antistar

Yes, I've now finished writing the tutorial, basically. Hopefully the levelled list part will be clear enough. I may still add a short section mentioning a few miscellaneous balancing things for people to be aware of when adding support for a weapon. Components and perk requirements for crafting weapon mods, setting the levels that (attached) weapon mods can start spawning at - stuff like that. That'd be pretty short by necessity, since it'd vary enough for each weapon that I couldn't go into much detail anyway. After setting up the levelled list script injection template, I did something similar for formlists. WARS uses a few formlists to define which weapons certain perks and Legendary effects apply to - and also which weapon mods can be attached/detached in the field using the Weapon Modification Kit (WMK - a reference to that old mod of mine). This formlist script injection template should make it easy for people to handle those things in weapon support patches. I finished the FN FAL support in WARS - Lend-Lease (WARS-LL), and also added support for Subleader's Uzi. Earlier I'd mentioned wanting to add support for this M1905 Revolver, but I haven't been able to get a reply from its author re: some permissions stuff, so... I might not be able to support that one, unfortunately. Support patches can be made without needing to include anything from the third-party weapon mod in question (the user just needs to install the original mod, as usual) - meaning that permission isn't required for them - but there are some art asset errors in that mod. If I fixed them myself, I'd need permission to redistribute the fixed assets. It's a shame; I've been looking for a .38 Special revolver like that to include/support in WARS for years. So instead I covered the Uzi, since it occurred to me that WARS has 9x19mm but didn't have a proper SMG using it. I mean it does have the Skorpion, which in WARS can come in .380 ACP or 9x19mm, but that's definitely on the low-tier end; more of a machine pistol. I'm not planning to cover any more weapons in WARS-LL before the release of WARS. Being a compilation patch of sorts though, I felt like it needed at least two weapons in it to begin with. ;) Now it's time to whip my load order into shape so I can do that extended play-test finally, and check for conflicts between WARS/PEACE and the mods I want to use, while I'm at it.

Cool; the more support patches available - and the sooner they're available - the better. I'm working on the Levelled List part of the tutorial right now, and uuurrrrggghhh, I hate it. I was dreading this part. It's kind of difficult to explain nested LVLIs at the best of times, and I'm up to the most complicated part; explaining how to work out how many spare mags NPCs should spawn with. The Levelled List stuff should be the last really significant chunk of the tutorial I need to write though, which is good. I'll be very glad to have it done, so I can get on with getting ready for extended play-testing. I think the tutorial will be crucial, but man, it's a real pain in the bum to write.

Based on how I've done closed betas in the past, I'd send a PM to each tester with a link to where they can download the beta versions of both WARS and PEACE. Any updates during the beta would go in the same place, so that I wouldn't need to send another round of PMs out with new links every time. So yeah - testers would have access to both WARS and PEACE (and I'll put all the relevant compatibility patches in there too, come to think of it) - and they can use either or both of them. I'll of course be testing/playing with both WARS and PEACE, myself. What I'd like testers to do is just play the game with the mod/s installed and then post in the WARS/PEACE WIP threads about how they go with it. Posting any bugs of course, but also if they like/dislike certain parts of it, think certain things are unbalanced, etc. For anyone thinking they may like to help as a tester; this won't surprise anyone who's been following the projects, but you'll need to be prepared to start a new game, and be aware that any third-party weapon mods will need to be patched to support WARS. (Similarly, third-party clothing/armour mods will need to be patched to support PEACE - though that's much easier than patching a weapon for WARS.) Could be a good time to actually use that multiple profiles feature in Vortex - or whichever mod manager you use, if it has something like that. Actually, on the topic of support patches; anyone who thinks they may want to make a patch for a third-party weapon mod they like can get a head-start on that during the beta if they take part in it, since I'll also make the WARS Support Tutorial available during the beta. (The finished tutorial; obviously I already posted that draft of it a little while ago.)

