PR 1.0 Spawn menu modification
Posted: 2013-01-06 19:08
The whole process from the first idea to finally being able to use it properly took about 6 months with days of constant coding and some weeks off.
It started with me getting bumped to R-DEV after I assisted the team in several tasks over the years beginning with server tutorials, tester, Tech Team Lead and finally being a Lead Developer with focus on the PR Testing Team.
I wanted to get deeper involved in modding in general and was looking for a coding project besides my other daily tasks.
So I stumbled upon this public thread http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f10-pr- ... right.html and decided to look for a similar solution for PR. Gladly Hjid from Alpha Project offered me his help and gave me some things to start with.
As you can see the first try was actually pretty similar to what we have now but remember this was a single button for one of 16 factions in game.
Also nothing of the back end was done yet, sure you could click the button but nothing happened.
I started a discussion in the DEV forums and we all agreed it would be a useful feature that people already had in mind but never thought of implementing it due to the large amount of work to create and maintain such a system.
The Military Advisors also strongly supported the idea mainly due to the fact it would give us 2 additional kit slots on the spawn screen.
I presented the team my first video so we were able to see it in action:
It wasn't actually working but the team liking the idea kept me motivated.
The next video gave me the impression it works even though on this state it had a few of very annoying bugs, which later exposed to be quite hard to fix:
A few weeks later, after discussions about kit type and order and some graphical suggestions by AncientMan it looked like this:
Because I couldn't imagine making this effort for every single faction I also started to program a small tool which should help me create the necessary files for each one:
and another video, if you look closely you can still spot some errors:
On this point I saw the chance to include that into 1.0 and did some stresstesting with a few selected testers. I stumbled upon a few unforseen problems which kept me busy for another couple of weeks until I came up with a proper solution.
Also kept working on the tool, I'll let the pictures do the talking
In the end it does everything pretty much automatically, reads out the correct weapons and creates the necessary files.
Finally a more or less finished version of a presentation video which I thought about releasing before we came up with the idea of the devcasts.
Disclaimer: the videos are quite old and details might have changed in the meantime.
I hope you enjoyed this blog and I gave you a small insight how things are getting developed.
Cheers
I`ve noticed something.... If we`re gonna have BUIS system in 1.0, what is the standard (scoped) and alternative(red dot) version of G36 for ? I am talking about german rifleman kit for example 
No offence, just my thought