Contributing

Thank you for your interest in Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered, the Poseidon engine source tree. This repository is the community continuation of the official source release, and contributions are welcome here.

Repository Model

This repository builds on the source release published by Bohemia Interactive and is maintained by the community:

• Pull requests are welcome for fixes, portability work, tooling, tests, and documentation.
• Ideas and feature proposals are welcome in issues or discussions.
• Bug reports should describe the build or branch being tested and include clear reproduction steps.
• Changes must respect the license terms in LICENSE, including the additional Section 7 terms.

Branches And The Official Track

• main is the primary development branch. All community work lands here — bug fixes, ports, tooling, tests, renderer work, and larger feature efforts.

• official is a curated, conservative branch intended as a candidate base for a future official Bohemia Interactive Steam patch. It deliberately accepts only:

  • bug and crash fixes, and
  • quality-of-life improvements.

  It does not take new features, renderer changes, or gameplay/logic changes — anything that would alter the game's official behaviour stays on main.

• Maintainers decide which changes are ported to official and apply the port label; contributors do not need to request or assign it. Target main as usual.

Issues

Use GitHub issues for bugs, ideas, feature requests, and coordination work. Use the issue template when opening a report.

• Include the game version or commit, operating system, reproduction steps, expected behavior, and actual behavior.
• Do not report security vulnerabilities in public issues.

Pull Requests

Pull requests are welcome. Before opening one:

• keep the change focused and reviewable — its parts should reasonably belong together, and unrelated work should go in separate pull requests. A wider change that cannot be split cleanly can stay in one pull request as long as it is organized into focused, self-contained commits so a reviewer can follow it step by step,
• describe the problem being solved,
• include tests or manual verification notes when practical,
• avoid committing game data, proprietary assets, generated dependency trees, or local build outputs,
• make sure modified versions remain clearly marked as modified and are not presented as an official Bohemia Interactive product.

AI-assisted contributions are welcome. If you use an AI assistant:

• you are the author, not the tooling — commit metadata must credit you and no tool you used (an LLM or otherwise): no Co-Authored-By for a tool, no "Generated with …" trailer, and no AI mention in the commit message,
• review and tidy the diff before submitting — strip over-commenting (comments that restate the code, narrate history, or cite tickets/PRs), dead code, and unrelated churn, and match the surrounding style and comment density,
• hold everything you post to the same standard as the code — commit messages, documentation, and GitHub text (pull request and issue descriptions, comments, reviews) should be clean, focused, and free of AI boilerplate,
• do not run AI review bots or tools against this repository directly; their output tends to be noisy. Run them on your own fork first and submit only the reviewed result.

Community Development

Ports, experiments, tooling, source cleanup, bug fixes, and long-running feature work can be coordinated directly in this repository. Larger ideas are easiest to review when they start as an issue or discussion before a large pull request.

Licensing Of Contributions

The project source is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, with additional Section 7 terms in LICENSE.

By contributing source changes here, you agree that your contribution is provided under the same GPL-3.0-or-later license terms, including the additional Section 7 terms in LICENSE.

When working with forks or modified versions:

• source changes are governed by the same GPL-3.0-or-later terms, including the Section 7 additional terms,
• you do not grant or imply any right to use "ARMA" or any other Bohemia Interactive trademarks,
• modified versions must be marked as modified and must not be presented as the original program.