Atil Koçkar

I can chime in. It will be bespoke to each weapon's ammo. So, for example, when you're repooling a P4's ammunition, the ammunition that belongs to the other weapons will not be touched. It's for that weapon only. A couple of things to add here: right now, in the current iteration, you will be able to repool only if you actually have that weapon either in your hand or on your back. You saw the rummage animation in ISC, so you have the weapon in your hand. If you have it on your back, you will automatically unholster it. And if you don't have that weapon, you won't be able to repool. So that's the current situation. We'll see where we go from there, so please give us your feedback when you get your hands on it. One more point, actually, something that we didn't show in ISC but will be included in 3.23: you will be able to trigger repooling in the inventory UI. When you right-click on a magazine, you see the context menu, you will see the repool option there, and when you click that, the inventory UI will close and it will trigger the regular rummage animation. And similar goes for the loot UI as well. When you're in the loot UI and you hover over the weapon and press a hotkey in the same way, it will trigger repooling. So you will be able to trigger it from the menus as well.

Yes. It's actually going to work the same way. In the current iteration, all mags are subject to repooling, except for tools, so not the dedicated salvage tool at this point in time. All are the same. We have the mid-term, long-term idea which revolves around differentiating energy weapons from ballistic weapons by giving energy weapons some automatic ammo regeneration. But that's for the future. So for the time being, they will repool all the same.

So basically, for right now for 3.23, it's much easier for balancing and stuff to make sure that both ammo types will repool. But as Atil mentioned, we are talking about, when armor suits get the resource network, potentially looking into the idea of the ammo being able to trickle charge, because at the end of the day, the energy weapons are using batteries, right? So they don't have a physical capacity. And so the idea is that they might be able to slowly charge up. So there's obviously pros and cons to both, and that's how we are going to eventually differentiate them from ballistic. Ballistic may do more damage, heavy-hitting, but obviously it's limited by its capacity, right? And you need to reload and run out of bullets and repool, whereas laser, for example, doesn't have a drop-off, so it can travel much further. But then obviously we've got to think about overheating, and if it does overheat, it can also just recharge. You don't need to worry about running out of ammo per se. So currently right now it's the same, but eventually we are looking at ways we can differentiate the two different ammo types.

Yes, you will be able to cancel the reloading and repooling process, probably by sprinting and jumping. There's a list of actions which we can cancel repooling with, or which we cannot do while repooling. We already have the system, but I don't have the full list of actions in mind right now. But you will certainly be able to cancel that rummage animation.

Can you cancel other people reloading?

If you kill them; death is the ultimate cancel. Or knock them over, right?

Can you knock them over and it cancels their reload?

Force reactions will throw you out. That's the intention. If someone throws a grenade and you go flying, you're not going to be able to rummage through your backpack.

And if somebody's in the middle of reloading and I punch them in unarmed combat, will that interrupt?

Depends on how hard you punch them. If you knock them out, yeah.

Zach and I obviously spent a lot of time looking at what we've called an actions matrix, basically. We've looked at everything: jumping, crouching, proning, what actions are you doing whilst you're doing that. So we're definitely working through it. It's a big list, because if you try and think of every single action you're doing, then it's: do I reload, do I want to heal, do I want to holster? So it's a big list to get through, but we're working with engineers to basically decide exactly the game that we want to make, and where we want to give freedom to the player, and what actions are more punishable, like if you've committed to that, then you've got to finish the animation and so forth.

Yeah, an example from the action matrix work could be the MedPen, right? Obviously, it's very quick now. But if we were to make that MedPen process longer in the future, you might not be able to sprint out. You have to commit to it. On the design side, we can pick and choose where that goes. It goes a long way to making the game feel less clunky when you have more autonomy and control over your character and the movement and the feel of that. It's very important. It's where the word 'clunk' comes from, right? It's an indescribable feeling of, oh, this feels janky, this feels clunky. It typically comes from actions not working as you'd expect.

