O.K. I admit the last news post was a joke, but it was true! I was in the middle of writing the up-date when I was invited down the pub and I thought it might give me some inspiration. :D Well at least you can’t say we’ve got our priorities wrong.

So lets got on with it…

Weapon System

I finalised the weapon code for rifles and machine guns over Xmas which now means they function as per our original design plan. Most of the effort was put into making the code as simple and portable as possible and from that we have two “foundation” weapon classes that all our other weapons are based on. This means we can add new rifle and machine gun weapons into our framework very rapidly with the bulk of the work being the modelling and animating.

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I was supposed to sit and write a news update but I got bored and went to the pub instead… :S

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.

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Summer is over, fall is upon us and unfortunately that means that things are slowing down a bit for us on the team. The autumn term is in full swing for those of us in full-time education which means a return to the books and less free time for modding.

We have however done some bits and pieces. The player models we showed last month are now going through final compiling to get them into the game as class based characters rather than the clone army we had before. We’ve also been experiementing with a individual visual rank on each players model but more on that at a later date.

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