Expirements with Firearms: What I Have Learned.

[angryglock]

TLDR: Lots of the gun settings do nothing or at least nothing useful.

 

I noticed a lot of gun mods will list several variables in their stats. Variables the modder set to balance the gun. Many of these actually do nothing toward that end. This stuff is likely not news to experienced gun modders but it was a revelation to me and apparently not known to many gun modders.

 

I have experimented extensively with all the vanilla guns and many modded guns using Geck. I've learned a lot about the settings for the gun object in the game. A lot of the results were surprising and disappointing. My test character was 100 Gun Skill. Though I also tested at 15 and the results were the same for the items below.

 

1. The Range: Min/Max settings only tell the AI how close and how far to use a weapon.

The settings do not really change the guns operating profile. I set a hunting rifle to *64 and 128. The rifle still made perfect, high-damage head-shots at the highest distances I could render the npc (Willow was shot in the head many times in testing). So the only reason to make changes to the Range is to control at what distances NPCs will use the weapon. For instance setting Boones rifle to 64min and 5000max made him stop pulling out his machete as often in close combat and he engaged any target I engaged at any range. If I could see the NPC and started shooting so did Boone and of course he rarely missed.

 

2. The Semi-Auto Fire Delay Min/Max does nothing.

I could set these numbers to anything and I tried full-auto guns, semi-auto and bolt action guns and there was no change at all. I have no idea why the settings even exist.

 

3. Sight Usage also seems to do nothing.

I could set it very high or very low and the accuracy with in ADS (aim down sights) seemed to be unchanged at any Gun Skill. Granted with the nature of the gun settings in this game it's harder to test this one since some hits and misses are based on gun skill levels.

 

4. Animation > Attack Multiplier:

The only way to affect the rate of fire of a semi-auto or bolt action is to change the Attack Multiplier on the Art and Sound tab. Lower numbers simply slow down the animation which slows down the number of shots you can fire over a given period of time. If the number is around 0.50 (with a base of 1.0) the fire rate is reduced and the fact that the animation is moving slower is not really noticeable but any lower and you start to feel like you are in slow-mo scene in a movie. The animation slowdown is very noticeable.

 

Note: the Multiplier sets the baseline. So if it's 1.0000 and you set the multiplier to 0.80 the animation is slowed by 20% and thus the rate of fire is slowed by 20%. I suppose this is how the Hunting Rifle Mod "Custom Action" changes the rate of fire. It changes the multiplier for this setting but a 20% improvement in something like this not hard to perceive.

 

5. Fire Rate: This setting only affects full auto guns.

This one I knew from reading the Geck Wiki but still it's worth noting. There are only a few full auto guns in the vanilla game.

 

These are a few of the things I've found. They represent the settings I wanted to adjust to make gun play a little better. For instance I hoped adjusting the range would allow me to make shotguns more accurate up close but useless at range. This is not the case. If you set the spread on a shotgun too low, you can snipe with it at all ranges. So you really only have the spread setting if you want to mess with shotguns. Even adjusting the projectile count is just another way of raising or lowering the base damage. A real range setting would make a big difference with shotguns and handguns.

 

A silenced .22 pistol using hollow-point ammo should be deadly at very close range and useless at long range but in the game the range is not a factor. Just it's spread stops it from being useful at any range. I set one to the same damage and spread as a sniper, turned on the scope overlay to make aiming easier and could snipe any target at any visual range. Even leaving the damage number to normal I was one-shotting unarmored targets at max visual range thanks to it's high crit multiplier and the sneak attack factor.

 

For semi-auto guns it all comes down to damage and spread. This means when trying to balance weapons you really have just the damage numbers and spread to use with a little wiggle room on the Animation: Attack Multiplier. I think this is why you see so many vanilla guns with really awful spreads (notably shotguns). Since the range does not affect it's performance the only settings the devs had available to use to try and balance them were the **damage and spread otherwise you could just use a riot shotgun to kill just about anything at any range.

 

I hope in future FO games the guns get some needed attention in terms of their performance settings. Even having something as basic as range and semi-auto fire rate would go a long way in adding depth to gun play. I won't even hope for more realistic ballistics (like ***drop) but it's nice to dream.

 

 

*Many of the settings don't behave if you use 0 as a number so just using low numbers is better for testing

**When I refer to damage numbers I'm including base and crit multipliers.

*** I know that you can simulate drop by messing with the projectile settings but since no vanilla gun has bullet drop as a factor, modders do well to stay away from that practice; it just causes complaints.

[KaiHatia]

Yeah, rate of fire and recoil and these things are a real pain at the beginning.

[Polyfemus]

Thanks for the write up! Inalways wondered about a lot of those settings. Disappointed to read that most of them do nothing. I'll probably refer to this thread when I need to make custom wepons. Thanks!