There’s been a lot of great progress over the last couple of days; let’s start with the video:
Item Refactor
I did a big refactor of the item system. I started thinking about how easy it would be to cheat with the client trusting model I was using. Cheaters make everything harder than it needs to be. So now the item system is host authoritative; only the host can create items and all the clients must request item creation which will be validated by the host based on the circumstance.
Guns
There are now 4 guns in the game, I think it’ll stay at this amount until I get real, thematically correct, gun models. Here’s what we have:
USP – Pistol Archetype
Classic pistol, light but lacking in power. These will be the most common gun.
MP5 – SMG Archetype
Fast firing but eats up ammo, light weight considering it’s fire power. It uses pistol ammo and will be more common than any other stronger gun.
M4A1 – Rifle Archetype
Powerful, the bench mark for all other weapons. Will be somewhat uncommon; not everyone will get one.
SM4 – Shotgun Archetype
A powerful shotgun, excellent at close range but lacking at distance. Will be just about as uncommon as the M4A1.
Philosophy
I want powerful guns to be a bit more scarce than in the original Morbus, but I also want all guns to have some purpose; even a pistol should be able to kill a brood alien (if you get lucky and the brood alien is bad.)
Ammo
Minor in the grand scheme of things but ammo now works as intended (reloading uses ammo in your inventory.) You are limited by how much ammo of each type you’re allowed to carry, and if you drop your last gun that uses a specific type of ammo, you drop all your ammo with it.
Also we have a slick “in world” ammo counter.
Nametags
Items and players have nametags when you look at them. I’ve been playing around with how the effect works; you can see a bunch of iterations I made:
I was considering leaving it as the White/Transparent styling, but the ammo counter is that holographic effect so it seemed like I should keep it consistent instead of mixing styles. We’ll see how it pans out later, this isn’t supposed to be the final HUD.
So many little tweaks
I swear whenever i sit down to work on something i’ll find something else that doesn’t quite feel right and needs to be tweaked. There’s lots of little things like repositioning the player flashlights, or creating a world and a view flashlight based on if it’s your own flashlight or someone else’s, or fiddling with the player eye position, that are so small and insignificant that they don’t deserve sections to themselves.
I’ve also found ~5 bugs in S&Box in the past week which has been a bit annoying, but Github issues have been filed for all of them so hopefully they get sorted out. Whenever I find a bug I typically change my design and plans to not be impacted by the bug. It doesn’t feel great making something that isn’t right, and cannot be right for reasons out of my control.
Playtest?
My todo list is getting shorter until the next playtest, we need to finish the basic hud, add in dead bodies, a simple player list, voice chat, victory messages, and place some weapons.
Then, in theory, we could do a simple playtest to see if any of this will hold together under pressure.
The pace things are going is pretty good right now, if they keep up we’ll easily have our first playtest by the end of June.
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