Weapon graphics galore news

I'm just writing a few lines to keep you up to date this weekend.

For those of you that haven't seen this yet I am now getting help from Iosif who is making weapon graphics for the game. And great weapon graphics indeed.

I have re-written most of the code for weapon rendering to make way for the new graphics and also to improve the visual quality by giving the weapons actual moving parts. Before this the animations were just a number of frames played in sequence. Now the moving parts are represented by actual textured objects in the game, and their movements are interpolated according to time rate. The new way saves texture memory and makes it all look much smoother. Newly written code also opens up for more interchangeable and optional parts like different grips and sights. Another new thing is that the weapons now will have two different side views while before they were just mirrored.

Here are some before and after comparisons. Not of the same weapon obviously:

The old UMP45 with discrete animation frames.

The new M4A1 with actual moving parts.

The M4 at the bottom is with the new changes and I think the movements look a lot smoother and the weapon itself looks a lot better.

Currently I'm tying up the last pieces of the new weapon code while I'm also working on an editor for creating new weapons from scratch. Once that is done I think there will be more new weapons to be seen in the next demo.

Here's an example of another new moving part. It's the M4's cocking handle. After firing the last round the bolt locks open, and if the player presses the trigger in this state the weapon must be cocked in order to re-arm the firing pin. The manual re-cocking looks like this:

Manually cocking the M4A1.

Finally another view of the M4 at a higher time rate:

M4A1 full auto.

At the moment I don't know when the next demo will be ready. I'm aiming to include the sniper mode I showed in a video earlier and the new weapons, but I think I will try to add some more technical/performance improvements as well. I'm not sure of which yet so stay tuned!