Create Armorer — actual model, animation and script study

Direct archive inspection, 2026-10-18. Read the published Create Armorer v1.2.0.1-for117 file, rather than relying on gallery screenshots or an older search cache. This archive has 13 gun-display records, 18 gun geometry files and four Lua scripts. No game execution or native compatibility pass is claimed.

Archive SHA256: 479f0ac05833ccec554efa1b22e6f71553c7ebe7f381310c28467a399c98b0ba · 7,107,566 bytes · 521 ZIP entries.

What the files actually contain

Counts include stored variants, hands/helpers and visual planes. They are not simultaneous visible geometry, draw calls or runtime cost.

Display identity	Bones	Cuboids / planes	Zero-extent visual planes	Authored clips
cannon_40mm_salamander	33	213	3	7
gl_revolver_devastator	34	111	0	10
mg_platemag_flywheel	177	561	256	9
pistol_auto_stress	39	83	1	13
pistol_revolver_torque	41	188	8	8
rifle_assult_crane	45	102	0	8
rifle_assult_roller	45	142	8	10
shotgun_db_stone	28	90	0	8
shotgun_pump_bearing	56	239	0	12
smg_auto_crank	177	378	252	12
sniper_semi_clockwork	42	232	0	8
sniper_semi_m1	53	129	3	14
special_melee_wrench	22	13	0	14

Useful techniques for our AoA weapons

1. Layer moving mechanisms and presentation independently

The Roller state machine separates base/bolt/main tracks, gun kick, movement and burst presentation. It has different empty/nonempty inspection and reload routing. Its inspection state hides the crosshair on entry and restores it on exit; shooting interrupts that main inspection track.

For AoA: treat inspect, recoil, movement and special flourish as independently owned tracks. Every exit route must restore temporary UI/visibility state. A cancelled inspection must not duplicate ammo transfers, leave a hidden sight, or block the next valid shot. Our current Iominator clips are only a motion foundation; they do not yet implement this complete state machine.

2. Frame-based visual planes are intentional geometry

The Flywheel machine gun stores 256 zero-extent planes; the Crank SMG stores 252. Many belong to numbered frame bones rather than solid weapon parts. For example, Flywheel's frame_1 uses crossed planes, and reload clips gate its scale from zero to visible and back over a short interval.

This gives a concrete reference for animated steam/smoke/energy presentation. Do not reject every zero-size dimension as a malformed solid. Conversely, do not count every stored frame as a simultaneously visible particle or claim a performance win from a file count.

For Soul Storm, compare this bone-frame approach with the planned single sampled atlas surface. A single-surface approach could reduce stored geometry and animation bookkeeping, but we need native shader/pass/visual tests before claiming it is faster or equivalent. Texture access, transparency and overdraw remain relevant.

3. Keep visual threshold events synchronized with gameplay

Roller's gameplay script caches acceleration and a one-time loading flag. Its visual state machine separately tracks acceleration and burst presentation. The source contains a useful boundary test: starting from zero and taking consecutive qualifying branches, the client-side condition can observe count 15 immediately after incrementing, while the gameplay loading branch is an elseif that observes an already-15 count on a later call.

This is a source-level test case to reproduce, not a confirmed player-visible bug: callback ordering, timestamp semantics and native API behavior have not been exercised here. For our upgrades, prefer one authoritative transition/event identity for the flourish and associated resource change. Test threshold crossing, interruption, resume, duplicate events and item switching rather than assuming two similar counters stay aligned.

4. Verify LOD assets instead of trusting declarations

Eight of the 13 displays reference LOD model/texture pairs absent from this ZIP: 16 unresolved exact asset paths. Five pairs are present. External resource packs or native fallback behavior may resolve missing paths; the audit does not establish a crash or rendering defect.

Our export checks must inspect actual main/LOD files, correct namespaces, logical UV size versus PNG dimensions and attachment variants. Do not claim a working optimization merely because a display JSON has a lod key.

5. Accept source JSON syntax deliberately

The pack contains commented JSON. Our audit now reads comments and trailing commas while preserving quoted URLs, escaped quotes and delimiter text. This is a bounded JSON-with-comments reader, not full JSON5 support. A strict-parser failure is not evidence that the native pack fails to load.

Apply the findings, with honest gates

• Add native cancel/interrupt tests for every inspection and reload state.
• Use shot/event identity for synchronized threshold flourishes; verify client/server lifecycle.
• Compare timed-atlas and frame-bone effects visually and under equivalent native workloads.
• Resolve all authored LOD and texture paths in a clean export before packaging.
• Separate solid collision volumes from effect planes and helper geometry in QA.
• Keep hand fit, feed/reload presentation, shader compatibility and runtime performance as independent acceptance gates.

Full factual census with exact paths and script hashes · Our reproducible audit tool · Weapon reference library

Attribution and reuse

Reference pack by Koei. Its project license page identifies Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Retain attribution, license links/notices and modification descriptions if licensed material is reused, and check individual asset/dependency provenance. This publication contains our audit tooling and factual observations, not the downloaded pack or its models, textures, sounds or scripts.