About two years ago there was a bit of a discussion about adding a crossbow to the game. At that time it was pretty much agreed that adding one would be impossible due to the lack of proper sprites to show one in action. Well, it seems that the folks at arcanumclub.ru (the Russians) decided to do more than just talk about it. Thanks to a Babelfish translation (and we all know how good that is) I believe they have a working arbalest! You can read about it's development here: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babe...3c7265e2b89779d4e983703b66a415&showtopic=1395 Some basics as I understand it: Starting with the proto of the rusty rifle, it was redone to fire arrows, and then further tweaked to realistic levels of damage and sound range. The Russian modders have even gone as far as creating excellent-quality artwork for inventory and schematic appearance of this new weapon. The arbelest still uses the rifle-wielding NPC sprites, but there shouldn't be too many people who would complain about such a small matter. And finally - This new weapon is to be added to their Arcanum 1.5 mod. To the folks at the Arcanum Club who helped make this a reality: Bravo! Well done indeed!
Cool indeed. One of the points we were arguing was the reload speed of crossbows and how that would work in Arcanum, and then Ferret brought up this whole deal with automatic crossbows some friend oi his used to sniper rabbits with (not that reload speeds have any realism to them in Arcanum anyhow). I thought that was the point we considered impossible though?
That's what stopped us, but if you consider the tiny scale of the sprites, the arms of the arbelest would be almost invisible anyway. Maybe a couple pixels wide?
If I may be picky, you'd probably want those few pixles to bend and flex as the string is pulled and released. Also, you'd want the stock to be wooden brown, not metal grey. I'm not dissing their mod here, simply saying. Of course, we all know what exorbitant amounts of time you'd need to make new sprites for Arcanum.
Question is, should we add filters to keep the spambots away or should we consider them a source of entertainment?
