It has to be said, given that this is the first Christ­mas I’ve had a blog (kinda).

Sec­ond, I’ve got a few ideas going through my head to do with weapons (clips/magazines, in par­tic­u­lar) that I have to get writ­ten down some­where, so you lot get to see the idea first. Well, sec­ond, since I had it in the first place.

I still can’t decide whether I’m going to do clips the “right” way or the “quick” way — I’ve already done the quick way, so it’s not a ques­tion of which is eas­ier to imple­ment. I’m think­ing in terms of doing fun stuff like hav­ing clips with spe­cific ammu­ni­tion com­bi­na­tions (as set by the user, rather than the weapon), along the lines of tracer/AP/HE (think of that get­ting fired, 3 round burst, into a fuel tank — tracer makes sure you’re on tar­get, AP punches a hole, HE makes it go BOOM! Not allow­ing for devi­a­tion, recoil, etc.) I think it’s prob­a­bly too much work for too lit­tle ben­e­fit, but I also like the idea of hav­ing a burst for any occa­sion (soft tar­get, hard tar­get, any target).

I’m mostly recov­ered from the last 6 weeks of work, so there may be a new release by the end of the year — or at least, some new screen­shots. I’m still won­der­ing how I can make things even bet­ter with LibT­COD, so ini­tially we’ll see a basic port.

Long time no post… Here goes.

Spe­cial effects to add to the dam­age system:

• Bleed­ing — take one lethal dam­age every step you take. Removed if you ban­dage yourself.
• Con­cussed — take one stun dam­age every step you take. Removed if you use smelling salts (wakey wakey!)
• Blinded — reduce view radius (vari­able). Removed if you use eye drops.
• Burn­ing — explo­sive items (ammo, grenades, etc) can cook off, you take mas­sive dam­age every step. Very bad, lethal, basi­cally (don’t walk through that napalm) unless you’re wear­ing a fire suit.

Mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the dam­age system:

• Reduce crits and super­crits — they’re already pretty lethal any­way, so drop them to 1x and 1.5x respec­tively (this needs to be playtested — at the moment play­ers are pretty fragile)
• Bruise (stun) from armour soaked dam­age — you should still end up get­ting minor bruis­ing from get­ting shot. This is in con­junc­tion with…
• Stun dam­age no longer kills — when you run out of stun dam­age you no longer die, but bruis­ing will blow through to lethal dam­age (bro­ken bones, rather than bro­ken blood ves­sels). Fur­ther stun dam­age may cause you to black out (this is bad — you’ll basi­cally be knocked out for a period of time).

At some point I’ll be adding shot­guns, with spread based on range, but I’m not entirely sure how to han­dle it. My idea cur­rently revolves around giv­ing a fixed range spread/cone that rotates around the player, rather than the exist­ing line for nor­mal firearms. Of course, if you decide to fire solid slug, it’s like a nor­mal firearm, but buck­shot is a spe­cial case.

Dual pur­pose ammu­ni­tion — hit some­one wear­ing soft or no armour and it’s like get­ting hit by a dum-dum, but if you hit some­one wear­ing hard armour and it’s like AP.  Spe­cial­ist ammo will be more expensive.

More later.

PS: You know what? I for­got about the pets… Doh!