So lately I've been thinking about making assets for the Unity store, like a gun or something, but that's sort of boring right? So instead I've teamed up with dfacto (Martin Shapev) to work on a modular weapons system.
Martin is doing the concepts, and I feel like its progressing to the point where we can show it off.
^ This is roughly how it will work, plus attachments of course.
^ And a breakdown of the overall system, though a few bits have been tweaked since this image.
This is all Martin's work so far of course, next its my turn to do some blockouts.
Replies
Nothing to critic so far.
this is looking awesome!
Cept I thought BL1. Cause...Common. Bl1 was the shit.
Looking awesome guys! can't wait to see some Highs.
Haha yeah, but without that wonderful 2500 ingame vert limit or whatever it was.
I have no idea how well or if it will sell, the goal is really to make a system that is generic and flexible enough that it would have a wide market. I think this sort of system would work for someone who wants to build a single asset, someone who wants to add a modular weapon system for player customization, and also a random-drop type borderlands system. We've tried to design the guns so they could fit in modern realistic type shooters, and also near-future sci-fi type shooters as well. I feel like this covers a pretty wide range, but I'm worried that the whole concept will be too specific still to have that much interest.
As far as textures, I have a few ideas:
1. There are basically 4 variations of the main parts, so I could create 4 textures and fit all of the swappable parts in the same uv space (so all upper receivers in the same uv space). Then we could have some scripts that merge only the active parts into a unique texture. This would probably be best if you wanted to make singular assets. Though this system would also work (without the texture merging) in a multi-player type game where all of the variations would likely need to be loaded in memory anyway. This also makes baking/texture creation more manageable.
2. Give each swappable part its own unique texture. Then you only load what you need, but this would be real inefficient as far as draw calls go.
3. Put everything on a huge 4096 or something.... probably won't do this.
4. I could also group all like-type (ie all scopes) on a unique texture, though I'm not sure what sort of advantage this would bring.
I'm leaning towards #1, but I would love to hear any other suggestions on how to manage the texture content, as that is really the biggest technical hurdle we will have to deal with.
Nice suggestion, however I think we're going to try to limit it to the parts we have now for the most part, just to keep the workload manageable. Though I am going to try and make sure that we can add more assets to the system later.
The main sections (upper receive+barrel, lower+grip+mag, stock) will all have fixed positions and swap like you see in the gif. The underbarrel attachments, scopes, and muzzle/silecner will likely have specific positions tagged on each corresponding part for each variation (Similar to how the Brink system worked).
I think that should basically cover it, but if you spot any specific concerns there please feel free to let us know.
The SMG and Pistol variant will be limited in what can be attached (no underbarrel attachment for either, and no stock on the pistol).
Cool, thanks for the link! My first thought was actually to do a system based off of the AR system, but I wasn't sure if there would be a wide appeal there, and I wanted to do some unique concepts.
I was referring mainly to the micro level. Currently the concepts do not inform of the mechanics involved in mating all the different parts together. For example mating a different trigger assemblies to different receivers. What if I want to mate the trigger from the sniper rifle onto the pistol - what sorts of advantages and disadvantages would that present. I find such design challenges the most interesting part of this project. They also offer the opportunity to do cool cross section renders showing how all the parts interact with each other under the hood, so to speak.
It's mostly super glue, but some duct tape is also involved.
Ah yeah, I think these designs will require a bit of suspension of dis-belief when it comes to the ultra-realism of designing and modeling internals and making everything so that it would physically function in real life. This just isn't a design goal for us, and we feel that it adds certain restrictions that limit the ability to do some more creative and interesting combinations, like the very forward placed mag in the SMG lower.
We are concerned with making everything appear believable, ie: bullets come from mag at roughly the plane of the barrel and things like that, but not to the level of total mechanical workability.
We considered keeping the lower basically the same, and we could keep all of the ejection ports basically the same to solve these sort of issues, but then you really cut down on the uniqueness of the designs.
Also, we're letting you create a scoped-auto-silenced-sniper-shotgun, not a very realistic combination, so there is an element of tongue-in-cheak to the design as well. We welcome a bit of absurdity here.
yeah my only quibble is that i know dfacto can crank some way more interesting designs, but for the brief of doing some real nice modular pieces for the unity asset store? these are perfect, exactly as near-future-tech-generic as they ought to be.
Yeah totally, I think its a bit of a compromise, but I didn't want to do anything too crazy out there. Getting way ahead of myself knowing my own propensity for actually finishing personal projects, but if this works it would be cool to explore a full on crazy sci-fi set or something.
Subbed.