This week saw some new progression in re[Mod], but it also saw me come down with the flu, so my contributions this past week haven’t been quite as large as I would have hoped.

Redoing the Sniper Scope

There were some important improvements made, the first of which being that the sniper scope “aim-down-sights” effect was rewritten to use a screen overlay instead of the mediocre “move the gun to the center of the screen” that we were doing before. Initially, my plan was to essentially use a switch inside the WeaponPartScope script which would cover the different effect types, but I quickly found that that was not flexible enough, as different effect types would require different types of data and exposed variables.

The solution was to use a ScriptableObject type, and a plug-and-play type system where each scope had a reference to a different “type” of effect that it would call into when aim-down-sights was activated and deactivated. The benefits of this included:

• Separation of concerns. The “Scope” script just handles its own data and stats, the “Effect” script/object handles the effects.
• *Exposing more variables per effect without clutter. Moving the effect variables into separate objects allows each effect to expose its own variables without needing to display the variables for all the rest.
• *Ease of use. The base effect that the rest inherit from simply requires ActivateEffect() and DeactivateEffect() functions. Thus, it’s very easy to add new effects and customize them as future scopes need.

I was also able to take advantage of new Post-Processing stack’s flexibility. The newest (beta) version of Unity’s stack allows for the creation and modification of effects at runtime, which I took advantage of by using a rounded Vignette effect for the screen overlay of the scope.  I also wrote a new, simple effect called Quickfade which, provided a color and a time, fades the screen to that color through a shader and then back again when the appropriate call is made. This feels significantly cleaner than using a full-screen UI.Image would be and, though I haven’t profiled it, my hunch is that it’s more efficient as well even with the overhead of the Post-Processing stack.

Refactoring Bullets

The other major item that I spent time on this week was refactoring the hitscan bullets in re[Mod]. Previously, they were a real drain on our network resources, due to some “get it working as quickly as possible” decisions. Previously, this was the flow for a bullet:

• A local client makes a [Command] call to the server to fire their weapon.
• The server instantiates a projectile GameObject, which then immediately checks to see if it hits anything and applies damage if so.
• This GameObject then calls an RPC to play the correct audio snippet on each client depending on what happened.
• The server “spawns” the bullet on the network, and the local copies play the visual tracer effect.
• After 0.25 seconds, the server destroys the bullet on the network.

This has now been significantly refactored into the following:

• A local client makes a [Command] call to the server to fire their weapon.
• The server checks if this “type” of projectile needs to be network spawned or not. In the case of hitscan weapons, it does not. Accordingly:
• The server makes a static call to check if the projectile has hit anything and applies damage if so.
• This static call packs all of its relevant data (start position, end position, hit object) into a struct. These structs are collected into an array which are accumulated and then sent to all clients through a Message.
• On receiving the message, each client Instantiates a local GameObject which plays the appropriate visual and audio effect.

This is a massive improvement in network traffic which I am happy with. The only improvement from here is to change the Instantiate and Destroy calls into calls into the pre-existing GameObjectPool class that I have, which is something we’ll spend some time on a little further down the line. Still, when a project starts to get to this size, every little bit counts!