tl;dr - guns sound cooler, equipment actually does stuff now, dying and respawning is a thing, looting buildings is a thing
got around to updating all my sound classes and redid most of the weapon sounds in some way so they sound less like nerf guns and sound cooler, weapon sounds are all now properly specialized with a few variations for higher caliber weapons, ranging from 450-500m sound falloff all the way up to 800-900m sound falloff (players stop being relevant at roughly 1km and most objects have culled at that point)
i decided to have a lower overall view range because it will in turn help with atmosphere if what you can see at any one time is slightly limited, it will obviously help with performance, and it allows me to artificially "increase" the size of the island game map im currently working on, the map is 4x4km with 2m cell size so its scaled to 8x8km, however nearly 60% of that is ocean so the actual play space is much smaller then that, plus it is split into 2 main islands that have full topography thus much of that space is relegated to mountain / cliffs / beaches ect limiting the "useful" space even moreso, so far the map feels a healthy size running around testing traversal timing considering the player count aim is between 1-15 people total, i dont think my spaghetti coding will hold up with many more players then 15, if even 15. it holds up with 5 people and ive been hard committing to keeping anything that would seriously hurt performance to a minimum but its still mostly setup in blueprint since i cant c++ if my life was at stake, i have a few friends who can c++ however so if i can get other people on board eventually that may all change
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i did equipment stats that tie into damage applied by bullets / other projectiles which first deal damage based on body part hit then is modified by that body parts armor value to calculate final damage applied to players.
right now the character consists of head, chest, arms, and legs for hit regions and each modify damage differently.
headshot = 5x base damage
chest = 2x base damage
arms / legs = no bonus damage
then armor pieces (helmet, uniform, specialty slot - some kind of unique slot that isnt clothing TBD) will modify those values up to 50% reduction at max armor value for that specific region, the math isnt 100% since i havent thoroughly tested but in the end ideally a good helmet should stop 1 shot headshots from weapons of a lower caliber then medium tier rifles like 5.56 or 5.45 m4/aks, as an example. anything higher will still probably 1bang people in the head, later on i may go more indepth like if you are shot in the face compared to the helmet itself but this will suffice for now.
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i also started doing ui work and made a ui background for the inventory that ill copy the style for the rest of the ui elements in menus and whatnot, i actually couldnt come up with a decent design normally in 2d so i created the base design with 3d objects in a level and took a screenshot of that with gyazo lmao then brought it into gimp and ran filters and touched up the image alot, i have a fairly quick workflow once i get a screenshot of the objects so thats good for iterating