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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