By Reto.Robotron3000, Community Manager & Game Designer
Multiple rifles, 2 pistols, 2 sub-machine guns, light machineguns, general purpose machineguns and heavy machineguns. Bazookas and a panzerfaust.
This reads like my wishlist for Christmas, but is actually what I am currently working on. In a FPS the guns are very very important, so I’ll try to explain a bit about how I work on balancing and tweaking them.
We decided from fairly early on, that we did not want to balance the weapons on a 1:1 mapping, where the only difference between the allies and the axis version of a weapon type was the graphics. We want a fun system where the weapons are suited for different tasks, and where it is a winning strategy to play together. So instead of balancing the MG42 and the M1919 machine guns and the Kar98K and M1 Garand rifles we are trying to balance ‘a squad of axis players’ versus ‘a squad of allied players’. This way we can let the different weapons keep their characteristics and ‘cool factor’ without having one weapon completely dominate gameplay.
To do this I have an array of tools at hand. First and foremost the weapons are setup in XSI where all their parameters can be adjusted.
“M1903 Springfield accuracy settings”
The above picture shows the settings available for adjusting the M1903 Springfield rifle’s accuracy. So to start out, I enter a set of values that hopefully makes some sense in relation to the other weapons.
Once I’ve gone through all weapons and setup default values, I start up a local version of the game running a ‘shooting range’ level where I can test how the different weapons perform. I also let loose a group of bots that simulate other players. Here is a screenshot from the ‘shooting range’ level.
“The beautiful sunset on the textureless shooting range”
When the game is running locally I use yet another tool to tweak values. This tool, called ‘the bandit’ is something we have developed in-house to help us tweak various values in the game while it is running. This way I can just launch one level and tweak all weapons from one place. Here is a screenshot of ‘the bandit’.
“Bandit comma Smokey and the”
In this screenshot, you can see that I’ve adjusted the left/right pull of the Recoil profile.
Once I am satisfied that everything works properly and feels balanced I’ll tell the engine to give me a ‘weapons dump’. The weapons dump is a file containing all the values from all the weapons that I can then import into a spreadsheet to plot graphs or do needed calculations.
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Really cool! I wish I knew how to code software to do this
That bandit tool is really handy whish I had something like that!
But wasn´t that M1903-A1 with 8x Unertl Scope only used by the marines in pacific?!? Afaik the army used the M1903-A4...or did I miss something and you added the pacific scenario aswell?