What Darren is working on Part 1
I've decided to write about what I've been working on lately - this turned out to be more than I originally envisioned so I have a series of posts about the things that I'm working on, broken down into these:
Here's Part 1.
Unreal Tournament 3 Weapons
Unreal Tournament 3 Weapon Releases
I recently updated my Assault Carbine and Weapon Arena Mutators PS3 versions to work with the 2.0 patch. I also released (PC only) a slight modification to Epic's DM-Darkmatch to make it, well, Lightmatch as some people on forums had mentioned they'd like to try playing the map with the lights on rather than off.
Bowgun Weapon
A user on the Epic Games forums posted a Youtube video of some Unreal Tournament (1999) weapons he'd like to see in UT3, it was mostly automatic bullet weapons which were a bit close to my Assault Carbine and some other things I'm working on for me to find them interesting but one thing did catch my eye - a crossbow that fired explosive bolts.
New ways of blowing people into gibs are always a good thing so I knocked up a model (which still needs unwrapping and texturing):
And then got to work on coding it. Here's a Youtube video of an older version showing how it works, but basically it's like having a Rocket Launcher with a magnifying scope that fires smaller and faster projectiles.
Youtube Link
After a great deal of back-and-forth with different settings for damage, damage radius, projectile speed, etcetera I reached a configuration I was happy with the balance of but it occurred to me this might not recreate what other people wanted. An explosive sniper crossbow doesn't really sound like it should be balanced and sometimes it's nice to give people a bit of choice so I set about making the weapon configurable.
What I ended up with was this mutator which allows the user to configure some weapon and projectile settings to suit what they want from it.
Now if someone wants the Bowgun to function as a Sniper Rifle that takes a little bit more skill to aim they can drop the damage radius to zero and bring the bolt speed up so it's closer to an instant hit weapon at reasonable ranges. If someone wants a mega-carnage weapon of doom they can ramp the damage, damage radius and bolt speed up and pull the fire interval down so you can't move for high-explosive bolts.
The mutator also allows an infinite ammo toggle for just the Bowgun (by making the ShotCost zero) and an Arena Mode toggle. With my past weapon releases I've included an Arena mutator (infinite ammo, no other weapons) and a Spawn mutator (replaces the Enforcer with the new weapon, no other changes) but now I have this one mutator that can do either of those things and more. If you toggle Arena Mode on but leave Infinite Ammo off you can only get ammo by stealing it from dead players. All of the settings (except the Arena Mode toggle) will always affect the weapon whether the mutator is active or not so you can configure the weapon with my mutator and then use the UT3 Weapon Replacement mutator to swap the Bowgun in for a weapon of your choice rather than spawning with it.
I'm going to start using this as my standard release mutator now (though not always with this level of weapon configuration), the only downside is configurable mutators don't work on PS3 so I'm going to have to stick to my old standard mutators for that platform.
Grenade Launcher Weapon
I've continued working on a newer version of my Grenade Launcher. The model now represents the XM307 automatic grenade launcher rather than the XM312 .50cal machine gun as it did before and is altogether a bit smoother and more detailed in some areas which were severely lacking before. I also spotted yesterday that the makers of Blacksite had made the same mistake backwards, their mounted machine guns have the muzzle of the XM307 automatic grenade launcher.
At the moment the next release, Beta 3, is going to use my iron sights system but there are a few niggles to work out before I can release. The bulk of the weapon combined with the arcing projectile makes it difficult to aim with in iron sights mode, so I'm working on a semi-transparent material that kicks in while aiming.
