Windowed magazines

[mjblay 10]

After reading the discussion in the dev branch about minimizing use of the HUD and recalling how Arma 2 ACE let you feel how heavy a magazine was, I asked myself the question:

Why does ArmA 3 not have windowed magazines?

These are nothing futuristic. They are simply magazines with a clear plastic window on the side that shows how many rounds are left in it. See here: PMAG® 30 AR/M4 GEN M2 MOE® Window, 5.56x45 Magazine.

And I thought that hiddenselections[] combined with setObjectTexture would be a great way to script the magazine texture to change each time a round is fired to make it look like there are less rounds in the mag. But alas, I couldn't find any stock magazines with hiddenselections[] in their configs.

So having windowed mags would mean creating a new mod. After working so much on my

, Advanced Laser Designator/Rangefinder, and Advanced LRPS mod (coming soon), I have a pretty good handle on config files and scripting. But I have essentially no experience with modeling.

Are there any others out there who would be interested in working with me to make windowed magazine models that could be automated to display accurate round counts?

[x3kj 1247]

its easy to do, even some A2 mags had this feature, doesnt need scripting, just animations. But since you cant have different magazine models per weapon, you would have to modify vanilla weapons to accomplish that, which is not allowed.

[mjblay 10]

Sorry I never replied back to this, but thanks for saving me some time in looking into it. I wondered why nobody else had done this yet.

[EricJ 724]

I've started to do this with my HK417s as normally they do have clear plastic mags. I've also modded a Magpul (works good actually) which shows the shells going "up" (the references can be found in the Arma 2 Sample Models from Armaholic in the ACR weapons, where the CZ805 had what Fennek was talking about. It's not setup like to show an actual spring but it does allow the bullets to disappear as you pull the trigger.

[DerBiwi 10]

Here is a part of my Model.cfg, which contains the animation for the windowed Magazine:

 // FIRE BULLET HIDE ANIM START
 		  	class bullet001
   			{
   				type="hide";
   				source="revolving";
   				sourceAddress="mirror";
   				selection="bullet001";
   				minValue=-1.0;
   				maxValue=0.0;
   				hideValue=0.033;
   			};
          class bullet002: bullet001{selection="bullet002";hideValue=0.066;};
         class bullet003:bullet001{selection="bullet003";hideValue=0.099;};
         class bullet004:bullet001{selection="bullet004";hideValue=0.133;};
         class bullet005:bullet001{selection="bullet005";hideValue=0.166;};
         class bullet006:bullet001{selection="bullet006";hideValue=0.199;};
         class bullet007:bullet001{selection="bullet007";hideValue=0.233;};
         class bullet008:bullet001{selection="bullet008";hideValue=0.266;};
         class bullet009:bullet001{selection="bullet009";hideValue=0.299;};
         class bullet010:bullet001{selection="bullet010";hideValue=0.333;};
         class bullet011:bullet001{selection="bullet011";hideValue=0.366;};
         class bullet012:bullet001{selection="bullet012";hideValue=0.399;};
         class bullet013:bullet001{selection="bullet013";hideValue=0.433;};
         class bullet014:bullet001{selection="bullet014";hideValue=0.466;};
         class bullet015:bullet001{selection="bullet015";hideValue=0.499;};
         class bullet016:bullet001{selection="bullet016";hideValue=0.533;};
         class bullet017:bullet001{selection="bullet017";hideValue=0.566;};
         class bullet018:bullet001{selection="bullet018";hideValue=0.599;};
         class bullet019:bullet001{selection="bullet019";hideValue=0.633;};
         class bullet020:bullet001{selection="bullet020";hideValue=0.666;};

 		  // FIRE BULLET HIDE ANIM END
 		  // FIRE SPRING HIDE ANIM START
 		    class spring001
   			{
   				type="hide";
   				source="revolving";
   				sourceAddress="mirror";
   				selection="spring001";
   				minValue=0.0;
   				maxValue=1.0;
   				hideValue=0.933;
   			};
   			class spring002:spring001{selection="spring002";hideValue=0.866;};
   			class spring003:spring001{selection="spring003";hideValue=0.800;};
   			class spring004:spring001{selection="spring004";hideValue=0.733;};
   			class spring005:spring001{selection="spring005";hideValue=0.666;};
   			class spring006:spring001{selection="spring006";hideValue=0.600;};

 		  // FIRE SPRING HIDE ANIM END

I'm working currently on a weapon pack, which use windowed Magazines. When you have questions, ask me ;)