June 14th 2019 by SDGNelson

Primarily item and equipped item (typically weapon) updates.

Summary Video

Tactical Attachments

Making the now-crowded attachments view not suck was trickier than expected. Since you can move around jumping and bobbing your weapon all over the place with this menu open, the angles leading to the item slots were not stable.

I experimented with several different approaches involving trying to group the slots together, but in the end a relatively simple solution worked best. The slots push each-other clockwise inserting spacing, then counter-clockwise, and then the average is used. Combining this with a few other techniques to keep the screen positions and angles stable turned out quite well.

Weapon Animations

Weapon animations have changed significantly over the past year. Initially while working on attachment changes last year there were separate animations for detaching, attaching, and a detach-attach combo. This might make sense for some future items, but was a lot more work to animate and keep consistent. Back then we still didn't have space-switching for animations either.

Now each equipped weapon can have its own dedicated animation blueprint which allows much more control over the blending and base pose, especially for weapon hand IK in the future. Creating the Eaglefire and Timberwolf reload animations was a lot of fun and quick to do with all the animation tools I've made over the past year, and now blend the detach and attach animations into a combination. Despite the item change being what triggers the animation, a notification partway through alerts the visual to swap to the new magazine.

Details Panel

With deep item hierarchies it was really confusing keeping track of where the item was, but now we have the new problem of extra-tall details panels. I somehow suspect this won't be the last we see of these changes.

Recoil

Last year I did some work on recoil patterns and control, and re-approaching it with fresh eyes was helpful to make useful changes. All the way back to 3 the recoil was configured as a series of pitch/yaw changes, but thinking about it this is not ideal for easily designing the shape of the pattern.

Now we control a clockwise angle the recoil will kick, and the magnitude of the kick. You can also see a preview of the pattern now in the editor (shown above), and in the future I'd like to support editing the pattern by interacting with the preview.

Next

It's looking like the next update to 3 will be on June 21st. Quite a few tasks have stacked up on the to-do list for that! As such, Devlog #024 should be someday mid-July.

Gameplay Change List

Usually for 3 I write the log as changes are made, but for this case I went through the commit history gathering the gameplay-related changes.