Realistic Sniping

[Nychus01]

I know next to nothing about how to mod this particular game, but something I thought would make for an interesting gameplay enhancement would be effects that throw off your aim with scoped weaponry at long distances (when not using vats).

 

It sort of bothered me that my courier could pick up a scope for the varmint rifle from Chet on day one and start picking off Powder Gangers with 300-yard headshots like it was nothing. Certain adjustments could be made to change this, or at least up the realism. Perhaps your long-range accuracy could improve as your Guns skill increases, but more than that, not every shot lined up in the crosshares should be an exact hit. The bullet won't go exactly where the crosshares are lined up; certain adjustments need to be made for that perfect shot.

 

Possible changes:

• You need to aim higher to hit a very distant target with a sniper rifle due to the bullet dropping in-flight. Mil-dots would actually have a purpose. A rangefinder (Perk? Boone perk? Separate purchase? Play-it-by-ear?) could tell you how many dots you need to compensate for this. The muzzle velocity of your chosen weapon would have an effect on this, too, perhaps decreasing the effect for higher-caliber weapons, and increasing the effect as weapon condition degrades.
• Wind can throw off your accuracy. Again, mil-dots come into play. If the wind is coming from the side, it'll push your bullets to the left or right. If you're shooting with or against the wind, you'll need to aim down or up accordingly. There would need to be some sort of indicator for wind speed and direction.
• Lead a moving target (probably can't be done in the existing game engine, but worth mentioning)
• If we're REALLY pushing it, things like the Coriolis effect, temperature and humidity (based on time of day?) could add a bit of randomness.

This would only really affect the long-range game, but I think it would really improve realism. It'd be more challenging (and more rewarding) to make long-range shots taking in these factors. Thoughts?

Edited October 9, 2013 by Nychus01

[devinpatterson]

Perhaps your long-range accuracy could improve as your Guns skill increases, but more than that, not every shot lined up in the crosshares should be an exact hit. The bullet won't go exactly where the crosshares are lined up; certain adjustments need to be made for that perfect shot.

I think for that, you'd probably want to increase weapon spread.

 

• You need to aim higher to hit a very distant target with a sniper rifle due to the bullet dropping in-flight. Mil-dots would actually have a purpose. A rangefinder (Perk? Boone perk? Separate purchase? Play-it-by-ear?) could tell you how many dots you need to compensate for this. The muzzle velocity of your chosen weapon would have an effect on this, too, perhaps decreasing the effect for higher-caliber weapons, and increasing the effect as weapon condition degrades.

There is a gravity setting for projectiles. By increasing it you can get more drop.

 

 

• Wind can throw off your accuracy. Again, mil-dots come into play. If the wind is coming from the side, it'll push your bullets to the left or right. If you're shooting with or against the wind, you'll need to aim down or up accordingly. There would need to be some sort of indicator for wind speed and direction.

 

You can define weather types and check for them in a mod, but they aren't really useful for determining wind direction and speed. They are very general descriptions.

 

 

• Lead a moving target (probably can't be done in the existing game engine, but worth mentioning)

 

Projectiles do have a speed and by reducing it you can implement a that game mechanic (I would imagine)

 

 

• If we're REALLY pushing it, things like the Coriolis effect, temperature and humidity (based on time of day?) could add a bit of randomness.

 

Sorry I don't have any idea how those could be implemented in a clean, practical way.

 

To sum up, I think I could tweak these setting for you, but it'd be you that would be doing most (90%) of the work by doing some heavy duty beta testing. Determining what settings seem realistic.

[TheStrictNein]

I think the mod is called Better Smoke and Ballistics. It turns of the hit scan property of all projectiles, so you will have to aim higher/lead the target

[bruse]

I'm working on a mod with realistic damage (and health/armours*) + ballistics for my own use (not yet done all the things which need doing, when it's done, I'll release it).

 

What you can get is bullet drop + realistic bullet speed (which means leading moving targets), wind would require extending what the engine can and cannot do.

 

Basically, what's needed:

(1) Rework all projectile velocities to be inline with realistic values (there's a mod which does do this actually as Bethseda length measures are known and listed in GECK documentation).

 

(2) Turn off "hitscan" for all projectiles.

 

(3) Figuring out how the "min spread" translates to MOA measurements would be needed. Then set the weapons to have realistic accuracy (which is in general more accuracy however, but in some specific cases might be less). As a rule of thumb, you'd expect a full length rifle (like, a, say, Garand) to be around 1 MOA, an accurized full length rifle (like a Sniper Rifle) to be under 1 MOA, and a carabine or shorter assault rifle to be around 4 MOA (less if accurized & match ammo). 1 MOA is about an inch at a hundred yards deviation - in general it means many weapons will become more accurate, esp. semiautos and full autos.

 

(4) Figure out how the "gravity" setting in projectile stats works; then set all projectiles to be attracted by gravity equally.

 

There's a few things which I'm not fully clear on, like whether rounds slow down or no (and what's it tied to). I suspect they don't. Which is a shame, but not something you can really do anything about.

 

There is a mod which adds actual recoil to the game, which is needed to make automatics and semiautos work well - GBMM is the name afaik. So you need to readjust aim after firing, and firing in full auto mode at a distance will mean a lot of wasted ammo even though the base accuracy of the guns is not the problem (if anything, a fairly long barrel LMG will be more accurate and also more damaging then shorter carabine-type weapons).

 

*Handling of armour is one great pain.

 

Even bigger pain is AI. Because I'm doing a playthrough now based on a "beta" version of my mod and essentially what happens is that sniping is too easy as you shoot one from a few hundred yards, then another, then another and they're all the time just standing there and walking around even while bullets are whizzing about and their comrades falling to the ground.

