The US Army's recruiting software / free first person shooter America's Army, has been updated to version 2.8 (Coalition). This latest patch sees the debut of the AA Mission editor, mapping software built on the UnrealEd tools the devs use to create the official missions.

The GameArena AA servers have now been updated, so you'll need to patch to continue playing online. The full coalition install can be found here at a massive 2.6GB. Fortunately, for those with v2.7 already installed, there's an incremental update available, although it's still 250MB itself.

The U.S Army has rolled out another update for their free download first person shooter, America's Army. The extensive list of changes most notably includes two new multiplayer missions Dusk and Border and a new match-making server browser. Head on through to our files library for the complete list of changes and the download pages for both the v2.6 full install and the v2.6 upgrade from v2.5.

GameArena is happy to announce that we are now testing some official America's Army Honour servers. From the official site:

Honor forms the basis of America's Army's unique scoring system. It is modeled after the Army values (Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless-Service, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage or LeaDeRSHIP). This forms the basis of the rewards system in the game.

As your character progresses throughout the game, Honor increases and decreases based upon his actions and performance. Your Honor increases for choosing to be a leader during the match (squad leader, team leader), successfully accomplishing your team's goals or objectives, winning a mission, and avoiding ROE (Rules of Engagement) violations.

America's Army is a completely free game that you can download right here on GameArena. For more information and discussion on this new feature, please check out this thread in the America's Army messageboard.

Update: The Honour upgrade has apparently caused some problems; we've contacted the support team for the Honour system and we're awaiting their reply. Apologies about the inconvenience.

Update #2: It looks like we're getting somewhere now - our test server (GameArena ArmyOps #1) is now working correctly!

The GameArena ladders will restart tomorrow, Friday 22nd October at 12 noon. We have finally completed the integration of the ladder system into the new look and feel of the site and thanks to the great testing by the ET ladder folk, everything is go!

With that in mind, all ladders that were previously in Regulation play, will again be placed into regulation play tomorrow. All ladders that were in free-play will be placed back into free-play. Natural Selection and Desert Combat will shortly be shifting into regulation play, and its important to point out that DC will be using DC Final.

Again, thanks all for giving us the time to get the ladders integrated, and good luck to all the participants!