Each published file is attributed with some text (name, description, tags), image and the owner sets up its visibility rights. When a creator wants to share his file, he uploads it using Publisher from Arma 3 Tools to Workshop. Let's talk about the details of the whole publish-subscribe loop here.

The continued development of the SteamWorks API by Valve might bring those in the future ( if any Valve employee is reading this: please, add a meta-data field into a published item data structure! ), but even if it doesn't, we're quite satisfied in how the Workshop implementation works in the back-end. In the end, we decided rather to focus on the game and accept some of the limitations of Steam Workshop, which includes a file-size limit and no meta-data available to handle dependencies and versioning. It became obvious that we didn't have the resources and experience, while the Workshop was a readily available solution.

Two years ago, we talked briefly about developing an in-house solution for sharing UGC as an alternative to Steam Workshop. We hope that addons in Workshop will work just as smoothly as scenarios did - maybe even better! Let's talk about the background to some of our decisions, some details of its implementation, and set out our future plans.Ĭonception to release: the gradual development of the Arma 3 Launcher UNDER THE HOOD Now, finally, we are gradually introducing Steam Workshop support for addons.

With Steam Workshop implementation, we aim to address both of these aspects at once.ĭuring our Public Beta, we tested Steam Workshop with scenario publishing and were glad to see that the community picked up on the new method of sharing, with thousands of custom scenarios published by Arma 3's launch last September. Therefore, content discovery and installation were identified as the key areas fit for improvement. How did we approach this? The ongoing support of content creators with script commands, tools and documentation had, of course, already played a huge part in our design process. User generated content (UGC) has always been at the heart of our series Arma 3 set a general goal to stay true to this original heritage while streamlining and improving usability.

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