Forensic Friday 36: Firearms Projectiles Galore
Welcome everyone to FF36! This week, we have more updates with firearms, building upon last weeks projectiles and bullets, a small sneak peak into the coming features, and a very interesting paragraph title! As said previously, there aren’t any anomaly poll winners for the time being as we try to juggle multiple responsibilities, but we hope you still like what you see! :D
Friendship ended with grants, prisoner is now best friend #
This may the first time a title is almost longer than the paragraph it headlines, but here we are. Grants are finished, all our development branches have been merged in as of yesterday, which now frees me up to start work on prisoners (expanded). In this sprint, the aim is to assign prisoners to cells, further build upon already existing prisoner moods to allow for brawls, misbehaving and general compliance, as well as expanding on gangs planning escapes, and confining prisoners to regions (which depending on their compliance, they won’t always listen to) . Exciting weeks lie ahead as we strive to keep up with the road map, but for now there’s nothing else to say on this. Hopefully, by next week there’s some cool features to showcase!
acquiring arms to fire firearms #
NPCs have acquired the arms to fire firearms! A tongue twister statement but over the past week we have been working on getting the little metal instruments of death into the hands of our NPCs. Currently there are no polished animations so the guns just awkwardly sit on the NPCs, but in the coming weeks expect NPCs to wield firearms like gun slinging cowboys.
Currently NPCs can equip firearms, place them into inventory space, and fire them. Firearms require magazines to function, which NPCs can reload. Currently this isn’t automatic but this will be coming soon. Though NPCs do currently do something automatically… unjam their weapons. Yes, you heard that right. Weapons have a chance of jamming depending on the reliability of the weapon. This chance is low, but in the case that it does happen, NPCs begin to unjam their weapon. This takes quite some time, depending on the shooting skill of the NPC; and can easily spell a swift death in the middle of a firefight.
Firearms fire ammo and hold magazines, and magazines hold ammo. The barrel length of firearms and the fuel burn rate of ammo is modelled to calculate the exit velocity of bullets when fired from firearms. So no bullet will behave the same! Other than that there hasn’t been much else additions other than a new combat module, which neatly segways into some refactors we worked on earlier in the week. But before we get onto that, here is a picture of an NPC holding a firearm below. Below that is also a diagram for some of the math for the aiming function we are using. It’s nothing too crazy really…
Some weird math to resolve aiming with inaccuracies
NPCs gone modular #
In the first half of the week, I began work on refactoring NPCs (hopefully for the last time!) We were starting to have a major issue with the NPCEntity script, which is the god script for all NPC logic. The issue was that is was a god script. Almost reaching 3000+ lines too :O, so I decided to finally take initiate and split the logic into separate detachable modules, which gives us a lot more freedom with the logic of NPCs. It allows us to disable certain behaviours such as social behaviours or mental system functions, which lets us model different types of NPCs like synths or anomalies etc. This has really helped freed up the possibilities with NPCs, whilst making them significantly easy to work on! What does this mean for the game? Faster progress! A welcome prospect! That’s all I can go into that without delving into the boring intricacies. You can see a list of all the modules we got going below:
Thats a lot! (っ °Д °;)っ
…As a complete aside, take a look at this weird NPC name? Harrison (lowercase F) ford Cozzi. What a wacky name!
Case Closed #
And with that, that’s another case closed! We’re one step closer to letting your NPCs commit war crimes under the banner of the greater good of containment! As usual, thanks for taking the time to read our weekly jargon and we’ll catch you all next week for more updates on our development.
This is @𝕋 𝔻 𝟛 𝟝 𝟘 taking a quick aside to talk some real talk. There is a possibility that we might need to take a break from the game entirely, for a month or two, to allow us time to work on our dissertations with full commitment. We aren’t entirely sure yet whether we will actually need to but for the sake of our mental health, trying to juggle both at the same time may prove detrimental. So, if we do end up taking an extended break, we hope you guys and gals understand our situation. Regardless, a month is not so long in the grand scheme of things, and now after working towards the roadmap for a few weeks, we are quite confident it is achievable. So taking a month break will still leave us with a predictable outcome in terms of the time the game releases! Anyways real talk over, I better let this case close for good. Ciao.
Thanks for reading,
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios