The Art and Science of Modular Weapons

So now that I have the basic con­tent orga­nized, I guess I do a bit of explain­ing as to how exactly the ‘mod­u­lar’ part of the sys­tem is designed.

Basi­cally instead of hav­ing a unique prop­er­ties file (OPR in GameCore-speak) for each weapon as a whole, the sys­tem is bro­ken up into lit­er­ally dozens of dif­fer­ent OPR / prop­er­ties files that are com­piled together on load (and even­tu­ally con­fig­ured at runtime).

So the weapon direc­tory struc­ture looks like this:

- weapons
– attach­ments
– mate­ri­als
– models

The attachment’s direc­tory has all of the assorted mod­els & opr files for the attach­ments. Each attach­ment is loaded & setup with it’s own prop­er­ties (OPR) file.

The mod­els direc­tory is what will store each of the base weapons them­selves (such as the M4 and the SCAR), and also con­tains a spe­cial OPR file that I’ve sim­ply called ‘modularweapons.opr’.

I guess it prob­a­bly would be sim­pler to just show you how things are structured:

What I’m doing (as you can see from the image above) is using a little-known trick in GameCore that allows you to ‘nest’ OPR prop­er­ties files. This allows me to mod­u­lar­ize each of the com­po­nents into their own lit­tle sub-system and com­pile them into the pri­mary weapons sys­tems on load.

As you can see from the above image, the modularweapons.opr file loads each of the attach­ments as seper­ate OPR files, and does some basic con­fig­u­ra­tion of which attach­ment is vis­i­ble or not (via the Edi­tO­b­ject property).

Then all I need to do in the main weapon prop­er­ties file (m4a1.opr in the exam­ple) is load the mod­u­lar weapons prop­er­ties file and it all just mag­i­cally works ;}

Each attach­ment (such as the flashlight.opr in the image) can have their own prop­er­ties (such as a light) or what­ever (remap­ping tex­tures if nec­es­sary, although I’m try­ing to go out of my way to make sure that all of the objects load with­out any warn­ings), and then for each addi­tional weapon that I cre­ate, I just load up the mod­u­lar weapons sys­tem and the attach­ments get added to the parent.

This way I can keep adding new attach­ments to the mod­u­lar weapons sys­tem and all of the var­i­ous weapons that use the attach­ments will update them­selves auto­mat­i­cally the next time they are loaded by the engine.

Pretty cool, no?

Related posts:

1. Mod­u­lar Weapons, updates
2. Con­tent Browser, Mod­u­lar Weapons, etc
3. Data-driven cus­tomizer