The Anatomy of a Shot
The Ranger Unit prototype is officially up and running and we hope to be able to share some screenshots soon. As The Ranger Unit is a first person shooter at heart, one of the first things we had to implement was the shooting. At first thought this might seem like a fairly simple process e.g. press LMB, shoot. But that’s just the beginning, as you start to develop these “simple” ideas, you begin to realise just how much is needed. As we begin to flesh out the Design Doc (which will be covered in more detail, in future blog posts) we thought we’d look at this now, in hopes of demonstrating how something so simple can gain complexity very quickly and the importance of planning and designing what you’re doing.
Before we could even fire the first shot we needed a character and a gun. For now we’re using license free models, that are freely available online from sites such as TurboSquid. We decided early on to model the bullet flight/physics on real life data (a lot of shooters just draw a straight line from the gun, when the shoot button is pressed), so if you shoot straight up, that bullet will eventually drop back down to earth. This will also allow us to have ricocheting bullets but we haven’t decided whether we will do this or not as it could lead to some seemingly unfair deaths. Next we added collisions so we knew when the bullet hit something. To be able to test this we added decals to show the collision. We used a paintball gun and paint splatter for testing but then switched to a pistol and bullet hole decal. In the finished game we will have different materials which can react to a bullet in different ways e.g. glass shattering, for this we need a materials editor, to allow us to assign them accordingly. For now we only have one material type/reaction/decal though. With the above in we can now shoot in the prototype and see the end result but to take it forward we need to add a lot more: -
• Animation of the gun when firing – e.g. the hammer and slide moving appropriately
• Shell casing being ejected out of gun and hitting floor, plus sound effect.
• Recoil animation
• Reload animation
• Gunshot sound effect
• Bullet collision sound effect
• Muzzle flash graphical effect
• Smoke graphical effect
• Particle system for bullet collision graphical effects
Add several weapons and materials and you start to see the complexity involved and why games cost so much money to make. For now though, we have some basic shooting in our prototype and can start to move onto more interesting elements like creating a shooting range and being able to shoot other players via a network.
Now we’re into the prototyping phase we will probably update the dev blog slightly less often, to allow us to focus more on development. The next dev blog post will take a look at the basic Design Document. Over and out.