Oh no, definitely not; you'd all know if a full release of WARS was only days away. ;) I'd actually been wondering if if might be out by the end of the year - and it's possible that the closed beta might start by then - but it's more likely to be early next year. It depends on how testing goes, of course. Yes, general implementation of the FAL (in the WARS - Lend-Lease patch) is done. Since it uses the same ammo, it does the same damage as the Hunting Rifle - which is quite a lot, in WARS: 150 DAM. (With FMJ ammo and an "Average" condition receiver - better/worse condition receivers will increase/decrease that damage.) It has a STR requirement of 6 and some powerful recoil, though. (Not meeting the STR REQ also doubles the base recoil of a weapon, among other penalties.) Still, I've got it pitched as an end-game kind of weapon. Anyway, currently I'm working on the Levelled List injection system for use in WARS add-ons. It uses a slightly modified version of the vanilla DLCLegendaryLLManagerScript script, with a struct in it that makes it easily expandable in the CK. You can add however many things to however many Levelled Lists via a script that runs once when the game first runs with the add-on installed. I'm in the middle of setting up a template quest (it's technically a quest script) with all the most likely LLs people will want to use (including myself - I'll be using this in WARS - Lend-Lease) pre-entered, along with brief notes for each on what that LL is used for. LLs for weapon loadouts carried by NPCs, weapons at vendors, weapons in loot, etc. It's a bit tedious right now to set the template up, but it'll save me - and anyone who makes a support patch - a lot of time in the long run. (I'll of course be covering how to use this template in the WARS Support Tutorial.)

Yes, I did tighten the spread on the shotguns a bit. I reduced their base spread from 12 to 10. I also made the out-of-range damage multiplier much less harsh, changing it from 0.1 to 0.4. (Most weapons use 0.5.) WARS does give firearm projectiles realistic values for velocity though, and makes them be affected by gravity (harder to judge how realistic the gravity influence is, however), so technically shotguns may have less range than vanilla since their projectiles aren't treated like lasers anymore, but practically speaking... their effective range should be a bit higher now. And same re: how long WARS (and PEACE) have taken to make. AmmoTweaks v2 not reaching release was quite a blow; it added years to the development time of WARS. It's why I wanted to use AmmoTweaks v2 in the first place; without it I needed to create or recreate a huge amount of stuff myself, adding massively to my workload. Again though, I don't want to blame isathar for that; it's just how things turned out. I'm dying to actually play FO4 again - and to play the DLC for the first time. Not long now though.

As a bit of an update: I'm in the middle of adding support for the FN FAL in the "WARS - Lend-Lease" add-on. There's quite a lot to do there - it's a very detailed mod. So many different parts of the weapon separated out into customisable mods; handguard, pistol grip, buttstock, carry handle, dust cover, bipod, etc, etc. That made the research part where I work out how much all the different parts weigh pretty time-consuming. It was helped along tremendously by the discovery that the DSA website lists the weight of all the parts they have on there, though. That was a gold-mine. Still a lot of work, of course - and it didn't cover everything that's in the mod. Now I'm going through and working out what the stats for the different parts will be in WARS. I'm setting it up to fit in with all the other weapons in WARS obviously, but the FAL being divided up into so many separate parts makes it a bit different. E.g. what do I do with carry handles? Anything? I ended up giving them -5% Wear Rate, the vague idea being that they allow you to handle the weapon while putting less wear on other parts of it. I gave the bipod -5% Recoil but also -10% Aim Speed, the idea being that even if you can't actually deploy and use bipods in FO4, it's at least putting some more weight out front. Anyway, while doing this I'm also working to finish off the WARS support tutorial, and that always feels like it takes a lot of time. Feels necessary though. People will want to use their favourite weapon mods! Prior to this work on WARS - Lend-Lease, the general weapon testing went well. (This was just summoning some enemies in QASmoke and trying different weapons/ammo sub-types on them.) Pistols/SMGs are good on small creatures - or even on big creatures if you use JHP and they don't have chitin or scales - but they fall off in usefulness when it comes to armoured targets. Mid-tier armoured targets can be taken out with 5.56x45mm FMJ or whatever, but it'll take much less ammo expenditure if you're using AP ammo. You'll definitely want to use AP on deathclaws and sentry bots and whatnot. (Though ideally you'd have Pulse grenades/rounds to use on the robots.) That all seems to be working basically the way I want! I did turn up a bug during testing that I don't know the cause of, though. Hopefully it's a rare one; I wasn't able to reproduce it. The effect that controls Attack Mode switching for a melee weapon got stuck on the player somehow when I switched away from the weapon, and interfered with the Fire Mode switching on ranged weapons. (Same hotkey.) Took me a while to work that one out. Fortunately it can be fixed by just equipping the weapon the stuck effect was from again. The Active Effects on HUD mod makes it easy to see which weapon the stuck effect is from; it adds a new "Effects" tab in the Pip-Boy that the effect shows up in. I've made a note of this stuff in the Known Issues section of the draft readme. Anyway, back to work on WARS - Lend-Lease. (If anyone is wondering why I'm doing a couple of weapons for this third-party weapon support add-on before releasing WARS, it's because they're weapons that I think need to be in the line-up. E.g. there was a conspicuous empty space where a battle rifle should be - hence the FN FAL. Going through the process of supporting a third-party weapon mod myself also makes it easier for me to work out what needs to be covered in the tutorial.)

