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Ah, the holiday weekend! This is a time for rest, barbeque’s and for fun and drink. Maybe, if you are lucky enough your home is near a coast and you can enjoy the beach, or maybe just a calm weekend of camping out.

Alas, for me, I see oppurtunity to work! I know, it seems silly. It is a holiday. Why then am I not enjoying this time with my family? Well, the answer is that I will happily sacrafice this weekend for a promise of more to come. I have a self imposed deadline to meet to get this product done. I will push myself until I do.

So? was the sacrafice of this holiday worth it? Absolutely. I have finnished the all daunting firearms statistics. This was a bear. Yes, I had all my old notes to fall back on. But again, as I have said in previous entries, I have chosen to start from scratch here.

It was easier this time. I knew where all my research material was located. I also knew the structure of how everything would work together. What was different this time is something I overlooked last time. This was conversion formulas that could determine the recoil of firearms and formulas for finding energy from a bullet. In my last build of the game damage was largely determined by the size of the bullet, and the energy was guestimated based on the effective range of the weapon. I knew this was flawed, but it was close, and much closer than I think most people would have gone with it. So I was happy, and daunted, to find something more concrete to determine the mathmatics that would give us our damage statistic for these weapons.

 Let me tell you, this was no joke! To get an idea of what had to happen I’ll walk you through my steps, but I won’t give away the formulas (not yet anyways).

1. Determine the list of fireams I want, giving credit to popularity, common use, and variety in game.
2. Determine caliber (bullet type) and common load for each bullet.
3. Determine velocity, weight in grains of the bullet, and weight of the weapon (this last is detrimental to the recoil fo the weapon)
4. Next, we calculate the energy of the weapon.
5. Create a table of the ranges of the energy usedby grouping energy in aesculating range (300, 400, 500, etc) between the first and the next.
6. Next calculate diamiter of the shell and create another table much like the energy table.
7. Create base damage die based on the energy table, with modifier. Create a dmage modifier table based on diameter of the round.
8. Combine the results for each firearm. Then adjust this statistic based on range (short ranges mean the round wobbles more and creates more damage to the target).
9. Create a table of modifiers for round variations (full metal jacket, hollow point, etc.)
10. This give us damage. Next we check for recoil by calculating bullet weight in grains, velocity, and weight of the gun. Since gun designs that are developed to reduce recoil are harder to determine statistics on (because they are generally preference) we ignore these for now.
11. We determine the energy forced back on the firer, then we use a forumla of my own creation to determine the recoil modifier.
12. We adjust for clear definition of firearms characteristics that will adjust recoil (short grip for instance).
13. Check all weapons to make sure there is a good enough variety, that there are no clear “best” or “worse” weapons. Clear out any statistical duplicates and best/worse and add new guns in their place.
14. Take a nap.

And there you have it. All of this had to be developed before the weapons could be given their stats. Now that we have all of this, we create spreadsheets that will do the calculations and start plugging in numbers. Never one to put faith in a computer, I checked the calculations. All looks good. Are we done? Nope. Now we submit our stistics to some people I know who have real world experience shooting weapons in combat. Remember that combat fire is much different than target shooting, and game hunting. So we want to see what these soldiers have to say about the weapons we came up with.

So now I only have to wait. Small adjustments can be easily made if there are glaring issues. Of course some criticism will be more about opinion, which is fine.

And so, there you have it. We have now our firearms, and another difficult portion of the book in the done bin. Now on to the next phase.

One last note: Today is Memorial Day. Remember that our troops live and die for our freedoms. You do not need to support the wars they fight. However, you should always support your troops. They put it all on the line for you! Honor that. If you have a problem with the war, tell your congressman. If you know a soldier, or someone who served, thank them. I also challenge you to thank every police, fireman, and serviceman you see (stranger or not) and thank them for doing what they do. They never get enough of that, because almost everyone takes what they do for granted.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 9:49 am and is filed under Developer Blog, Modern Sagas Development Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.