The History of Antistasi
Once upon a time Antistasi was created by Barbolani as a guerilla warfare simulator. To test his mission and to report the bugs the Official Antistasi Community was created.
It started very small with only 2 handful of people. Servers were rented at own costs, communication was done via TeamSpeak as well as the forum of the old homepage. Over the time the community also helped with the development but mostly under the oversight of Barbolani himself. This proved quite difficult at times because as we like to say “Barbolani works in mysterious ways”. This is by no way meant in any offence but due to the fact that he preferred to work alone and is not a professional coder (which makes the creation of Antistasi even more impressive), he developed Antistasi as a side project next to also having a busy life and a family to take care of. This led to him not being available for months.
During the periods of Barbolanis inactivity the community continued the development process. The first community driven development effort lasted from early 2017 to June 2018. This was largely done by people like Chris, RickyTan, Kendo, Jeroen, Sparker, StefArma, IrLED, AlexTriada, Sebastian and BeZZuBik41, to just name a few. During this time and building on top of Barbolanis version 1.2 they developed until they reached their Antistasi 1.8.x version. This version not only got rid of bugs and improved a lot of the AI, it also implemented famous systems like the Crazy Irish Man – a weapons dealer you could find – or the dynamic frontline which was indicated on the map, created roadblocks along it and also gave passive indication on what targets the AI could attack next. This dev team discontinued working on it in June 2018 and went different ways. Some remained in the community and even years later contributed code for the next dev team, some went on to form the team that developed the Arma 3 mod Vindicta, others just left. Wherever they all may be, we are grateful for their work and efforts as they pushed the boundaries of Antistasi, created a wonderful mission that literally thousands of people enjoyed and they certainly left us with a lot of ideas, impressions and thoughts that we still consider and work with in the current development of Antistasi.
The second and still ongoing community driven development effort started in May 2019 where after 8 months not hearing from Barbolani the need for bug fixes and adaptations grew so large that something had to be done. Due to the fact that Barbolani is from Spain, most of the variables used in Antistasi where Spanish, which of course made it hard for developers from all over the world to properly understand it. Hence over a period of 3 month the codebase of Barbolanis version 1.3 was translated. After that was done the first goals were to remove dependencies, fix critical bugs, increase stability and prevent frame drops and lag. This process went on for months in which a few versions were released. Over the time the dev team grew from just 2-3 people at the start to over 10. And this is not even including helpers, translators or else. The work shifted from hot-fixing game-breaking issues to implementing to features, factions and maps. There was space and time to properly rewrite complete systems instead of only patching the old ones. For most code that got added to Antistasi we had a 4-eye-principle, meaning that in the optimal case every single line got at least read and roughly checked by another dev. Luckily the Community by then also was in a partnership with Armahosts which provided and still provides multiple Arma 3 servers with headless clients as well as a large TeamSpeak server. This of course not only helped the community in terms of playing but also gave opportunity to test changes, pre-release-builds and more and helps with keeping the quality of Antistasi at a relatively high level.
Now, in late November of 2022, more than three and a half years after the start of the second community dev team, we are still active and shortly will release the Antistasi Mod. Up until now Antistasi always has been a mission, a scenario which could be played and which came with a lot of Arma 3 based limitations. But since the release of Antistasi 2.5.3 on the 11th October 2021, and in large parts even before that, we have been massively working on moving Antistasi from a mission to a mod as well as reworking major systems within Antistasi. This switch is not only giving us more freedom in terms of what we can do, but it also packs all different available maps into one Steam Workshop item, allows us to implement a save-game system, the ability to have multiple campaigns at the same time and way more. So, as you can see, the history of Antistasi is by no means linear but very branched out and intricate. And this is not even taking all the other versions into account that are out there like Antistasi Plus, Antistasi Ultimate or countless other versions that are either shared on the Steam Workshop or also the non-published ones that people play on their own servers.
But what also is very apparent is that the history of Antistasi is by no means at the end. With the move of Antistasi to a mod we also have integrated a system which gives outside developers the ability to create addons to the Official Antistasi mod. This way a creator could add a feature without the need to reinvent the wheel. We hope that many creators will use this system to create addons and enrich the gameplay or maybe even directly work with us to improve our systems and implement new ones.
As the last thing and whilst looking towards a bright future of Antistasi I would like to thank everybody that was or still is part of the Dev Team, all the Dev Helpers, the Template Helpers, the 29 Translators out of 12 countries that already translated and still are translating Antistasi into every language that is compatible with Arma 3, the Admins, Members and Guests of the Official Antistasi Community that we can harass with test builds, every external Developer and Player that gives feedback as well as Armahosts for the amazing partnership. Without all of you none of this would make fun or even be possible.
Thank you!
Bob Murphy - Dev Team Lead