Things have been busy, but I've just about finished filling out the DR/ER normalisation FO3Edit scripts; only a couple of races left to do. Then I'll test some of those a bit with some different weapons (just in the QASmoke testing cell) to see how they feel. Some are easier that others (e.g. for most creatures with only skin/fur and no scales/chitin I'm just setting DR/ER to zero so that JHP works well on them), but it can be a little complicated to work out the formula I want for some races. E.g. the DR one for Stingwings looks like this: //StingwingRace "Stingwing" [RACE:0005FBB1] //Desired Range: 15-40 //Known Actor Base DR range: 20-60 //Race DR: 0 (Unchanged) if race = $0005FBB1 then begin if (DamageResist > 30) then begin newDR := 20 + (Sqrt(Abs(DamageResist)*6)); e := setDR(e, newDR); end; end;So there's some interplay between what I want the DR range to be, what the range is for vanilla NPCs of this race, what the range could be in mods, how big or small the desired/vanilla/potential mod ranges are compared to each other, etc. Maybe this sort of thing is simpler for people who don't hate maths, but that's not me, so... :wink: Anyway, I should finish the last couple off today, which is exciting actually, since that means that WARS will be feature-complete*. Still got some support/compatibility patch work to do, and the WARS support tutorial to finish off - but then I can get my load order set up and finally test WARS and PEACE out properly. *Edit: This in post number 2500 of the thread, nice/oof. ;)

How annoying a weapon will be to add support for will largely depend on how many OMODs it has, and on how it and the OMODs are set up. The more different it is to how weapons are set up in WARS, the more there'll be to change. It being a minigun or not might not make much of a difference, compared to that side of things. Oh - if it's a weapon that can support a number of different ammo types, that'll add onto the workload too, since every ammo sub-type for every ammo type for every weapon needs its own dummy weapon, in order for NPC ammo-swapping to work. (Not quite as bad as it sounds; it's mostly duplicating a weapon record, changing a few values, duplicating again, changing a few values again, and so on.) Well, I'll be adding support for the FN FAL myself at least, in the "WARS - Lend Lease" add-on. Probably doing that next actually (along with the Smith and Wesson Model 1905 Revolver, since I think the Pipe Revolver needs a proper, factory-made .38 Spc counterpart), so that I can finish up writing the WARS support tutorial while I'm at it. Right now I'm going through all the Races (creature types) in the game and filling out the FO4Edit scripts that determine the DR/ER range that NPCs can have. (Not including any DR/ER from armour for humans, super mutants, etc.) Did you know that in vanilla FO4, high-level Triggermen have natural DR such that they could be stark naked but still somehow as well protected as if they were wearing a full suit of heavy combat armour? Yeesh. This is the sort of stuff I'm fixing. There are three FO4Edit scripts; one each for HP, DR and ER. The scripts are based on FO4Edit Despongifier, and I have permission to distribute them (with the WARS Support Tutorial maybe?) so that people can run them on any mods they may be using that add new NPCs, and have their HP, DR and ER automatically normalised to work well with WARS. (It'll create a patch plugin, basically.)

