History of ACE (Armored Combat Extended)

This article was made specifically for people to understand the long story of ACE to have a complete view about the addon, it's community and the problems it has faced, as well as breaking down myths and theories. And also includes every important person to the ACE project, that has some sort of impact.

Origins (2015-2017)

By the late 2015-2017s, the original ACF project (later referred to as ACF-2 to distinguish it from newer iterations) had sadly fallen into a state of stagnation. Despite a dedicated community of players, there had been little in the way of major code updates, bug fixes.. Seeing this as an opportunity, a modder named RDC (Red Deadly Creeper) decided to create his own fork called ACE to revitalize and advance the aging project. Irritated with the stagnation of ACF2, RDC began work on a new addon.

What started as small balance changes for ACF2 quickly grew overnight into an extensive overhaul before RDC knew it. bringing modern armor and ammunition as well as equipment into ACF bringing it into the modern era. Always with the focus of improving the feel of combat and adding new technology. Composite was designed overnight. With great success. Though not entirely perfect. And RDC is still haunted by rubber in his dreams to this very day.

With the opening of its GitHub repository on September 4, 2018, ACE officially embarked on its journey towards redefining the landscape of armored combat within GMOD. Interestingly, prior to making ACE open source, RDC had already been playtesting it on a private server run by another server owner and a current ACE developer named Cheezus. This was the first server to ever host the early ACE modification, though it didn't last too long at the time due to conflicts between RDC's vision and the existing playerbase.

Around this same period in 2018, RDC also joined the popular AWM Builders server community, which had been using its own custom modded version of the original ACF, where he made a deal with server owners about them switching to ACE and being the main test server for many ACE changes, that RDC had planned to do.

Early Development and Community Building (2018-2020)

One of the first major additions RDC made to ACE was support for composite armor solutions, which had been a highly requested but unimplemented feature from the ACF community for years. He also greatly expanded the selection of available weapons, ammunition types, and engines to allow for far more realistic and contemporary armored vehicle designs. This finally gave players the ability to construct modern main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled guns and more, rather than being limited to the mid-20th century technologies of ACF-2.

These additions immediately attracted a lot of interest and praise from the AWM Builders community, who had always wanted more tools to build vehicles closer to their real-life counterparts. An early contributor named KemGus also joined around this time to help handle the growing community management and feedback gathering responsibilities, while also promoting ACE's installation on other servers.

However, RDC remained the primary driving force and took a very centralized approach to development. He preferred to work alone for long periods before releasing massively hyped "thematic" updates with many new features and overhauls implemented at once. There was little emphasis on incremental public releases, open collaboration, or clearing smaller bug backlogs during this era. While having github available for everyone and having the whole addon's source code on the list, the secret behind particular developing moves done by RDC was always there, only people close to him only knew the reasoning behind his decisions.

Throughout 2019 and 2020, the ACE project continued rapidly implementing RDC's personal vision of evolving and expanding the original ACF concept. A lot of new balancing decisions were made, that would seperate ACE from original ACF-2 and the fast arising ACF branch - ACF-3. A lot of tension has appeared within ACE and ACF-3 community, that would constantly argue about one's addon's state.

Crisis and Restructuring (2020-2021)

At the end of 2020, a crisis point was reached when RDC made the decision to step away from active development of the ACE project, due to the conflicts with some community members and being tired after falling into routine after so many years of work. KemGus, at the time, had a developer rank, although he wasn't coding much and he was the main person who made enjoy = routine, so neither of the contributors (a very small amount of people) liked it by the time, so KemGus decided to step off as a developer, going down to a contributor rank. With RDC's departure and KemGus having very limited coding ability, the future of ACE was thrown into jeopardy. KemGus recognized the precarious position and began searching for a new developer to take over the core leadership.

KemGus always been trying to find new opportunities to grow ACE's addon popularity, so it was a usual thing for him to go on different servers that used original ACF (ACF-2). So one day he found a spanish server that didn't have many players on, but the server owner was there. His name was Mr.Marty. He convinced Marty to switch to ACE and Marty liked that idea and very soon after switching to ACE, started to contribute to ACE with an actual code, not opinion or models like other contributors were doing. KemGus thought that it was an opportunity and managed to convince Marty to take on the role of developer and soon head developer. Under Marty's leadership from late 2020 through 2023, the development priorities for ACE underwent a significant shift. Rather than focusing primarily on adding new features, Marty refocused the team's efforts on improving overall code quality, fixing long-standing bugs and issues that had persisted for years, and increasing the stability and performance of the addon's core systems. This strategic decision paid off.

