1 year of prototyping, 5 years of development of the mod and tools, 1 year since 0.1 alpha release
20 active team members from 14 countries, 80+ contributing in the past
26 repositories 8,000+ commits 500,000+ lines of code 50,000+ work hours invested by the team
No money involved, only donations to cover server and development costs
HOW IT ALL STARTED
Hi there. My name is Stefan Roos aka. 3ti65, and I'm the co-founder and project lead behind BF3: Reality Mod. I want to give you a brief overview on how the project came together and evolved over the past almost 6 years.
I've been always a big fan of the total conversion Battlefield 2 'Project Reality' mod and I had played it since version 0.5 (I was only about 14 years old back then). Ever since then, I had not experienced anything even remotely as immersive and exciting as PR. In terms of the community, coordinated teamplay, communication, tactics and strategy, there was nothing that came close to that experience.
Over the years, the game became rather antiquated and the quality of the community also declined quite a bit. With no modding tools provided to any Battlefield game after BF2142, there was no way to recreate the same experience on a more modern platform, and no commercial game was able to fill the spot to my satisfaction.
Back in 2015 I came across the BF3 modding platform Venice Unleashed, which back then was in its infancy and had just had its initial release. Seeing the (back then quite limited) modding possibilities, I wondered whether it would be possible to create a remake of Project Reality. I came across Mats Bakken aka. Powback and together we started throwing together different proof of concepts of how to change different gameplay aspects. We modified weapon handling, movement speed, etc. for almost a year before we decided it would be sufficient enough to actually get started with the implementation.
About that time, Fulgen Ruiz aka. FoolHen joined the team and together we pushed the implementation of our proof of concepts as well as a new UI and additional features. Ever since then the team grew steadily with new developers, designers, testers, etc. joining the team and contributing to the common vision. At the time of this writing, more than 70 volunteers from all over the world have contributed to this unique project in one way or another. We have overcome an incredible amount of obstacles together, be that from an engineering perspective or on a personal level.
We were forced to delay the release several times due to some gamebreaking issues and a functioning VoIP solution. After spending so much time on it, we felt that it would be an injustice to all our hard work to release the game in a unworthy state. In retrospect, we managed to use that additional time to a great affect, implementing additional features such as a sound system revamping, a dynamic weather system and a complete new gunshots and explosion suppression system.
All in all, the long work and the long wait for the players have been worth it in our opinion, but you'll be the judge on that with our upcoming initial release. If you want to join the team and contribute in any way, hit us up on our discord!
~ 3ti65