Making semi-auto's automatic

[beyondwudge]

New to modding.

 

Tried to change the semi-auto weapons (Laser Pistol, .44 Magnum, Lincoln Repeater, et cetera) to automatic weapons.

 

Aimed to precisely retain their semi-auto performance (minus the sticky firing) whilst removing the need to repeatedly click when operating them.

 

Discovered that the semi-autos would play a dud animation for their first shot of any 'burst' before operating properly.

 

Tried a number of different attack animations. Attackloop seems to sort of work but it also shakes the gun like a psycho rather than in time with the weapon's fire rate.

 

Also, even attackloop still seems to play a dud loop before firing commences, it just is not as game-breaking since it's so short. I even noticed this with actual automatics like the Chinese Assault Rifle.

 

Has anyone tried to do this before and solved this issue? I used the search function but it gave me post after post about all sorts of other stuff.

 

Thank you for any help you guys can provide.

[beyondwudge]

Anyone help?

[beyondwudge]

Guys?

[mechine]

Start out @ http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/Weapons This will tell you what all that poop you were messing with means, but it's not updated, an not all of it is correct or was even known at the time the page was writen. So it's not 100% correct, but it's a good basic guide to start out with. Start out just changing the Semi-auto delay Min/Max and the Attack animation multi.

 

Changing weapons to Full Auto as a way to simulate semi-auto is a horible idea. Idk I just figured I'd say it. It's not just a few weapon types. You have Semi auto, Semi auto rifle, bolt action rifle, lever action rifle, single action split top revolver, semi-auto split top non-revolver, single action non-split top revolver, blah blah blah But there are two full autos the assault rifle an the SMG, so at least you could somewhat have one and two handed simulated semi-auto via full auto settings. heh that poop ain't going to work though.

 

The animations for the most part are hard coded into the game engine, there's not much mix an matching. Because of this you can actually delete the animations inside a nif mesh (so it doesn't even have an animation) and since it's hard coded fallout 3 is still going to play the animation in-game. Which in your case of sort of "mix an match" fallout 3 is going to play whatever animation it thinks the weapon is, when coupled with the fact that the meshes now have missing parts for the animations which are trying to play, the end result is weird almost silly animations for the weapons.

 

You can see an example of this if you created 12 versions of any weapon, but all with different reload settings, reloadA, reloadB, reloadC an so forth, once you get in game, an you try them all out to see which reload works best, you'll see half of them do something silly or stupid like try to put a micro fission cell on the side of a 10mm pistol or something. You can even run into this if you have the correct mesh an correct settings for the form id you created in GECK. Sometimes, just because it's hard coded data, it's just going to do whatever the heck it wants despite it being set up correctly to act a certain way.

 

That being said you might have two or three pistol meshes which were all cleanly pasted from player made meshes into known good vanilla meshes, to be as identical as possible to the vanilla 10mm pistol, while also being as clean an optimized as possible via good weapon creator practices an tricks, and even with identical settings when they were created in GECK based off the 10mm pistol. Then in combat testing one of the weapons will perform better than the others in reguard to semi-auto fire even though the only thing different between the two or three pistols is the shapes. And what is that? I guess it comes down to poly count, which is the count of how many triangles it takes to make those shapes. It could even be hidden data, from it being a weapon which was converted from another game, or hidden data from the slack jawwed yokel noob that made it. Who knows...

 

There's a lot to it, but someone who got in there an got their hands dirty for a couple of months could with a reasonable amount of quality, produce meshes an settings for semi-auto weapons, either player made or vanilla content, which would yeild real world like semi auto double taps or even tripple taps. There's tutorials an even videos, but you can also just get in there an mess up a bunch of stuff until you learn. Pretty much all I do is copy paste the mesh shapes into known good vanilla meshes so they are clean an look just like the vanilla mesh for that type of weapon. Which when coupled with using the vanilla weapon for that mesh as a base provides the best fire rates for semi-auto. I.E. I copy a Benelli M4 super 90 shotgun into a vanilla combat shotgun mesh then I'll create the weapon in GECK based off the Combat shotgun. But it might be the case that I should paste the Benelli M4 super 90 into a vanilla 10mm pistol mesh in order to get a good fire rate, in that case I would use the 10mm pistol as a base to create the weapon in GECK, so that it matches.

 

 

Now bear in mind, the lincoln rifle, hunting rifle, .32 pistol, and scoped .44 mag pistol are the more complex weapons in fallout as far as how they work an the meshes. Then the SMG an Assault Rifles would be the most simple. With the stuff like the 10mm pistol or combat shotgun in between the two. So for the complex weapons, you should only change the attack animation a little bit at a time then test it. If it's 0.7500 then try 1.5000 or whatever gives you a even fire rate like 2.00 or 3.00 or 6.00 shots per second, you know even, not 4.3234 shots per second. Then the more simple meshes you can change a lot more without messing them up. Like the 10mm pistol it works great at attack animation multi 2.00 @ 12.00 shots per second, some player made pistols need 3.00 @ 18 per second, if you're not really good at working with this stuff you might need to set it higher. Anything over 3.00 for an attack multi should tell you that something is wrong with the mesh or the settings for the mesh.

 

The Semi-auto delay Min/Max is like a factor for if the weapon is a in bad conditon the trigger will delay or be squishy, because it's meant to be a crappy weapon. You can lower the amount of delay, or even set it to none (zero)