As part of our contract with the U.S. Marine Corps, BISim is introducing a new universal component system for configuring weapons and attachments, enabling more user-friendly customization in its next version, VBS3 v3.9, expected for release in May.
This new weapons creation system allows administrators to customize attachments including lasers and optics for U.S. Marine Corps weapons, preview the weapon in a new 3D user interface, and immediately apply these custom configured weapons to scenarios in real time.
Jeremy Mason, a BISim senior game designer in Prague, said the new system is the product of BISim’s user-centered design approach to the VBS3 UI.
“We made this system work dynamically instead of trying to create variants of every possible weapon combination,” Mason said. While the new system currently only applies to USMC weapons, all units can use the Marine Corps weapons in game.
Mason noted that the project was one of the first to involve new UI/UX members of the design team and bringing a more user-centered design approach to the VBS3 UI.
“The team did a lot of work and testing on how users see the UI,” Mason said. “This is the first of many similar projects like this coming to VBS3 from BISim.”
Lars Transfeld, BISim’s manager of content, said the system began as an internal tool for artists to develop new weapon variants.
“Before this system, every new weapon required a unique weapon model, like the M4 with lots of variants,” Transfeld said. “It led to a giant library of unique models and requires a lot of maintenance.”
With the UCS, each component becomes its own config class, Transfeld explained. “We broke weapons into logical components like barrel, receiver, stock, rail, etc. The modular weapon component system is the first step toward getting us to a universal component system. This helps our artists reduce maintenance time and eventually could be extended to other models such as vehicles and characters.”
As more customers contract with BISim to update content or new models, BISim would add them to this modular system. These changes will help BISim artists and customers make more diverse content more quickly and easily and reduce the time users spend searching for the variants they want to use during a scenario.