That'll be me soon too; getting my load order sorted out so I can do the playthrough test of WARS and PEACE. Just need to look over the creature HP/DR/ER values, like I've been talking about. Everything else is done now, in terms of getting WARS and PEACE feature-complete. The last couple of days I've been bringing the War and Peace patch - and the WARS and PEACE patches for Manufacturing Extended and Better Manufacturing - up to date. Just finished that up. In terms of things that are most likely to require compatibility patches, for WARS that would be: - Just about anything to do with weapons. So weapons, Object Mods, Loose Mods, ammo, and crafting recipes for those things. - NPCs and Race records, for the HP normalisation and some DR/ER edits. I've got some FO4Edit scripts for that, though; I'll have to remember to make those available to make it easier for patches to be made for this. - Levelled Lists. Mainly relating to weapons and ammo, obviously. - Perks. Mainly the weapon skill perks (Commando, Gunslinger, etc), of course. For PEACE, it would be: - Armour and clothing. Some stats are tweaked, and notably basically all clothing had pockets added, and/or the ability to modify them to add pockets. (Part of PEACE's "more STR means more carry weight bonus from equipment" system.) - Power armour. Similar to above, since I gave PA their own line of Load Bearing Equipment mods. - Food, drink and medicine. Lots of changes here. - Survival Mode. PEACE uses an edited version of the monster "HC_ManagerScript" that controls Survival Mode. (Though I did roll in UFO4P's fixes to the script.) - Technically I should mention weapon OMODs and Loose Mods again, since PEACE also edits those to give them realistic/reasonable weight values as part of its encumbrance overhaul. - Levelled Lists again, probably. A number of edits there. (E.g. adding new items, and removing items from "death lists" for creatures so that they don't have a cut of meat from their own body in their non-existent "pockets", somehow.) Mods relating to Legendary effects are likely to be straight-up incompatible with both WARS and PEACE since I was trying to make them not rely on the existence of literal magic in order to be possible, and I don't think I've seen mods that add/edit Legendary effects do so in a way that would... complement that, let's say. Also Armorsmith Extended will likely conflict heavily with PEACE. PEACE does a number of the same things that it does, though with a lighter touch, from what I can tell. Whether that's a good or a bad thing might depend on how much you like the full range of Armorsmith Extended's changes. I should probably write up a tutorial for adding PEACE support for clothing/armour mods too, actually... though it's pretty easy - especially for normal apparel (not power armour). For most apparel it's basically adding one Mod Association keyword for each pocket/pouch/bag size OMOD it can have, and if applicable, adding the default pocket size OMOD it should have to its Object Template. And that's about it. Both WARS and PEACE should be fine alongside mods that edit weather, lighting, environments, atmospherics, whatever (mods like that should probably load after WARS and PEACE). Both mods make minor additions to some interior and exterior locations; placing a few items, moving some things slightly (like slightly moving a couple of perk mags that are used as schematics in WARS to locations that aren't quest/faction-gated), that sort of thing. The most significant there is probably PEACE placing some CAPtain ATMs in certain places, though I was always careful to do so in a way that wouldn't require editing navmeshes. It's all minor enough that it should have no impact on precombines, as far as I can tell. I wouldn't expect Sim Settlements to conflict heavily, but I don't know yet. I'll most likely be looking at that while getting my load order set up.

If I have put that much thought into it, it'd be a function of how long WARS (and PEACE) has taken to make. I've had a lot of time to think about it. ;) (It was the same with Clockwork, since that took nearly five years to make.) As much as I think there's more and more to criticise in BGS' games as time goes on (definitely "A Promise Unfulfilled"), I have a lot of sympathy for people trying to make games. It's not the same as making a mod. (Unless the mod is getting into "total conversion" territory, arguably.) With the probable exception of rote retreads like Call of Duty - or mindless, cynical shovel-ware like Candy Crush and its clones - games in development are a chaotic mess, with the developers desperately trying to discover what the game even is up until very near to release, usually. It's an erratically moving target, while modders generally get a (more or less ;)) stable platform to build on, once the game is finished.

Oh no, there's still a bit to do before I can start the playthrough. I've just had a run of days in which I haven't had time to work on the mod, too - so I'm partway through implementing the Fat Man. The art and projectile/explosion records are done - need to do the AmmoTweaks/extended WARS features implementation now. After that I need to look at the DR/ER/HP values of some of the creatures again. Like making sure creatures that logically seem like you'd want to use hollow-points on actually have low/no DR but maybe high HP. (E.g. Yao Guai. And probably the same with feral ghouls but maybe HP regen instead of very high base HP?) Stuff like that. Then there's just some minor odds and ends - like assigning the new colour-coded box assets to the loose weapon mods I haven't done that for yet. (So that different types are a bit more distinct on factory conveyor belts.) After that there's probably a bit of compatibility/support patch work to do, along with getting my load order set up for the playthrough. So not too much to go, but I'm definitely not already playing the game. ;)

