I've been lurking around the custom forum for a while and I've noticed a few things.

I hope these observations can be helpful to the artists and modellers alike.

1. Ammo counters :

Don't put these on, for an ammo counter to be useful the NS team would need to write some code into the weapons to have an ammo display or somehow you'd have to pull the info from the hud.
-Its not gonna happen. Leave em out.

2. Proportion :

Seen a few cool ideas with hugely out of proportion elements, everything from 'grips', 'stocks', 'ejection ports' and magazines.

Take a look at a few firearms sites with images, you'll see how all real-life firearms are all in proportion...

3. Ergonomics :

I work in an industry where ergonomics is really important, items must handle well, imagine holding something with sharp edges or strange angles. If its really uncomfortable it makes it very hard to use wether its for 10 seconds or 10 hours.

This ties into point 2. Once again reference current production firearms for evidence.

Thats all for now, comments/additions more than welcome.

I agree, Ammo counters cannot work as of yet in NS. The only gun with a somewhat functional ammo counter that you can get was... well, I forget his name, but it was the Pulse Rifle from Aliens, and the ammo counter showed three modes: "FRNG" "RDY" "RLD"

uh huh

sounds familar catalyst

The only pulse rifle with a good set of sounds but a scrawny model. (Actually, it was down to the orientation of the model in V_MDL... but I was too lazy to fix.)

The old FA G36e was the only thing I can think of with a working ammo counter because of the perspex magazine with each and every bullet being fired.

Yeah ..... you do realise that you can't even do that in HL because the engine just plays the same generic fire animation over and over really fast?

Firearms did it.

its a easy code for ammo counters you modding noobs, have a sub model for every round (50, 49, 48..... ya big list) and have it hard coded for ammo != submodel, just like firearms did.