Dead Space Plasma Cutter SWEP

Released: March 20, 2021

Tags: Lua, SWEP, Blender, 3D Animation, Horror

As a big fan of the Dead Space series, I was always disappointed by the quality of the Plasma Cutter weapons on Steam Workshop. The big definining thing about the plasma cutter in Dead Space is that the position of the lasers directed exactly where the weapon would hit. The items on workshop had lasers, but they were purely decorative in nature. The plasma cutters also lacked other cool features, like the diagetic HUD and the melee system.

My Plasma Cutter works exactly like in the game. By default, it is holstered, and attacking in this state will cause the player to throw a melee attack (which can be chained by timing the attacks properly). The plasma cutter needs to be aimed manually for the player to be able to fire it. In the aimed state, the plasma cutter emits a flashlight and three lasers that define exactly where the plasma cutter will hit, and both of these will respect the rotation of the viewmodel. The ammo counter is also displayed on the gun itself. By tapping the use key, the muzzle rotates 90 degrees, which causes the position of the lasers to change tool. All of these features work in third person as well, including the laser positions which respect where the model is being aimed. The gun can cut the Half-Life 2 zombies in half if the player is aiming at their torso and shooting in horizontal mode.

The gun uses my weapon base, and I actually started working on it in 2019 but only released it after the weapon base was released to the public. The weapon's reliance on my base is also one of the reasons it has a lot of these features (they're supported by my weapon base) as well as other goodies like clientside predicition. Most of the extra code of the gun was to add the two extra lasers, the melee system (which mostly came my swords addon), and support for all the different animations. I did all the animations myself, trying to match all the little details of the animations from the original game.