Originally designed as a random tactical mission for OCB, Patrol Operations evolved rapidly as a dynamic mission generator with random objectives designed for combined arms co-operative tactical game-play by larger groups of players.
The first version was developed in January 2011 for Arma 2 and was initially an adaption of the work by Bon_Inf* from his mission Takistan Force however. It was only available internally to OCB members on the tactical server and was not made available to the public.
After such a positive response from members, Patrol Operations 2 was released to the public in November 2011 after being overhauled to support better multi-player functionality and missions made more dynamic.
With the arrival of Arma 3, by November 2013 a huge volume of requests drove the release of Patrol Operations 3. The development was rushed and the framework was cut down due to bugs in the early versions of ARMA 3. As the game stabilised, Patrol Operations 3.1 was released with some expanded functionality, newer missions and bug fixes.
With the development of Patrol Operations 4 for Arma 3, the underlying mission framework has undergone a full re-write (again) to move to a simpler configuration setup. This increases single-player & multiplayer support seamlessly and allows more extensible mission options with full upgrades for the future. It also restores and adds many features that were removed in Patrol Ops 3.