Ok, so I have the basic restruc­tur­ing of the weapons con­tent and the first phase completed.

Here’s a shot of the full M4 with all of it’s var­i­ous com­po­nents linked in (using the sys­tem I described in Part 2):

Next on my list is the FN SCAR, which is the next-simplest on the list as it also uses the same rail sys­tem that the M4 does. After that I have to sep­a­rate the m203 and AR car­ry­ing han­dle so they can be added to the mod­u­lar attach­ments sys­tem. The SCAR uses a dif­fer­ent type of attach­able grenade launcher (the FN GL40 or Mk 13 Mod 0) but that’s sim­ple enough as well. Basi­cally each weapon will need a ‘white list’ of attach­ments, ie attach­ments that are sup­ported by the weapon, and when adding them from in-game, basi­cally do behind-the-scenes swap­ping of the dif­fer­ent grenade launch­ers, iron sights and so on that each weapon sup­ports. Luck­ily there’s not too many com­bi­na­tions so should be fairly straightforward.

Fun stuff ;}

So after a quick analy­sis of the exist­ing weapons mod­els that I have, here’s a quick break­down of what I have determined.

The con­cept of hav­ing mod­u­lar weapons is def­i­nitely the way to go — but it’s def­i­nitely going to take a bit of con­tent orga­ni­za­tion. For exam­ple, there are excel­lent com­po­nents in the SCAR and M4 mod­els that I have cur­rently, but I’ll have to break them apart and seper­ate them before I can make it truly reusable. This includes both the mesh com­po­nents them­selves as well as the textures.

After deter­min­ing that I do have some excel­lent reusable com­po­nents basi­cally ‘ready to go’, the next step is decid­ing what / how to orga­nize them into a reusable com­po­nent system.

(con­tinue reading…)

So now that I have the basics of the stats sys­tem for the Con­tent Browser imple­mented, I’ve been look­ing into the best way to man­age the 3d ‘pre­view’ of the var­i­ous weapons. This in turn has led me to research­ing / exper­i­ment­ing with the best way to han­dle such things as weapon attach­ments, includ­ing sights / front grips / stock replace­ments and so on.

(con­tinue reading…)

As I flesh out the pri­mary cam­paign game­play mode (and the rest of the high-level design) for C:SO, I’ve been throw­ing around the whole ‘coop’ idea. Adding coop is some­thing that I’m very inter­ested in doing with C:SO, how­ever the chal­lenge is deter­min­ing the best way to fac­tor this into the over­all design.

(con­tinue reading…)

Spot­ted a dis­cus­sion on the GameCore forums regard­ing a turn-based game, and men­tioned that the sim­ple RTS exper­i­ment that I’ve been work­ing on would be some­what of a start­ing point for devel­op­ing this.

(con­tinue reading…)