In addition to the technical work, Marty and KemGus also spearheaded a restructuring of the ACE project to make it a more open, community-driven effort. Decision-making processes were made more transparent, by making the roadmap public, with the reasoning behind key changes being clearly communicated. This opened the path for more external code contributions and a healthier environment for the ACE community to grow. So the wiki was created in the january of the same year, that dev team decided to promote a lot and has managed to

Gaining Popularity (2022-2023)

With a heavy emphasis on polish, refinement, and overall quality thanks to Marty's initiatives, ACE was able to have a successful wide public release on the Steam Workshop platform in 2022. Promotional videos showcasing ACE's capabilities were produced in coordination with the AWM Builders community, a long-time core user base. This concentrated marketing push helped drive substantial interest, with ACE being featured on Steam's trending addon list for a period.

ACE's popularity and active user base continued rapidly expanding. More and more people started to switch to using ACE from other frameworks (like ACF-2 and ACF-3) as well as new players started to come more frequently. This was arise of the media content done by the users as well as project itself, having significant growth in the users amount in discord, steam and servers, that used ACE as their primary/secondary addon.

By this time a new contributor named Cheezus appeared and slowly becoming developer after some time. Cheezus heavily contributed to stability of the project, aka fixing bugs, made a completely from scratch SWEP base framework, as well as established some quality control for the code, adding linter and making wiki pages for developer.

2024 Transition

In late 2023, a shocking development occurred when RDC, the original creator, suddenly returned to the ACE project after years of absence. However, RDC's vision was very different compared to Marty's one. So after ups and downs Marty ultimately made the difficult decision to step down from his lead developer role in early 2024. To help maintain stability and a clear direction for ACE moving forward after Marty's exit, KemGus took on an oversight role that he termed "CEO", though he emphasized that it doesn't mean that he would be single handedly controlling ACE direction, it would rather be a final word in any issues or so. He also aimed to create an environment that would allow Marty to continue making code contributions to ACE without being demotivated.

In communications reaffirming the transition plan, KemGus implored RDC, Marty, and others like Cheezus to have more empathy, be open to compromise, and stay focused on their shared passion for making ACE as great as possible - not get bogged down in "endless dick measuring contests." He emphasized that all former disputes or unilateral actions should be put aside, avoiding the assignment of blame.

Under the new structure, developers like RDC, Marty and Cheezus would work on ACE with the enjoy. It is also important to mention the part that in the late 2023 the developer team decided to open up dev chat to a chosen number of people that any developer thought could be useful with providing feedback. That allowed to bring more life into development as well as bringing more joy to the new contributors that have been very helpful last year with models and feedback, as well as developers themselves.

By early 2024, the project had amassed over 6,000 subscribers on the Steam Workshop, with that number steadily growing.

Relationship with ACF-2 Developer team

ACE started off at the time that original ACF had slowed down. There was never a conflict between RDC and the existing ACF contributors / developers. RDC used to be a part of the group of the original ACF developers and contributors. ACE used to get contributions from people like Ferv in the early stages of its development.

Confusion about ACE's state

It's important to start this long story with a small introduction. ACE was the first project that continued the work on the ACF, before any other project did like ACF-3. Despite confusion surrounding its identity in comparison to so called "ACF-2.5" and ACF-3, ACE garnered widespread acclaim and support from the user base. The reception of ACE underscored its unique value proposition and solidified its position as a standalone project with a dedicated following. As ACE continued to evolve, it became increasingly evident that it was not simply an extension of previous frameworks but a distinct entity with its own trajectory, history and community. From its inception, ACE set out to address specific shortcomings and introduce novel features not present in any previous iterations of ACF. Unlike ACF-3, which aimed to refine and optimize the existing codebase of ACF 2, ACE sought to push the boundaries of the existing code base and fixing it when necessary. So we believe that it is incorrect to call ACE ACF-2.5 or just an extension of the original ACF. It is also important to note, that nobody agreed with us regarding other projects having a "version number" after the name.

Important people

remember these people, as they've made the project better by contributing.

Winners of ACE Dupe Contest:

• Chiyo (Wiezel1a2, itpsv90)
• Doitsu (type90, cv90sc)

Winners of the content related contest 16.06.2024 So, the winners in categories are:

• Rebel with his awesome HL2 Sweps conversion to ACE SWEP base
• hideki for posting fun videos
• Doitsu Ryoku With his awesome as always namer ifv ⁠Namer 30 IFV (The good version)
• Firstgamerable and Maccnificient Mac With a good quality video content and server management