What can you tell us about the Redstone Arsenal team that will continue to update and support the game?

Since 2005, the America 's Army development effort has been led by the talented team of software engineers, artists, and producers at the Software Engineering Directorate at Redstone Arsenal. The Software Engineering Directorate is an Army software lifecycle management center with extensive experience developing state-of-the art gaming applications for use within the government. Their designers and engineers have developed applications for customers from the Special Forces community to NY Police Department to NASA. The Redstone team led development and software integra tion for the Virtual Army Experience and the Army Experience Center which have proven extremely popular with the public. In anticipation of the release of America's Army 3, the team at Redstone has already completed much of the work on the next release of America's Army that in addition to adding Medics to the game will also add several multiplayer maps.

The game itself has had issues with the authentication servers getting overloaded with too many connections. What is being done to fix these issue?

The America's Army 3 game is designed to provide players a great deal of data regarding their performance, critical terrain in multiplayer maps, a new scoring system and the capability to update dynamic content on the fly. All of these aspects of the game are very data intensive. Based upon our testing of data transfer rates between the Beta version of America's Army 3 and our authentication and data servers as part of the FilePlanet open beta, we believed we had more than enough data processing and data server capacity in place to handle the launch of the Game. Clearly, our data server capacity was not sufficient to support the unprecedented demand and data transfer levels we have seen. Within moments of launching the Game, it became clear we needed to add server and data handling capacity. Therefore, we immediately began installing new servers in our data center, we added bandwidth and we undertook substantial tuning of our database systems. As we improved system performance, demand for the game consumed the capacity we created allowing more users to play but without any immediate improvement in system performance. To address this imbalance, we have created a data handling upgrade for the Game that will moderate data flows during the launch period. We expect to release this upgrade shortly via Steam and our Deploy Client so as to automatically upgrade AA3 installed on player computers. We expect this upgrade to significantly improve Game performance and our players' experience.
Finally many long time America 's Army players could understandably be concerned about the future support of America 's Army 3. What can you say about the US Army's commitment to supporting and updating the game as they have done in the past with the original game?

We established the America 's Army Project Office at Redstone Arsenal to institutionalize lessons learned early in the Project and set the stage for expanded use and support of the Game following the release of America 's Army 3. We expect to release content on Medic, Information Operations, and Mobility/Counter-mobility Soldier specialties over the coming quarters. The America 's Army 3 game embodies a host of powerful technologies which will allow us to deliver engaging Soldier experiences for years to come.