Edited October 14, 2013 by bruse

[betto212]

also for a more realistic sniping :

 

bigger world and bigger draw distance(ugrids)... distances are too short

 

better body parts (if you hit a helmet is the same as hit the naked face).

[bruse]

Too big distances for combat is an issue in itself, though.

 

IF the courier can fight at 500+ yds, then the opponents must also be able to. And if they can, due to the fact the Mohave is physically reduced in size and many locations are too close together, then NPCs will slaughter each other where they shouldn't.

 

So the defaults regarding distance are mostly alright - the big problem I'm seeing doing a playthrough with more (still not finished) realistic damage / gunnery is the AI. Basically, a Courier with a 5.56mm semi-auto can clear house with trivial ease, even with improved wasteland spawns, no radar markers (although that makes for some nasty surprises at times when the AI miraculously does decide to hide in ambush), the biggest "danger" in the game are either critters which require more firepower then humans, or power-armour troops which don't care for your puny rifle (BoS), as long as you have clear line of sight to the enemy.

 

The reason is simple, you fire a shot at a group of, say, powder gangers from range and, hit or miss, they resume walking around like nothing happened. If you hit and kill one, the rest come in and watch only to get shot in turn like some sort of brainded zombies. Tweaking with AI values so far has had no result.

 

It's really critical to making the game challenging, fun and immersive, because realistic gunnery when your enemies stand around like mannequins breaks every outside combat (indoors combat works better and increasing detection ranges and such worked, still need tweaking). When you, for instance, get on the hill in front of the NCRCF gate and start shooting on the occupants below, I want it to respond like an actual camp does - the sentries in the towers shooting at you with rifles, and the rest of the PGs either shooting (if they can) or taking cover behind buildings and staying there (if they can't) in ambush, or getting in buildings.

 

Currently assaulting something like a PG camp is trivial and the only hard bits are indoor combat bits in the main building (as when the detection ranges increase it results in everyone attacking you from the moment you fire the first shot as it should).

 

When you give guns their proper accuracy and lethality, the lackluster AI becomes the immersion-breaker.

 

 

As for armour on body parts, it's a bit trickier. Project Nevada has DT not applied on headshot on actors without head armour; not sure if much can be done there. I haven't gotten into this part yet, but rigging scripts to examine what part was hit and apply or not apply DT based on armour coverage is doable (for armours which have, eg. no armour coverage on arms / legs) and something I might do.

 

Ideally when armour is hit I want one of the following to happen:

(1) The round was fully stopped by the armour (damage * penetration modifier < DT); only some damage (say, 5%) is applied.

(2) The round has penetrated the armour (so damage*penetration modifier - DT is applied).

(3) The round has bypassed the armour (so full damage is applied regardless of armour).

(4) The round has hit a vital part of your body (critical hit).

 

Outside of localized coverage (basically done by formlists for armours with no arms / no legs / no arm+leg protection and then scripts to examine what part was hit, so DT is not applied when an unarmoured segment is hit), it's tricky to produce this effect. Perhaps randomly having no DT applied on hit depending on how much does the armour cover would work (and additionally some specific types of armour impacting your chance to be critically hit, as critical hits ignore armour - so, eg. power armour there's just no real gaps to exploit or very very limited).

 

Finally, the last part towards making realistic combat ties to both AI and equipment; the thing is the player can obtain items which are within the context of the game world super-powerful, like power armour. Now, I've made it so in the current iteration of my mod that power armour is still very vulnerable vs some types of weapons, but the problem is that the most of the game world has no access to what they need to defeat power armour and all they have is small caliber firearms which are easily defeated.

 

So you can just go and power through the game world with a few exceptions without any care in the world, including annihiliating the entire legion as they simply don't have the means to stop one power armour goon with a minigun just walking around and mowing everything down.

 

So some rework of equipment lists is also needed, else the game becomes really easy with adv. combat armour II (which provides almost full-body coverage of armour sufficient to defeat small arms fire, esp. since NPCs lack AP ammo) and trivial with power armour. So:

- providing a chance of having AP or other specialty ammos to regular enemies

- providing a chance of having explosive devices to regular enemies

- rearming the legion to use more hunting rifles & carabines and such (all are lore-friendly) and improvised explosives / firebombs (lore friendly) and be less reliant on melee.

- NCR is fine with their service rifles all around, if some are given AP ammo and frag grenades.

 

Specifically for power armour:

- providing a small chance (at high levels, perhaps) of having anti-tank class weapons such as missile launchers appearing, perhaps some form of new lower tech disposable rocket launcher for the legion (the missile launcher just isn't lore-friendly or looking right on them), perhaps occasional 40mm grenade launchers for the "bandits" factions.

 

- I want the AI to react specifically to power armour, somehow. Which means - run, ambush, whatnot. Seeing a bunch of idiots with handguns and machettes charging a steel Terminator with a minigun just ain't immersive, fun, balanced, realistic, you name it. They should be running for their lives, making ambushes IF they have a weapon which can damage it, unless they specifically have anti-tank weapons.

 

I'm thinking about making power armour be a no-no in many game locations, but that'd mean voice acting and I don't know if I want to do that - but specifically being refused to enter casinos, military bases and such while wearing power armour.

 

Sorry for the long post, I'm working on all of this in my spare time and it's a non-trivial issue to get it all working together as it should. The creators of FNV did a good job at balancing but an atrocious job when it comes to realistic depiction of firearms, and it's very hard to fix the latter without breaking the balancing of the game completely.

 

I want the game to be more realistic but again not too easy (nor mechanically made too hard, eg. scarce ammo) and immersive (and you sniping people standing like mannequins waiting to die is anything but immersive).

Edited October 15, 2013 by bruse