Prepare to receive civil judgment. — August Development Blog
August was a pretty busy month for the team, we gained a few new faces and overcame many challenges. The main thing we’ve been working on has been the new enemies and allies in Anti-Citizen. If you didn’t catch it, we posted a tweet about a week ago which showcased the metro-police enemies we’ve been hard at work on. We are really excited to share a ton of info about these guys with all of you, so buckle up!
What we are showing today is still in development.
How the Metro-Police came to be
To put it simply, City 17 doesn’t feel whole without civil protection. Since Anti-Citizen starts right in the heart of City 17, It wouldn’t be right if the player couldn’t fight metrocops. Therefore, we began to work on metrocop enemies that look, sound, and fight just like the ones seen in Half-Life: 2 (except way cooler). One last thing before we begin, huge thanks to Generic_Icon and the Eagle One Development Team for recreating the Combine Grunt VMDL, without it this wouldn’t have been possible!
Civil Protection Arsenal
When creating civil protection units something we found to be very important is the arsenal they sport in Half-Life: 2. The metrocops in HL2 use USP Matches and MP7s, we knew that if we wanted to create metrocops, they’d need to use both of these weapons.
The USP Match
All civil protection units are equipped with a USP match, the same one the player uses, this sets both the player and the enemy on the same playing field off the get go. Creating a weapon that behaves differently than the original SMG comes with several challenges: balancing, rate of fire, and behaviors.
The first challenge we tackled was how the metrocops actually used the pistol. All of the grunt animations were not made with pistols in mind (duh), our animator John CO. says “because the half life alyx grunts use more than a thousand animations, editing each and every one to fit the pistol didnt seem like a good option. The system that I came up with is somewhat of an animgraph abomination. I start by parenting the weapon to one of several attachment points, based on what the metrocop is doing. After that, its just a matter of using IK to lock the hands to the gun, and then edit the finger animation to match. Unlike valves weapons, we also used animgraph to animate the slide while he shoots as well as the magazine while he reloads”. After getting the metrocops to actually hold the pistol we moved onto our next challenge.
Section of animgraph responsible for positioning hands and weapons.
Rate of fire, this was accomplished with some pretty unconventional methods. John CO. explains it by mentioning
“firing proved to be a challenge, because the grunt’s magazine size is hard coded at 40. What I ended up with is fairly brute force solution: a state machine with 16 outputs (one for each shot, then a last one for reloading)”. On top of magazine size we had to change the rate of fire by making entirely new shooting animations that would make sense for a pistol being fired rather than an SMG being fired.
Our final challenge was balancing, since we altered the fire rate on the gun this means it does less damage per second. This makes the pistol metrocops easier to combat, this perfectly worked out as the metrocops are some of the first enemies you will fight. The easier nature of pistol metrocops allows us to get the player right into the action right off the bat and have larger scale combat encounters.
The MP7
The MP7 functions the same way that the original SMG weapon the combine grunts use, but it sports a fresh coat of paint. The SMG has been replaced by a new MP7 model made by Reza Wicaksono originally made for the cancelled VANCE HL2 mod. The new sounds for the SMG and USP Match are from MMOD by Gunship_Mark_II.
One would expect that swapping out SMGs would be a lot easier than adding a pistol, but because of differences in grip locations between the mp7 and the ipistol, we still needed to use IK to put the arms in the right spot, just like the USP Match.
Civil Protection Chatter
The 2 aspects that make the metrocops iconic are their outfit and their voice. We replaced all of the grunt voice lines with Civil Protection lines from Half-Life: 2. A lot of attention had been put into the voice line replacement process as the combine grunts say very important things, such as if they are injured, reloading, or advancing to the player’s position. Therefore, when replacing the lines we compared them to the HL:2 lines to make sure the voice lines still served their correct purpose during combat.
New Talent is Among us
In our last dev blog we mentioned that we were looking for new faces to join the team.
Please give a warm welcome to our new team members:
John CO. is our new technical animator, experienced with animgraph and specifically avoiding animation.
Helghast is our new level designer & environment artist, experienced with not only creating levels but making them feel like real environments.
and last but not least, JakeSayingWoosh is our latest addition. He is an environment artist, level designer, material artist, and so much more.
Til’ Next Time
Thank you for reading, we are all really excited that we were able to share a lot of metropolice information with everyone. As previously mentioned, we have other NPCs in the works too, such as your friend, side-kick, or pain in the rear, Lenny! We can’t wait to share more about all of the cool things we’ve been working on, but that’s for another time.
