On the heels of talking about the Deployment Menu, there’s another menu that I had a lot of fun building and consider a technical achievement: the Arming Menu. This menu is a staple of old vehicle combat games, and mech games in particular like in Battletech, it's called the ‘Mech Lab’. This is the menu where the player gets to exercise a level of creativity, creating a loadout of weapons and equipment that they are most comfortable with. In battleMETAL, every playable ‘Metal (mech) has a set of Equipment Slots. These slots may contain Weapons or Equipment but limited to a set of factors such as item size and the type of item. Here’s a few examples from old school games to showcase what my starting ideas were.
Mech Lab as seen in Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries
These menus can be fairly daunting for a newer player or someone not used to this genre of game. A ton of information is thrown at the player all-at-once, and many decisions here will directly impact the player’s experience when they actually deploy to the game space. However, this is a menu that the game will return to many times, and Players are encouraged to spend all the time they want here testing out ideas. To that end, I tried to make the Arming Menu as straightforward as possible given the limited UI tools at hand.
Proof of Concept Arming Menu ~2016
...Ok, we can do a little better than that, heh. This image was the very first take on the Arming Menu. Although it lacks a lot of graphical icons, one can see the roots of the menu are here. Weapons and Equipment have a UID or unique ID that the game uses when looking up data for the item. When the Arming Menu is called, it grabs all relevant data for each UID, and the data is stored in separate .item files. These .item files are text files renamed to be better understood, and contain a JSON-style data language.
Add in data loaded for every mech in the game and the end result is a wonderful menu that looks like this:
Now this is looking pretty good. We can see the list of available equipment for the Player. We can see the hardpoints that the chosen mech possesses. There’s some other important panels here as well: the ‘Weapon Group’ panel in the lower left allows the Player to set their fire groups. A fire group is a collection of weapons bound to a single fire key. Next to this panel, is the ‘Energy Drain’ panel. This important panel ties into battleMETAL’s Player resource mechanics. In addition to health, Players must be aware of how much Energy their ‘Metal currently has. Energy is used to power weapons, shields (a rechargeable health pool), and sprinting. This panel tells the player how much energy their Weapon Groups are going to draw when used. This is helpful to Player if they’re trying to balance their equipment selections.
In the middle-right of the screen is a very important set of panels, the Weapon Info panels. The top one shows the statistics for the Weapon that a Player has chosen in the menu. The bottom panel is for the Weapon in the selected hardpoint. They’re over/under so that Players can compare directly, the stats of 2 different weapons before mounting any weapon to a hardpoint.
Now for some neat code notes. Every mech has a list of Hardpoints that can hold a piece of Equipment. The data for this is stored in a text file with a custom .unit extension. When the Player selects a mech in the Hangar Menu, that data is loaded into a set of global vars. These vars are not static, if the Player chooses a different mech, the globals are updated with the data of the next mech the Player chose. Part of the data loaded are the hardpoints, Quake C being more primitive means that hardpoint data is loaded into a series of Arrays[] dedicated to each data point. The index of the array is used as the UID of the Hardpoint:
float MECH_DATA_H_TYPE[10];denotes the allowable Types of equipment for the Hardpoint.
float MECH_DATA_H_SIZE[10]; maximum Size of the Equipment.
vector MECH_DATA_H_ARM[10];
vector MECH_DATA_H_HNG[10];
The two vector arrays are specifically for the UI. Currently, I hardcoded the screen-position of the Hardpoints when the Arming Menu needs to draw these on-screen. The Arming Menu code loops through all the hardpoints (game maximum of 9 possible hardpoints) and pulls the position for each Hardpoint from those vector arrays. When the Player clicks the mouse, the code checks to see if the mouse position is within the area near of each vector to determine if the Player has clicked on a Hardpoint. If the Player has, the code uses the UID of the Equipment in the Hardpoint to load the .item data file for that Equipment.
Another great feature I implemented recently was the ability for the Player to save up to 6 different configurations per ‘Metal. I realized that Players would prefer to be able to save their changes to the mechs for later use. Well if we’re going through the trouble of saving something once, then we now have the functionality to save anytime (isn’t programming grand?). The save feature is autonomic and triggered by natural Player interaction with the Arming Menu. Things like tabbing between configs, or switching from different menus and the Arming Menu. The save files are then stored in folders labelled via ‘Metal UID, and then their own number. The save files itself is a plaintext file, and is loaded on-demand. This means that savvy Players can noodle around with just the text file and have it load by simply changing configs in-game. I did put in some validations though, so no breaking a ‘Metal’s Hardpoint values by putting in larger-than-allowed weapons or such.
Finally, once the Player has tweaked the ‘Metal to their liking, they proceed to the Deployment Menu. When the Player hits the ‘Launch’ button, the CSQC takes all their selection data and pushes it up to the Server for parsing. The Player’s chosen mech UID is sent, along with Hardpoint data and Weapon Group options, the server than takes this data and builds the Player’s entity into that mech. Overall, this was a really fun feature to build for battleMETAL, and fairly radical for any Quake mod at all.
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