Devlog #7 — Guns from parts, and armour for your car

This round had two big builds running side by side: guns you build out of parts instead of picking up a finished rifle, and armour plating you can bolt onto your car. We also knocked out a batch of first-person bugs and got the first trees chopping.

Guns, built from parts

Every gun is going to be a platform you build, not a weapon you simply find whole. A gun is made of six parts — receiver, barrel, handguard, magazine, grip, and stock — plus optional extras like sights once their mount is fitted. Every part comes in three tiers:

• Scrap — homemade, cobbled together from whatever was lying around.
• Forged — rough makeshift work, welded up by someone who knew a bit more.
• Military — older, well-made factory parts.

Tiers mix freely, so you can end up with a gun that's half rusty pipe and half clean factory steel. Right-click a receiver and choose Modify, and a window opens with a live 3D preview where you swap parts in and see the gun change in front of you. Once every required part is fitted, the receiver becomes a working gun.

Part tier decides how the gun performs. Right now damage, range, accuracy, recoil, and magazine size all respond to which parts you've fitted — a Scrap magazine holds 20 rounds, for instance. Fire rate, aim speed, reload speed, and draw speed are designed to work the same way but aren't wired up yet.

The first platform built this way is the AK, split into its six parts across all three tiers. Untested so far: opening Modify from your actual inventory (right-click) rather than our test tools, and whether a gun you're holding actually shows the parts you fitted onto it.

What Scrap parts actually look like

We spent a lot of time making the cheap end of the AK look like it was actually built by someone with a welder and no patience. The Scrap receiver is a bent sheet-metal box, rusty, following the real AK's bevelled profile with a rolled-down rear end just like the original. It's got a hex-bolt standing in for the charging handle, wide hand-cut straps with drilled holes and rushed wire stitching holding it together, and scratches and chipped edges scattered at random angles so no two look quite the same.

The Scrap magazine is pieced together from sheet panels with jagged hacked seams, a patch plate welded over a weak spot, slanted wire wraps, and red electrical tape wound around a third of it. We also gave the Forged magazine its own look — worn steel with pitting, dents, and scratches — so the tiers read clearly apart from each other. Military parts stay as the clean, original factory parts they always were.

The new Scrap barrel is a length of plain pipe joined by a coupler to a thinner gas pipe, with a bent sheet-metal shroud strapped over both ends to hold it together. The front sight is cut from flat plate and lined up by eye with the rear notch.

Two small details on the receiver that we're pretty happy with: a fire selector knob with hand-scratched positions reading "no bang," "bang," and "ratatata," and a bent flat-bar mag release lever sitting in front of the trigger guard. Both are just for looks right now — the selector doesn't switch fire modes yet and the lever doesn't release the mag — but they sell the "built by hand" feeling.

Armour for your cars

The other big piece this round: armour plating for vehicles. Each plate is crafted from inch-thick steel and shaped to match a specific panel on a specific car — doors, bonnet, boot, front guards, rear quarters, windscreen, rear window, even the door windows. That's 16 separate plate spots on a car. Every plate has rough, torch-cut edges and looks like it was built from two or three pieces tack-welded and wire-stitched together before being bolted on. The window plates have vision slots cut into them, so you can both see and shoot through them.

To fit a plate, you carry it over to a car that's in complete working order — no missing doors or parts, not a wreck, engine running fine — and a see-through ghost shows you exactly where it goes before you bolt it on. Door, bonnet, and boot plates move with the part they're attached to, so they swing open and closed along with the car. Once a car is fully plated, it takes roughly a third of the damage it would otherwise take from guns and crashes, though the exact numbers are still being tuned.

Plates are now built and fitted in-game on ten of our thirteen cars — sedans, hatches, wagons, utes, the SUV, the sports car and the van. The ambulance, post van and one pickup still need their own pass. Crafting recipes for the plates haven't been added yet, and the damage reduction and the fitting process from your actual inventory are both still untested.

First-person fixes

A batch of annoying first-person bugs got cleaned up this round. You no longer see a double set of your own legs. Helmets, masks, and face coverings are hidden from your own view so they don't clutter the screen, and your upper body hides when you're aiming on foot so you don't get a second pair of hands in your way.

Your head now also stays hidden while you're driving, but shows up correctly again in the inventory preview so your character still looks right when you're checking your gear.

Trees you can chop

We also shipped the first version of tree chopping. Oaks, pines and spruce on the map can now be cut down — chopping drops logs, the tree falls with a creak and a thump (both pulled from free sound libraries), and the tree regrows over time. The main map got 15 forest patches planted across it, roughly 3,700 oak and pine trees in total, all with proper collision so you can't just walk through a trunk.

What's next

• Finish armour plates for the last three vehicles (ambulance, post van, pickup).
• Add crafting recipes for armour plates, and get real hands-on testing of fitting and damage reduction.
• Test the Modify window from a real inventory right-click, and confirm fitted parts actually show on the gun in your hands.
• Wire up fire rate, aim speed, reload speed, and draw speed to gun part tiers.
• Make the fire selector and mag release do something, not just look good.