Progress Report: Nothing but XML Strings, all the way down

Hey everyone,  hooboy has it been a while, and you probably are wondering what exactly the hell I've been up to. 

Short answer, since Jan 1, it's been 100% work on patching the entire of the NIArms . 5-6 days a week, for 3 months. Why? because it's been basically a year since any of them had some love, and there's important under-the-hood and quality of life improvements to be made (When is there ever not), and as an aggregate, there's 184 distinct guns to work on. Unfortunately,  a lot of the stuff, by it's nature is hard to really show off, so in catching you guys, whom pay my loaves of bread, what nya'll is happening and why. 

Stringtable ALL THE STRINGS

So, Arma has these things called strings, that basically contain all the text information to display- in the case of guns and mags, it's the on-screen names, the tool-tips, the HUD details, even the Author fields in Virtual Arsenal that sorta thing. These can be stored hard-coded within the config data itself, or as part of what's called the String table- an XML file that give some extra organisation layers to the data, among other benefits. The cost was always that they take more time to create, because, you know, it's a new file, in a different language. So NIArms has been all hard-coded strings for that reason, aaaand I've been switching the the Strings over to the XML-based one because long-term, that's a better best practice. Plus, as an added bonus, it gives me a chance to fine-tune and correct all the text, so it's all unified in the language it's employing.The COST of that, though, is that it takes time to manually bring it all across and I'd be lying if I said that the majority of the last few months was not taken up with just this task. 

However, as a perk of the shift, all the text can now support multiple languages. If you'd like to help translate NIArms into other languages, as of this post, all the string tables are available on the NIArms Github . I'd appreciate the assist.

MagWells and JAM

So one of the lowkey additions that got added to Arma a few months back (actually, nearly a year ago, but whatever, )  was a feature called MagWells. Basically it allows for dynamic pools of compatible magazines for each gun, instead of the old way of having to manually declare what specific magazines work in what guns. Well, CBA has this little new module that takes full advantage of the functionality of that and build basically a way to allow any mod's magazines be compatible with any other's guns, It's called JAM, NIArms now supports it, No more need to write out manual compats. Now, this was actually all done by Robalo months back, so my part in this was just doing the once over to ensure it works, but I need to mention this to talk about the next part, because they're kind of interrelated.

Magazine Proxies and New Magazines

Another engine feature that was added with the magwells was magazine proxies. Basically, like how attachments work, now so too can magazines for weapons.  This feature was worked into the HK416 release, as you may recall, with added bonus of additional STANAG magazines. Well, now pretty much all the NIArms guns have that. As an extra Bonus, a couple of weapons got extra new visual magazine types, Probably the one everyone will notice is with the AKs.

There is only really one exception to the rule on proxies here, and that's Belt-feds. Unfortunately, and it's really down to the fact that different guns mount the belts at different points and there's no reasonable way to account for this. But everything else is gold.

Belt-Fed Tweaks and Fixes

So, I gave all the belt-feds a once over for motion, because especially the SAWs, I was kind not pleased with how the belts animated, and small other annoyances. So I've been fixing them. So as a start, the 7.62 Belt feds now also have 200 round belts, and a matching variation where the belt just hangs loose. All the Bullets have been replaced with nicer ones.  Especially for the SAW, the firing animations have been better timed.... and the SAWs have been realigned to sit lower on the shoulder. (which meant also fixing the reload to match and UUUGH, more work)

Some Re-animation

I kind of have an internal list of animations that I personally am not a fan of, so I took the opportunity to strike a few of them off. Most Notable, the G3s, MP5s and FAL OSW. That's not all though, as I brought across the new animations I did for the HK416s and applied them to the regular AR15s, and it's a 200% improvement across the board TBH. Most were kept to their original sequence timing so I didn't have to do much in the config heavy lifting, but they ALL are significant improvements. 

Prep work for Foregrips, and RHS Foregrip support

It's in the title there, but one of the extra tech goals I want to get done with upcoming SCARs is a standalone support for Grip attachments, ala RHS, so all the guns got all the framework layed for that, which also makes all applicable weapons compatible with RHS's implementation in the meantime. I'd actually discretely added this support as default in release as far back as the SG550s, but making ALL the guns ready for it was a task in itself. Hundreds of new classes.

New Muzzleflashes

I think you've probably caught it by now, but I reworked the majority of muzzleflash meshes. They look nice now. Granted, they're not perfectly realistic, but I wanted to give them a little flair, and I think importantly, the way that they're done makes sense even under night-vision intensity.

Here's a Video of the M60E4 now looking it's Best  

FIX THE G.D. M203s

Ugh, all the M203s were terrible. The Leaf sights were bad, the ones that didn't use the Leaf used that BI Quadrant sight, no , no no, it all has to go. 

Replaced all the rail-mounted 203s with the M203-2003 I made with the SG550s, gave as many of them the NICO ladder as feasible. Retimed the animations to fit animations made with the SG550s. Fixed the Sounds. Made new original M203 ladder sight that actually has correct scale and gradiations. Re-zeroed everything. MUCH FUCKING BETTER. All 203s HIT AT THE CLAIMED ZERO,NOT 10m approximate. THANK GOD.

Split Rail-Foregrip MP5s into own weapons 

As cool as it was to not have to pick a railed version if you wanted to add a light, it kind of was a bit of a technical stretch once you started including messing with Grips and stuff, so they got split off. 

New attachments

Yeah, so I've made some of the Custom-build muzzle devices you know and love (Gunfighter and KX3s from the AR15 pack, SF3Ps from the ACRs, etc) into actual attachments. If you have the pack they come with, you have them in the respective caliber weapons as an option. It's the Small things. 

Oh and some one actually BOUGHT from elsewhere some new optics to put in the mix- Nightforce ATACR F1 1-8x - AKA that short dot SOCOM's acquiring for their space shuttle door gunners. It'll be coming in two variations of the Geisele Super Precision Mount, with DocterIII RDS. 

Also, I'm not sure if It was in before this patch, but in case it wasn't and I forget mentioning the Docter II that came with the P226s and piggybacked on the Hensoldt ZO is now available as a standalone Rifle option. For when you have to be SUPER low-profile. 

On top of whole bunch of little tweaks here and there... I think that it... but I also feel like I'm missi- OH yeah. That's it :

Stretch Task: A2 and A1 style Retro Black AR15 Rifles

Okay, I've literally said nothing on this before now, because I'm trying to keep it a surprise, but I'm dropping a set of Cold War classics. M16A1 and A2s, and carbines of those two derivations (629/XM177E2s, 700 series, and the intial adoption M4 Carbine).

Why? Just a little something. These aren't my meshes, they're predominantly the work of Krycek and Tigg (with permission), with some extra finish done by me, so consider these a but of a holdover until I actually get round to completely doing them myself. Otherwise these ARE feature-complete, and are a good look TBH. 

Mum's the word for now, but look forward to those very shortly. 

If you'd like nicer res images of anything you've seen in the post, or some of the extras, I have this imgur album of everything for browsing at your own leisure. 

So *breathes out* THAT's what I've been up to. Writing that down both makes it feel like less and more than I've actually done, but I will not deny that I'm trhowing as much as I can into trying to make sure I don't have to do patches like this on the regular anymore. It's LITERALLY too much,

But at least I can say I commit.

That's  about it I guess, I got some mop-up to do, but yeah, this is dropping very soon, and then I shall have myself a whiskey. 

Toadie, Out