Sliding towards the festive season…
Sadly not much “exciting” progress to report this month as the team have had a lot of real-life commitments taking priority over Ham and Jam. We did cross a few things off the list though…
First up, we got around to changing how we handle ammo for our weapons. Since day one we’ve had the “bucket of bullets” method from the default HL2 code which simply reloads the weapons magazine from the total number of bullets carried by the player. Obviously this doesn’t really represent how things work in real life so we’ve implemented a magazine/clip based system instead.
Theres a couple of interesting things with our implementation. First of all, it reloads the weapon with whichever of your magazines contains the most ammo. However the magazine your taking out of your weapon simply gets put back into your “webbing” as-is. This means that there is a good chance that if you live long enough to go through all your magazines, you’re eventually going to find yourself reloading your weapon with substantially less ammo than expected…
We also have a semi-realistic way of telling the player how much ammo is in the magazine. We decided that rather than give a precise number, we just give you a rough idea of how full or empty it is. Most soldiers get a gut-feeling for this sort of stuff and can usually tell roughly how much ammo is left by the weight of the magazine. This is the sort of feedback we’re trying to emulate.
Both of these features add some interesting gameplay. Do you do a tactical reload but risk having a half empty magazine when you might need a full one in the future? You’ve only got about half a belt of ammo left, but is that enough? It really puts a premium on managing your ammunition situation well.
Apart from the ammo system, we’ve made an effort to finalise the design for our HUD. We’ve had a lot of temporary elements just for testing but we’ve sat down and tried to come up with a design which doesn’t clutter the screen but gives you just the right ammout of feedback you need. There was a lot of debate and ideas thrown around and we still don’t know if what we have will be the final version, but at least it’s moving forward. Personally I think it looks great but these things are always subjective!
You may recall from previous updates that this summer I found some new information about Pegasus Bridge. Well after analysing and pouring over the new information, we’ve revisited our original sketches and altered a few things on our map. Most notably, the command bunker at the bridge is actually historically accurate now although probably not what you would normally expect a bunker to be…
So work continues, slowly but ever step is progress. We are a little concerned that when the Orange Box SDK codebase ships that porting to it may be a problem and we may have no choice but to do due to certain issues with SDK support from Valve. That said, we hope our “due dilligence” plan during our last code port makes it easier for us.
Finally, I’m constantly asked “how much is left to do?” which to be perfectly honest, I can never give an accurate answer. I did however give it some thought this month and I’d say right now we’re about 90% legal (i.e. all borrowed content is gone and everything is our own) and about 70% towards what we would consider being the first iteration of the game that would would release publically. Whether that would be as an alpha or beta I can’t say and likewise I don’t know how long it would take to finish that last 30%, but we’re trying.
