. But first, we need to convince all local publishers and distributors that it's good move for the game overall. I personally wish the time we can remove it comes as soon as possible but sometimes these things are complicated in business terms and it is hard to predicted how and when it will be possible. I can assure all users suffering with compatibility problems in the game or patches that my frustration is equal or even bigger than theirs. It's a true nightmare to spend countless hours working on a patch and see that some users than can't even run it properly due to newly introduced incompatibility of copyprotection wrapper we have to apply over the game engine.
Q: Are there any plans to stop cheaters in multiplayer games ?
First step is now in version 1.08 with addon signatures. There's more we plan to do on this side but I don't want to be any more specific.