Last time I mentioned that I was starting work on the AI system for NPCs. My goal was to have enough together to have little shoot-outs with the enemy AI, and that requires more of the weapons system to be fleshed out. So I decided to take a detour to figure out this smaller piece that has some overlap (e.g. MDL animation events and actions). I also want to start getting feedback from folks on the feel of the game, especially when it comes to something as integral to the core experience as the weapons.
I don’t want to require play testers to install Half-Life, and I don’t want to be in a position where I’m redistributing Valve’s assets, so I started tackling some placeholder assets. After a few tutorials, I was able to model and animate a hand holding something that resembles a revolver. After a short detour reverse engineering Blender’s .blend format and working around a bug in the GLTF exporter, I was able to import my new model into the nmdist engine. I slapped together some textures in GIMP and a small level in TrenchBroom, and I now have the base for future playtests. I’m hoping to build a small shooting gallery to test the weapons before moving on to shoot-outs with NPCs.
Here’s a quick demo:
I’m off to GDC! Until next time.