Blogue entry 2., MacGyver, eat your heart out.

This blog entry will be a little bit of an exposé on what I intend to do with weapons in USG, and also an update on the DirectX implementation of the game.

Something I've always been enthralled with in some games is the ability for the player to modify his environment to arbitrary extents. I spent a great deal of time as a kid playing The Incredible Machine (TIM), not completing the puzzles or challenges, rather making a huge and complex device for the purpose of firing a salvo of rockets at a cat in a box, or creating perpetual motion machines. 50% of the machines I constructed did nothing more than sit there totally inert, another 40% exploded spectacularly and the remainder actually did something resembling my desired effect.

The failures only amplified the joys of success.

It's in this vein of thought that I propose my weapon creation assembly system. I believe I've found a middle ground between the haphazard madness of TIM and the droll but accessible weapon mechanics found in most games. I plan to give the player the option to construct their own weapons.

Many games, often ones featuring contemporary weaponry, give the player the option of adding various attachments to their weapon. Scopes, silencers and the like. I plan to go beyond this mere customisation and give the player much more freedom in their weapon creation. The player will have access to components such as:

Grip and trigger,
Projectile chamber,
Battery,
Laser emitter,
Barrel,
Fusion core,
Magazine,
Explosive charge,
Proximity sensor,
Timer,
Scope,
Turret chassis.

The player, when at a gun bench (Either of his own or one rented from a faction or workshop), will be able to assemble these components into a device of their own design. The components will be coded such that there will be an obscured signaling system behind them. The player need not worry about the behind-the-scenes processes of his weapon, he should only need to know from common sense that a magazine attached to a timer won't result in something very useful. If the player so desired he could attach a Grip and Trigger to an explosive charge. Not really a weapon, per se.

If he wanted to create a cheap-and-nasty weapon he would attach a Grip and Trigger and a Magazine to a Projectile Chamber, essentially forming a Bolter. He could attach a grip and trigger to a timer, and then attach an explosive charge to the timer. The time delay set at the time of construction. The player has just created a grenade.

Each of these components will have different properties depending on the level of the object. For instance a low level battery may only hold 50 kilojoules of energy and when attached to a 5 kilojoule per shot laser chamber, would only result in 10 shots before the battery is discharged. A more powerful laser chamber would pack a bigger punch, but drain the battery more quickly.

The construction process will be presented to the player in an easy to understand, drag-and-drop arrangement. Components will clip together intuitively to form the whatever device the player sees fit to make. I hope this system will result in the player being able to customise their weaponry to suit their own style of play and allow their imagination to drive their experience directly.

The port to DirectX has taken longer than I had expected. Not because of difficulties in adapting the graphical systems to the new standard, but because I've gotten distracted with porting other pieces of code over to the new framework. I got carried away one night and ended up writing an entirely new entity system that I think will serve me very well later on. Don't worry, Zing is still in there.

I started work on the new map system in earnest today. I've added support for procedurally generated maps, even if I don't choose to go down that path in the future, it'd still be nice to have it there. Here's one of the first screenshots I took after I got the map system drawing as it did on the DS. Bear in mind the screen boundaries are all out of whack since this is running at 640x480, rather than the 256x192 the DS has. :þ



Thanks for reading. In my next update I hope to have a prototype of the weapon assembly system, or possibly a properly functioning map system. Maybe both!

--Scythe--

P.S. I couldn't end this blog entry without listing a few of my favourite weapon combinations:

A device built to resemble a gun except the magazine is replaced with an explosive charge. Leave it on the ground near an enemy and he may notice it and pick it up. You approach the enemy and he tries to shoot you. The gun and trigger sends the activation signal to the projectile chamber, which sends an activation signal to the explosive charge. Boom!

A knife with a scope and LAM attached. For super-accurate stabbing.

A rifle with a special high-tech scope that interfaces with your ocular implants to give you incredible accuracy. Requires a lot of high-level tech.

Worst blogue ever.

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