So, guns have bones. Hell yeah! Now I can actually tell what’s going on when my guy waves his hands over my gun! Friggin’ awesome. Now, how else could 4.0 improve on 3.0’s weapon animations? Well…
I could go into reload mechanics like Insurgency Sandstorm’s (which I would absolutely LOVE to see in Unturned), but honestly, I think we need to take a step back before we get there, and just talk about reload animations.
In Unturned 3.0, weapon animations essentially worked like this: if the magazine still had rounds left, you’d simply perform the Reload animation. If the magazine was totally empty, you’d do the Reload animation, followed by the Hammer animation. This certainly worked, but it presented a number of issues.
Most noticeably, reloading while empty just looked…odd. You’d change magazines, go back to idle for a second, and then charge the magazine like “Oh shoot, I forgot to actually load the gun!”. Put like that, it’s almost humourous. It also brought up issues for specific weapons. The Schofield in particular suffered from this - from the reload animation, it would seem that the character loaded a stripper clip into the gun…while the bolt was still closed. This simply made no sense. For the Viper, Maschinengewehr, and Chimera, this presented a different issue - while you technically could just rack the bolt after inserting a new magazine, it wasn’t the recommended way to load these weapons. The “correct” way is to pull the bolt back, lock it up on the sort of…lip of the bolt?..change magazines, and unlock the bolt, usually with a nice hearty slap. In 3.0, this simply wasn’t possible due to how the animation worked.
So for this, I propose two solutions:
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(TL;DR: Just do it like a normal shooter. Seriously, I got way too in depth here.) Have separate Empty and Full reload animations, like…pretty much every modern shooter. These would be fully unique animations, though most would probably just have the Empty animation be a copy of the Full animation with a charging action of sorts at the end. Obviously for things like shotguns, revolvers (that don’t take speedloaders), or clip-fed rifles (that can’t just eject all the ammo still remaining in the weapon), this wouldn’t work so well, so they could get their own treatment. Shotgun and revolver reloads would be comprised of a few parts - Cycle In, Load Cycle, and Cycle Out. Cycle In and Cycle Out would essentially be transitions into and out of the loading cycle, and Load Cycle would be an animation of one round being loaded into the weapon repeated until the weapon was full loaded. For clip-fed rifles, they could either share this system but have a Clip In animation replace the Load Cycle if the weapon is loaded while empty, or they could be FORCED to reload only when the magazine is empty, kind of like CoD 2’s Lee Enfield (but without the 5 round reload (but I guess if he added a Lee Enfield he could just straight up do what CoD 2 did with its Lee Enfield…)).
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If you want to get REALLY specific, do what DICE did with BF1. Seriously, they went bloody insane with that game’s reloads. It’s genuinely enthralling. I’d imagine it’s just a more complicated #1, but I don’t care.
And yes, I understand there’s the whole “attachment changing” animations that the reloads currently use. I’d hope he could amend to truly let the reloads shine.
tl;dr: i wanna hk slap my mp5 god dammit
