Jonny Jacevicius · Tech Designer / Weapon DesignerYeah, so it's actually very similar to what we've been doing with the Items and Ships 2.0, and it's essentially making things easier for us going forward, making everything a lot more efficient, especially code side as well. And in the case of weapons, making bespoke setup much more of a thing of the past. So previously we were using our old XMLs; we're now moving over to DataForge. I'll give a little shout out to Torsten in Frankfurt, who's been working very hard on this for months. He's the coder who's been working on the system with me a lot.
Basically, we're avoiding bespoke setup on weapons now because there were cases where we wanted to make some really, really cool weapons for you guys, but we were really hampered by what we could do with our existing system. So we were very limited to: is it rapid fire, is it burst fire, is it single shot? And if we wanted to do something special, we would have to get a coder involved to jump in and do a bunch of work for us. Whereas now, as we go further down the line and we might start investigating some damage types and things that start to get a little bit more weird, we might want to have a lot more interesting behaviors on there.
The new setup, it's difficult for me to formulate how much it actually does into words. Now we can combine different fire modes in different ways. So the Custodian, as an example, is a weapon we've got live at the moment. And I think a lot of people know that in 3.1, a second fire mode might have slipped in. And that was because we were testing ready for Weapons 2.0, which is it always was planned to have a charged burst on the weapon. That was something we could never do previously, but now we can use a charge fire mode with a burst inside and we can do what we need to with the charge to make the burst better. So that's just an example of how robust the system is, in that we can do all of these strange things without needing code support anymore.
Specifically on FPS weapons, we're also looking at recoil. So we've been using our reasonably simple recoil system that we've got in our Mannequin editor at the moment. That's all being moved to DataForge as well. So it's a lot easier for people like me to use and edit live while I'm actually playing the game, so I can do a lot more fine tuning on there. And we're getting a lot more camera movement involved and everything to make the weapons feel a lot more punchy, because we've been listening to you guys and a lot of people think that we're not rough enough with the weapons. They don't feel punchy enough. So that was one of the things we took on board when we were redeveloping this stuff.
And one of the very big things for FPS is the attachment system. We really want to start pushing on that, and I'm not saying it's going to be coming anytime soon, but we've allowed for all of the stats on the weapons to be modifiable. So we can start to think about adding things like silencers, compensators, different scopes, and all this kind of thing that you can change in and out in your PMA, and you'll be able to see your weapon stats change and feel an effect on the weapon overall. So yeah, we're really leaving it open on the FPS side, basically for all of our systems going forward, so we've really future-proofed our system here.
Ship weapons specifically as well, we can do some new interesting things on there now that we've got Ship and Item 2.0, or it's currently in process like you say. We can now tie weapon behaviors a lot more into the heat and power system than they've ever been before. Previously we pretty much only really had: is the weapon on or off, or is it overheated. We can now take a look at how much power it's receiving and then curve the stats a certain amount. Like, oh, if it's only receiving half power, then it fires half as fast, it's only half as damaging and stuff like that. So we can even start investigating something like the hotter the weapon's running, the more damage it does or the faster it fires. So you're kind of skirting that line between overheating and reaching your max firepower.
So yeah, those are the main points that I really wanted to cover. I'm pretty excited about this going forwards and actually getting it into game, but I can't say when it's actually coming yet.