Just as important as making sure the new models were as accurate as possible and sexy as hell was making sure the darn things actually worked in the game. That's were the coders stepped in. Troy “RAMP” Lowe, was called on to apply his mad coding skillz to a wide range of tasks, from creating new tools for art to ensuring that animations and skeletons all worked as intended. Some of you might recall an early video showing what kinds of things can go horribly wrong when you're working on a game.

A big portion of the work was re-organizing the state handling. There are currently over 500 states with the new model that, when combined, create the animations you see on the battlefield. For instance, the default relaxed stance is made up of several states, including standing, relaxed legs, gun down. All the old code had to be modified to handle this new library of states in an efficient manner and a new animation blend tool was created to combine the states. Extra work was needed on some new custom poses as well to make the transitions as smooth as possible. Polish on the animations was  needed to find odd animations and swapping them out for better ones.

Other work that needed to be done included the new attachment system that has been introduced in 1.33. This required coders to create a way for the producers to define which class of infantry got specific kits and a means to manage it. LODs also needed to be modified, allowing for the new attachments and to improve performance whenever possible.

“The first iteration of the new infantry model performed about half as well as the old one”, explains Dana “GOPHUR” Baldwin. “The last pass improved that drastically, and they're now outperforming the old infantry by 30%”. The jumps in performance were due to many changes and updates in the code, including re-working how the granny files, our animation middleware, handled the textures. “And any time old code is turfed and replaced”, he says “it's a good thing for the whole game”.