Greetings Wardens

In this update, we wanted to show off in video format the work done now to the new Ship HUD with all the weapon groupings and individual weapon ready status.

Weapons HUD Video

Lead Developer – Kamikaze walks us through all the latest implemented HUD work such as the Speed Indicators, Weapon Ready Status Dots, and the Weapon Groupings.

We explained a bit of the layout of the HUD and what was designed for it in this previous update – https://solarwardengame.com/dev-update-new-ship-hud/

Weapon Grouping display coming soon™

We were hoping to get the detailed Weapon Grouping display finished for this week’s update, but alas we underestimated the issues we required in making the custom weapon grouping work in the first place. The short version of what was needed was a bit of a refactor when it comes to the weapons that get equipped onto Ships. Unfortunately it seems like Unreal doesn’t allow you to see nested Child Actors’ default values and edit them easily, which means that we had major difficulty when it came to weapons that were attached to turrets attached to ships and setting their Weapon Groupings. To get around this, we had to gut how we had Child Actors attached and spawn them at run time with pre-defined parameters so we can access them easily later from the ship end. This new method will also allow us to quickly modify weapons on Turrets as well when we get customization in the Hangar working properly with weapon groups.

In either case, the detailed Weapon Grouping display is a display that will be very similar to MWLL Weapon group display (if you are familiar with our previous title). We don’t currently have a visual in game yet, so we will borrow the MWLL display for our visual example.

Seen above are rows of weapons and which corresponding weapon group they belong in to. Along with that information is also the current Ready Status and Range of the weapon. Some additions we are wanting to put into this design is the ability to switch which weapon pip style would you like to see the Weapon Group. For example, instead of all Weapon Group 1 pips to be shown as a circle in the HUD, perhaps you would prefer a triangle or a square. These pips will then be saved per ship or per blueprint of ship design you create as a custom class for you to build in your campaign.

We want to build this into a sub-menu that you can pull up at any time to modify your weapons to be placed into different weapon groups. This sub-menu will not be visible at all times as there is alot of information that isn’t required to be seen at all times but can be brought up via key press (TBD) from the Ship you are currently piloting.

If all goes well now we have a better method of defining the ship weapons, we will show a working version for you all to see in a future update.

God Speed, Wardens!

Thanks again for tuning in to our weekly update! We will see you all next week!