Springing into Action news - Firearms: Source mod for Half-Life 2

I'm still alive...

Well here we are again; it’s always such a pleasure. As everyone leaps, sprints, and solves their way through Portal 2, we developers have been doing the same (with development during our breaks, of course). Thankfully, we have now all beaten the game and are back to work on FAS 2.0. As you can see, we have a brand spanking new website developed by Adam Brzozowski and Ben Sholk, and a whole new branding courtesy of Brad Durham. We’re hard at work improving the quality of FAS on all fronts, ensuring that you guys will have an awesome experience upon release. Give the website a look around and check out all the new media and information available. For science.

We are working on quite a few big features with FAS simultaneously, so you can expect a lot of sweet updates in the future at a more consistent rate. With regards to game design, we have completely redesigned several features that didn’t work to their best capacity in 1.0, and added several new features that will make things more fluid and intuitive for 2.0. In the next series of updates, I will be discussing some of the major design changes and new developments with Firearms: Source. One thing that is already finalized for our big release is the*updated weapons list. Every weapon seen there will be featured in the next version, and any further additions to it will come in later updates.

The Armory

Before we began adding new weapons in the wake of FAS 1.0f, we first needed to break down the functions of our weapons and their roles in FAS. This ultimately led to us splitting the weapons into deeper, more specific subcategories than in previous versions of the game. Presently, we have created 3 new sections: Personal Defense Weapons (PDWs), Carbines, and Battle Rifles. As always, we have also added a lot of new weapons for our next release that will fill new niches and please many gun nuts, including some classic Firearms mainstays like the IMI UZI, MP5SD, Sterling (as seen in a previous update), and the much-beloved Dragunov SVD. You can view the full list of new firearms on our weapons page, along with explanations of the new categories and their roles, and weapon credit costs from our internal testing (subject to change through game balance). This bumps our grand total up to 50 distinct weapons.

UZI Weapon Showcase

Now we are on to the real meat of this update and are ready to show off one of our new weapons planned for release in 2.0: the IMI UZI. The UZI was a weapon used frequently in Firearms along with an attachable suppressor gained via the Stealth skill. Not to ruin this particular breed of underhanded fun, in Firearms: Source you can not only purchase a suppressor for your UZI just like old times, but also equip it with an aimpoint to shift its role from a strictly short-medium range submachine gun to more of a weaker miniature carbine.

You can see the UZI’s versatility, as well as its role as an ideal stealth weapon. It enables a player to quickly kill enemies in close quarters while loaded out with heavy armor. In the case of snipers, a quick smoke grenade allows you to close distance and take flank routes, as a protracted firefights at long range are not the weapon’s strong suit and would certainly end in disaster. However, you can easily sneak up on easy targets such as snipers, leaving them completely vulnerable to your stream of suppressed 9mm bullets.

Aiming to Please

You may have noticed in the UZI showcase video that, yes, ironsights have indeed been implemented and are planned for release in FAS 2.0. After hearing community members and newcomers alike continuously suggest the inclusion of ironsights, we took the idea to the drawing board with a goal of ensuring that the mechanic didn’t slow down or hinder FAS’s core gameplay. We feel we found a nice balance by allowing them to grant a slightly decreased fov, enabling players to focus on targets far away, but without granting any additional accuracy or reduced recoil. This means that those who prefer crosshairs can continue to use them with no competitive disadvantage, while those who prefer ironsights can use ironsights if they prefer the more immersive gameplay. For those who want a more traditional trade-off between accuracy and mobility with their ironsights, version 2.0 features an aimpoint attachment which when purchased decreases a weapon’s “unscoped” accuracy and increases it while “scoped”. We of course will be tweaking these values for the ideal balance, but that will come with gameplay testing.

Developers Wanted

The FAS team has a lot of new features planned and there is still quite a bit of content that needs to be developed before the next version is ready for release. We are looking for motivated developers who are interested in helping us complete Firearms: Source 2.0 and ready it for release on Steam. We are primarily interested in weapon animators, environment artists, particle artists, and level designers. If you are interested, please take a look at our Jobs page and submit your application. We look forward to the addition of new members to our team!

Finally, I am very happy that we have a new website and am eager to break it in. You all can expect more frequent updates from us in the future, since we will have plenty to show off. We are also still in closed internal testing, but we will let you all know when we are ready to move to public beta gameplay testing. Thanks for your patience.

Source: Firearms-source.com