Arma 2 Forward Compatibility

[Maruk]

ArmA 2 will be laregerly compatible with Armed Assault. To make porting of content from ArmA as simple as possible.

Currently, one of the most important things is:

* using of undefined variable in scripts (nil value) will be in ArmA 2 strictly reported as an error. All variables used in any scripts must be initialized before first use.

Reference: community.bistudio.com

[mrj-fin]

Nice to hear that means as the continuity is guarented and many mods team will stay loyal for this game.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Out of curiosity, Is using testing isNil against a variable to determine if it exists or not still fair game? I would assume that it is, but it's better to ask.

[Spooner]

Well, as this is the single thing that most often causes me bugs, specifically by mistyping a variable name and it just defaulting to nil, I'm really happy to have this appear in SQF, even if I have to wait for ArmA II. Many thanks!

Any chance of getting this patched into ArmA, where use of a keyword in a script turned ON this functionality? This was how it was done in Perl: if "use strict" was in a script then Perl would raise an error on an unrecognised variable, the default behaviour would be to just assume that it was nil (or the equivalent in Perl). OK, not seriously expecting you to do this, but it would be great if you could.

A question for clarification: If you private a variable, but don't assign to it, does it default to nil or would dereferencing such a variable also be an error?

[UNN]

Out of curiosity, Is using testing isNil against a variable to determine if it exists or not still fair game? *I would assume that it is, but it's better to ask.

Yeah, it is a little confusing. I'm assuming he means that commands that try and reference undeclared variables will now return an error, rather than returning the the variable type the command expected.

For example:

_IsAlive=Alive NOSUCHOBJECT;

Hint Format ["Is Alive %1",_IsAlive];

At the moment the above code would not return an error and the hint would display the value bool.

[sbsmac]

ArmA 2 will be laregerly compatible with Armed Assault.

This is very reassuring - I'd been wondering whether the effort I've been putting into scripting lately was going to be wasted but this says otherwise.

[Hoot1988]

on behalf of the community i must say thank you Maruk. was wondering when the compatibility with arma2 discussions would come up.

[Sickboy]

Great News and thanks for keeping us updated Maruk!

[CrashDome]

I second that comment!

[bravo 6]

Very good news! Thank you Team!

So all the work made or still to be made or even in development can be used in ARMA2.

Go Team!