Yeah, I've been thinking that I'll probably record some clips when I get into some good fights while doing my playthrough test of WARS and PEACE. Some aspects of the mod may not come across as well in short clips (e.g. longer-term impacts of crafting and logistics stuff), but others obviously will. Having said that though, once I've put together a big ammo/weapons factory, I'll have to show that off in a video or two. WARS does a lot with factory machines. In the meantime, the closest to a natural gameplay video so far is probably this one showing off the 12 gauge ammo sub-types.

Haha - thanks. I just finished doing the Plasma Gun, and now there's just the Fat Man left to do. There's still the other various things I mentioned, but it's feeling closer than ever.

Hey - they're coming along well. I made a couple of minor additions to PEACE the other day; configurable sleep healing in Survival Mode, with Endurance influencing HP and limb condition restoration per hour. Plus the return of the My First Infirmary and Auto-Doc as new settlement objects. In WARS, there's only five weapons left to do the ammo-swapping, condition, etc stuff for now: Fat Man Flamer Plasma Gun Tesla Rifle Gamma Gun So that shouldn't take too long. I still need to have another look at the HP/DR/ER values for some creature types, like I mentioned in an earlier post. Plus there's finishing writing the tutorial, and maybe starting the "WARS - Lend-Lease" patch with support for a couple of third-party weapon mods. Not that much to do before finally starting my test play-through, though. I do want to have support at some point for Tactical Reload - or Extended Weapon Systems, which looks similar. It might depend on if one works with WARS and the other doesn't? E.g. the Tactical Reload Nexus page mentions having to leave out the ReloadStart annotation for the "reserve" reload animation, and I don't actually know if that means the ReloadStateEnter event doesn't get sent? The WARS/AmmoTweaks weapon manager script does use that event, so... Anyway, that's a little hypothetical for now, since it'd obviously rely on me getting time to make a bunch of reload animation variants. Hopefully each one wouldn't be too much work if I'm basically just taking the existing animation and removing the "work the action" bit, but there are a lot of reloads to cover.

It may be that they did, but found that it was performing well enough for their purposes. In contrast, my purposes are a bit different, and so this problem turned up. ;) Incidentally, in my last lot of testing (the Harpoon Gun is done now), I found that QASmoke was taking 25 seconds to load now - even better than I thought.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but off and on during WARS' development I've run into a... probably more of a quirk than an outright bug in FO4, where complex levelled lists that are specifically in the inventory of a high number of NPCs will cause the game to take a long time to load. Early on I was trying a system where any weapon could spawn at any level, but higher-tier weapons were very rare at lower levels - and it would gradually change as you went up in levels until it was more the other way around and low-tier weapons were now rare. The system worked in testing until I actually implemented it so that Raiders would spawn like that, and suddenly... I thought I was hitting an infinite-loading bug. In actuality it was still loading... it was just that it took it 7-8 minutes to do so. So I had to scrap that system. And overhaul later systems too, which is always tedious and time-consuming. More recently, the load-times have crept up again, because while in vanilla the weapon spawning on NPCs is pretty simple - usually a single weapon which is maybe up to a few nested levelled lists deep - it has to be more complex in WARS in order to support: - NPCs often having primary, secondary and melee weapons. - Multiple ammo sub-types, with higher-level NPCs having more ammo. - NPCs spawning with more or less ammo depending on whether a weapon they're carrying is a primary or secondary, or perhaps semi/manual/etc or full-auto, etc. - NPCs spawning with the appropriate number and type of magazines for their weapon/s. So for a while now my load times (just for jumping straight from the main menu to QASmoke to do some testing) have been gradually creeping up until they were getting close to the three minute mark, which is a real pain at the times when you're in a "loading, testing, quitting out, tweaking, loading, testing, etc, etc" loop to get something working properly. I also didn't want to eventually inflict load-times like that on users, so it's something I've been trying to puzzle out for a while now. Fortunately then I fixed it yesterday! Based on testing so far, anyway. It was a bit of a weird solution that I didn't expect to actually work. There are 40-50 (almost all vanilla) levelled lists that determine what the vast majority of NPCs spawn with, in terms of weapons. These are the lists that I added WARS' "Loadout" levelled lists to, and when I cleared them out, it fixed the load-times. Leaving them blank was no good of course, so I added the contents of those 40-50 lists back in via a script that runs once. (The same script used by the main DLCs to do this kind of thing.) I was expecting the game to load fine the first time, but then go back to taking nearly three minutes to load a save that had been made once that script had run, but that didn't happen. The load-times stayed fixed, instead taking ~30 seconds to load into QASmoke. (This is with a regular hard drive - not an SSD.) So that's a relief. Kind of weird, though; and it points to it being an odd quirk in FO4. Almost like it's enumerating everything all NPCs could possibly spawn with when it loads, despite it obviously not needing all that all the time - but then not doing that when the info is in a save-file rather than the plugins? I don't know. At least it seems like it's fixed. TL;DR - I reduced load-times from ~3 minutes to ~30 seconds. Phew.

