Parabellum

The main addition in this update was to add a destroyed variation of the turret, which it switches to at the approprite time. A small thing, but important for selling the effect.

This update introduced physical recoil when the cannon was fired, which was achieved through two combined methods:

• the tank cannon mesh is rigged, with a root bone and a cannon bone, and the recoil is animated and exported to Unity. When the cannon fires, this animation is played, giving the impression that the firing itself has forced the barrel back.
• additionally, a force is applied to the vehicle, causing it to rock, giving weight and a sense of power to the shot.

I’m still unsure if this is at all realistic, I was going off the “feel, not real” rule when it came to it.

In this small update, I managed to get the tracks of the tank to deform and shape as the vehicle passed over rough terrain. It’s a fairly straightforward and simple effect, but it adds a ton of life to it.

I’m a little annoyed as I didn’t save the tutorial I used for this. A huge thank you to the person who wrote that tutorial, it was a massive help!

Original Caption:

Fixed an issue with hit detection and damage; basically, the round would bouncing before determining whether or not it should pass through, meaning it always slightly ricochet’d regardless completely throwing off the whole thing.

When a round hits, and penetrates, it now casts a ray forward to loosely simulate spalling (shrapnel) inside the tank and if it hits something soft and important, it damages it.

Original Caption:

Whoo, got it figured out finally. Armour gets a boost depending on angle, so you can angle yourself to boost your chance of deflecting shots, and you have to wait for a solid hit before firing if you don’t want to waste ammo.

This is a really, really simplistic version of the kind of math that is involved in tank combat. Ever hear of “armour overmatch”? Yeah, I just learned about that. Don’t think I’m going to put it in, otherwise it’s going to get really math-y.

Original Caption:

Gunner sight.

This was actually way harder that I thought it would be; I figured I’d just slap a camera on the barrel but that was no good. Basically, the turret is turning to face the mouse, but if the camera is turning with the turret, it’ll never align and just slowly spin trying.

So you basically control the turret two different ways; smooth turn to mouse for 3rd person, and manual 1st person movement nudging in gunner view.

This update introduced the damage system, which is still how it is done in the latest version. When a round hits an armour plate, and pierces, it then deals damage to anything behind that armour plate.

The video demonstrates, in this instance, that there are two “critical zones” that can be hit on the turret;

• The Core; this simply disabled the turret, and it can be repaired
• The Ammunition; if ignited, this explodes, destroying the turret.

This was the first big update on Parabellum, and covered a few bits.

One thing of note is the beginning of the armour system. As you can see, the target tank has red, orange and green armour plating. Each plate has a different thickness value, which determines how easy it is for a round to pierce it. The colouring simply denotes how difficult it should be to pierce, for my own debugging.

A funny side note here is that the turret you can see, which tracks and shoots at the player tank, has an utterly scuffed targetting system based on hack-y code. I later learned of parabolic arcs, and the proper mathematics required to predict the arc of a shot. But here, I just winged it. It did work, but I would later discover it only really worked at the distances I initially tested at. I was still very new to C#, to be fair.

I’ve been documenting progress on the game since the start, so I felt it best to back-fill this blog.

This was the very first recording of the project; and actually the very first thing I made in Unity. I managed to get the very basics working;

• Physical Movement; i.e, rolling over hills
• Turret aligns with camera
• Firing loop

It was a small, but very exciting first step.