The global ammo count thingi is the ammo system used in most shooters made now a days, let’s say you have an M4 with 30 bullets in the clip and 90 in total, so 30/90. Let’s say you shoot 2 bullets and reload, you will end up with 30/88, shoot 5 more bullets and reload, 30/83. Where do all those magazines come from? So if you shoot once and reload till you’re out of ammo, you’ve probably used over one hundred magazines. That’s fine I guess for arcade shooters, but for my game I want to implement a magazine system where if you have 3 magazines, it cycles between them when you reload, so if you shoot 3 bullets out of a magazine that holds 15, when you reload, it will store that magazine in your inventory and look for a new one to reload, that one could be 15/15 or possibly 1/15. This is used in realistic shooters such as ARMA, Insurgency and even Battlefield 2 used this, but it doesn’t stop there!
I plan on making it more dynamic, by making it an interactive system, instead of drag/dropping bullets on the magazines in the inventory screen, you will equip the magazines and load the bullets yourself, 's the process explained a bit better:
- You pick up ammo (Different ammo types such as 9MM, .45, 2.23mm, 5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc)
- You pick up empty/full magazines using the ammo types as identification
- Magazines are treated like weapons, except you only equip them through the inventory only and once swapping weapons you won’t be able to access the magazine unless you equip it again from the inventory, preventing a massive weapon pool of utility “Weapons” (items)
- You equip the magazine, now, every time you “shoot”, you play an animation which has an anim notify exactly when the bullet is adding to the magazine, which calls the function AddAmmo(), which basically takes a bullet from that caliber type ammo pool in the inventory (Let’s say you have 45 individual bullets of 9mm and you’re loading a 15 capacity clip) and adds it to the magazine.
- Once you’re done, add the magazine to your inventory and fill another one, this is the same process with all guns except shotguns, which don’t use magazines (no usas or saigas lol)
Now you’re all probably asking, why make this a tedious process? Well for me personally I’ve never seen it in a video game and since I’m going for an old school hardcore survival approach, this will make you appreciate each shot more and make regearing sessions a bit more fun, nothing better than scavenging a massive building and gathering tons of bullets, just to spend the night back at the safehouse with your buddy storing the loot and packing up the magazines while it’s pitch black outside with strange noises heard in the distance. Adds more roleplaying to the game and makes it a bit tedious, which is good for this.
“What if I run out of bullets while scavenging/exploring?”
You shouldn’t be shooting in the first place lol, shots can be heard from afar and will attract every living/dead creature close to that location, guns are for extreme cases and for exploring high frequency areas, but the whole process of equipping the magazine and loading bullets is pretty quick, you can hide in a corner and pack up the bullets you picked up while scavenging.
I can go more indepth with actual pseudocode or real implementations if requested ^.^
And dual wielding I don’t think so :P, maybe wielding a flashlight/lighter/frequency meter and a 1handed melee weapon could be acceptable :P, but a horror game with dual wielding weapons is a big no no, especially for the vibe that I’m pushing for :P.