Yes, the plan is to release them at the same time. That's going to be kind of wild - and take a lot of set-up on my end - since it'll probably be like four or five mod pages popping up at once: - WARS - Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite - PEACE - Project Extend And Change Everything - War and Peace - WARS-PEACE Compatibility - The War Room - WARS Support Patches - Peace In Our Time - PEACE Support Patches I can't remember if I've mentioned it, but I've already got patches (for WARS, PEACE, and both together) made for Better Manufacturing and Manufacturing Extended. They'll go on the latter two pages there, probably. Both WARS and PEACE are designed with Survival Mode in mind, and with the assumption that the player is using it. I'll be recommending that people use something to re-enable the console and regular saving though, since "sleep-to-save" is death for immersion and role-playing in this Immersive Role-Playing Game. Both mods also make some changes to Survival Mode. E.g. WARS normalises difficulty damage multipliers across the player and NPCs so that everyone is doing 1x damage. It also changes the Adrenaline perk to give increasingly more bonus kill XP, rather than bonus damage. Both mods assume limited carry weight (as in Survival) and that items like ammo and meds have weight, but PEACE goes a lot deeper into that area - e.g. with its encumbrance overhaul. Check out the first post in the PEACE WIP thread for a summary of those features though - and the second post for an exhaustive list. A lot of what PEACE does - like food spoilage and crafting/building/etc taking in-game time - is meant to complement Survival Mode.

As an update: ... You know what I realised recently? There isn't actually that much left until WARS is feature-complete. (PEACE is already feature-complete.) I just finished doing the Missile Launcher, and now there are only ten weapons left to set up ammo swapping, condition, etc for: Gauss Rifle Railway Rifle Fat Man Flamer Harpoon Gun Gatling Laser Plasma Gun Cryolator Tesla Rifle Gamma Gun Some of those will take more work than others. The Gatling Laser will be easy since it won't have ammo swapping. Others like the Fat Man and Harpoon Gun (and Railway Rifle maybe) will take a little more work since I need to do some art stuff for their ammo. Just some mash-ups of existing assets though, so that shouldn't be too bad. After that I need to tweak some HP, DR and ER values for some creatures, I think - but I've got a couple of xEdit scripts that let me do that pretty quickly. That's basically it, off the top of my head! Of course, that doesn't mean that it'll instantly be time for release at that point. I still need to finish the 3rd-party weapon support tutorial, make a patch for an existing weapon mod or two - most likely the FN FAL and this S&W M1905 Revolver to begin with - and test WARS and PEACE properly via a full playthrough. (And to do that, I'll need to install/update/configure a whole bunch of mods to get ready to play - and possibly make some compatibility patches along the way, if they conflict with WARS/PEACE.) What I'm hoping though is that I'll get partway through that playthrough and be satisfied that I'm not going to find any more bugs or balance issues or whatever myself - and then kick off the closed beta. I'll be appreciative of the help when that time comes. :) Testers will most likely get access to the beta versions of both WARS and PEACE regardless - to make my life easier - but can choose to use either or both as they prefer, obviously.

