koobas.hobune.stream
Showing a dynamic amount of bullets in a Belt/Magazine/Cylinder
I’m just curious about how some games are able to show a dynamic number of bullets in a revolver cylinder, show the amount of bullets left in a belt, or accurately show the rounds remaining in a polymer magazine.
Some of the older games have machine guns with visible belts despite having 0 bullets left in the magazine. Or like in Black Ops 1 Revolvers are reloaded off screen so the cylinder isn’t visible.
How do video games accurately show the bullets left in a magazine/cylinder/belt? Is this effect scripted or is it a separate animation?
Do you mean how they show physically amount of bullets left? I think it's single animation. There is already reloading animation, so why don't extend it and create bigger one? It should be more accurate than "reparenting" game objects and move them with scripts. But it doesn't mean it's not possible. In my opinion there are two main reasons why something won't be done (in that case why developers creates simpler animations) in game:
Not enough time/money;
Optimization.
The first one is obvious. That's just a small part of the game, so it's not necessary to create complex, beautiful animations. $$anonymous$$oreover, every single bullet need to be drawn and properly handled (that can bring some bugs!), so definitely it will cost some GPU/CPU power. That was the case in older games where they have to think about every triangle at least twice. Now we have more possibilities.
So the answer is simple: some of the developers want to create complex animations and they have enough time/money and GPU time to do that :)