I think we've kind of already brushed on it, but I will just quickly say: we put so much work into our scopes, and we've got such a wide range of armor sets, and having, as Pascal mentioned, the armor sets completely block the vision, and then having to do that workaround, and making sure... Especially when you make a game for PC, you've got to think about different FOVs and different setups and how it will impact different players. So I think that's been a bit of a pain point, but I think the change that we're doing now, and eventually down the line, hopefully, the change we make later on, will really be so beneficial. So that would be my point.

Just to add on to that, obviously the biggest one for me personally is sprinting and general movement and how that feels. Sprinting is a prime example of one of the improvements that we're planning to make. When you run, the gun goes below the camera, there's not too much head shake and things like that. So the overall feel when you're sprinting, especially if you're on a planet, it doesn't ever feel like you're properly sprinting. Again, that ties into how much stamina that takes, because it's not too expensive or painful to sprint at the moment, and that plays into how much weapon sway you have. Some stuff I mentioned earlier: tracers, more obvious muzzle flashes, improvements to how we do medical gameplay, and some other stats we need on the weapons, like sprint-to-fire, which is a big one. At the moment, all the weapons use the same sprint-to-fire, which is a big reason why the P6LR was a very big offender in 3.22. And if you basically say, okay, cool, it actually takes you time to shift your LMG from the sprinting pose to the return pose, then LMGs are not as good in CQC. And we can make them slap incredibly hard over those 40-meter ranges, because the LMG person is already prepped. They're aiming at you, they will shred you. Because LMGs at the moment feel like assault rifles with big mags, where everyone uses LMGs. These are examples of things that we're looking at to say, hey, this is how we improve our weapon sandbox and overall get something where the weapon variety feels very intentional, just like we're doing with armor.

Pascal and Atil, I know these are the designers and they get to set a lot of direction, but as programmers, there's got to be some things that you want to get in there to really bring the experience up. What have you got?

Honestly, from my side, I have put a lot of focus on the clunkiness, and the biggest point I always had was that firing the weapon doesn't feel really smooth. And now we've worked on the recoil; that's the great thing about the procedural recoil, right? I did the tool, and Zach has to do all the work now, bringing in the recoil. So that's a nice benefit of being a programmer. I don't actually have to do the work. I just do a small bit and then Zach suffers. But this was, for me, the biggest gripe about our game. The HUD also was always a little bit not too clear to me. We're improving that as well with 3.23. And for now, we have all of these new improvements going in, and all of my biggest concerns have been answered or addressed, and I don't really know what I want to improve at this point in time. Obviously, when I play more, I will start picking up on the more minor annoyances and then want to improve those, until they eventually become a major annoyance for me. But for now, I'm way happier with 3.23 and don't really have anything that I must do.

Well, I'm going to mirror Pascal here. For example, the combat HUD was a really good addition, a really good improvement. Now we convey information way more accurately, and a lot more useful information, to the player. For example, from time to time we play Star Citizen in the office and I see the old UI, and when I'm working on this new HUD, the difference is unimaginable, really. And it's going to feel really different. And especially what the guys were working on with the recoil and the new scopes also made a difference. So probably this particular update brought a lot of things closer to our golden standard. I will probably get a more concrete opinion on how awesome we made things after a few more playtests, but it's really, really promising.

What a question. So the big thing I want is a slug shotgun, easily. It's my favorite weapon type in games. I absolutely love them. I also want an incredibly quick...

No, just one.

Okay, okay. Slug shotgun. That's what I'd take, hands down.

Probably a rocket launcher from one of the old-school shooters. That feels really good to use.

A chainsaw. That would be great.

Man, what a question. I would love some sort of gameplay kind of weapon. Maybe shoot a mini black hole and they all get sucked into the middle and then something happens. I'd love that. Something really out there.

There was a funny thing with Pascal's answer, actually, because he says chainsaw, the most Doom thing. When we were making the procedural recoil, when Pascal was testing it, he would always hip-fire the weapons and say, hey, look how cool this looks, because he basically only plays boomer shooters. So we were in a feedback loop of him making recoil purely from a hip-fire perspective, because obviously you can't ADS in a lot of boomer shooters.

You should see his test level.

It's E1M1 from the original Doom. It's not for the public, but I just took the map layout to learn our editor, right? I had to learn it at one point, and I know how E1M1 looks.