Another relatively minor new feature in PEACE: - MREs 01 (If you're wondering what the image is referencing, it's this.) I've wanted to add MREs to PEACE for a while, as a kind of aspirational/high-tier food type to carry in the field. Something that is efficient in terms of weight to nutrition, and which cannot spoil. The issue was that in PEACE, I've adjusted "portion size" for food items so that nothing is worth more than 25 caps, since (if I'm understanding the system), anything more than that will go to waste if eaten as soon as you get hungry. (Having to wait until you're starving before you can eat good food without wasting it feels bad. This was a problem in New Vegas too.) Treating an MRE with a realistic weight value like a single food item didn't fit in with that reduced-portion-size approach, so I'd left it on the back-burner for ages, not sure how to approach it. Recently it occurred to me though that I could treat it like a real MRE: you open it up and get a range of individually packaged food items. So here's how they work in PEACE, copied from the draft readme: I also made some similar - but much simpler - changes to the Institute Food Packet:

Yeah, I do hope that the tutorial will encourage people to make patches for weapons, and not... discourage them because it looks complicated. No, it doesn't swap the equipped weapon for another one. I had to do that way back in WMK, but it's not necessary here. ;) Basically all the extended features in AmmoTweaks/WARS - ammo sub-types, weapon condition, fire mode, recoil handling, etc - rely on Object Mods (OMODs) to add those effects to the weapons. When an OMOD is attached/detached from an equipped weapon (e.g. to swap ammo sub-types), the game forces the weapon to be re-equipped. (So that everything is initialised properly, I'm guessing.) It seems to be hard-coded, unfortunately.

Thanks; that's good to hear. :) I find writing tutorials to be difficult and time-consuming. I mentioned this somewhere in the past several pages when I was describing how the Physical Mags System works, but no; for better or for worse, there's no specific tracking of ammo types/counts per magazine (except for the dropped mags), and you don't have to load them yourself. Something like that would require the development of a bunch of complicated new systems across the inventory, UI, etc in order for it to not be an unwieldy mess for both me and the player. E.g. a way for the player to select which specific magazine to use when reloading, with different mags potentially having different ammo sub-types in them. It's not impossible exactly, but it would take coding knowledge that I don't have. So failing that, I think the system I've got is about as good as it's going to get for FO4. It still means you need to take the selection, supply and weight of magazines into account re: what you're carrying... it's just that you don't have to manually load them yourself. ;)

Okay, here's the current draft of the tutorial: - WARS 3rd Party Weapon Support Tutorial Again for emphasis, for anyone else who comes along: the tutorial is not finished yet. Very much a WIP.

Actually, if you (or anyone) wants to check out the WIP tutorial to get an idea of what'll be involved with making a support patch for WARS, I can probably put up a temporary download for it. (Using sendfile or whatever.) It's just a pdf file. You absolutely can pick the dropped magazines up; it's a key part of the system. :) You can see me doing it in the video. (Link for the sake of others reading along.) The part where I leave the mags on the ground is just to demonstrate how they're cleaned up when you leave the area, and how you can then recover any mags, casings and ammo that was cleaned up that way, by using the Ammo Recovery Post.

I should say that if a third-party weapon mod adds its own new ammo type, that will of course work with WARS. It's just that if it's only the one type - no "sub-types" as they're usually called in AmmoTweaks/WARS - the weapons using it may feel a bit limited compared to the other weapons in WARS that can swap between AP/JHP/Match/Tracer/etc.

That's the sort of thing I'm aiming for with WARS, too; those tactical (and logistical) decisions about which ammo sub-types to carry and use. JHP for un-armoured, AP for armoured, EMP for robots/vehicles, incendiary for some crowd control, etc. For a minor update, I just implemented the Laser Musket. In WARS it doesn't require ammo - a bit like the Recharger weapons in New Vegas, but here you turn the crank to charge it. It only does half the base damage of a regular AER laser weapon, though - at least on a single crank. You can still crank it up to however many times the receiver level allows for, in order to boost the damage. I also changed its automatic receiver to be a Trigger Group option; so now you can have select-fire Laser Muskets, switching between manual and auto with the Fire Mode hotkey. BGS had specifically set automatic Laser Muskets to be player-only (via a property on the OMOD), but I'm not sure why. I removed that limitation, and from some quick testing, it seems like NPCs can use it just fine? Anyway, before that I implemented the Walther PPK - WARS adding that in as the standard variant of the unique Deliverer. It uses .380 ACP in WARS, like the real thing - not the far too large 10mm, as in vanilla. Deliverer is still in there, as a unique Legendary.