Pyromaniac and plasma ammo?

[miguick]

In my quest to learn about and tweak every little detail of Fallout New Vegas' item mechanics, I've come across a pair of cases that, while of little impact to the flow of the game in their default state, have me puzzled about how could they be improved.

It more or less boils down to "flavor" special effects on ammunition types, and how they should interact with things like perks and resistances. As you may know, quite a few kinds of ammo have an incendiary variant, and grenade munitions have pulse and plasma variants in the GRA addon.

For incendiary ammo, these work by applying a fire effect on the actor from the ammo's script, so the enemy receives a bit of extra fire damage over time after the impact. However, despite what the wiki says, I haven't noticed any additional damage from this kind of ammo when having the Pyromaniac perk. This perk only references the PerkPyromaniacWeapons formID list, and its entry point simply checks for the perk owner's weapon being in it. There are also PerkPyromaniacAmmo and PerkPyromaniacWeaponsUsingAmmo lists which would be the ones you'd think would handle those cases, but those lists that are not used anywhere in the game that I can see.
I tested with an anti-materiel rifle and incendiary 50 MG ammo, which are present in those unused lists by default, and got no difference than with regular 50 MG, neither in the bullet's impact damage when having pyromaniac, nor in the extra fire damage when compared with and without pyromaniac. That second part about the fire damage makes sense, since Pyromaniac only increases damage from the weapon, not from any additional fire effects it may cause.
But assuming I'm right in these tests and those lists indeed don't help, if I wanted to make Pyromaniac increase the damage done by incendiary ammo, how could i go about it? I don't think I could check the ammo directly in the perk since there are no condition functions for it that i can see, not in NVSE, JIP or Lutana. I could add additional fire damage to the effects applied by those ammos, but again I don't know how to reliably conditionalize it to the attacker having the Pyromaniac perk. The conditions in actor effects can check for stuff on the combat target, but if the attacker has any other combat target than the player (sneak attacks, changing the target in combat), the extra fire damage disappears.

Is there any other more convoluted solution you can think of? Could I, for example, check who the attacker is in the ammo's script, so that I can reliably apply extra fire damage from there only if the attacker has the Pyromaniac perk?

 

 

Next is plasma explosive munitions, where we have pulse and plasma variants. Pulse explosives work by attaching a damaging effect to the explosion with effects conditionalized to the targets being robots or wearing power armor. I could write a boring rant about how unfortunate is that this method doesn't take advantage of the EMP Resistance stat, but for the purposes of standard gameplay, it is more than fine enough, and in fact kind of avoids the problems that plasma ammunition present.

The way explosive weapons work, from what I gathered and as you may know, is that the damage from the explosion of the projectile of the weapon (following me there? :P) is "merged" with the weapon's own damage, to calculate any modifications from skills, perks, resistances, etc. So you have plasma grenades, whose weapon entry has a damage of 1, and which is simply the damage caused by it impacting on an actor, and then you have the explosion of their projectile with a damage of 225, and that's what's actually used to calculate their DAM and DPS. And since plasma Grenades have their Resist Type set to Energy Resistance, actors with 100 in this stat will be immune to the explosion's damage as expected (and to the 1 pt of damage from the grenade impacting them, but that's kind of an acceptable side effect)

So we reach plasma ammunition for the grenade launchers and machineguns. These simply work by using a different projectile with a different explosion and graphic effects, but since they are still governed by the weapon that fires them, they do not operate under the rules for plasma grenades and mines. Their damage is not modified by the target's energy resistance, and a critical death does not cause them to 'gooify'.

I do not see any easy solutions to change this in this case. While I could go the route of pulse explosives and have them deal damage through an 'Energy Damage' effect instead of through their explosion, I find that undesirable, since pulse ammo is already underpowered enough considering the effects' damage does not enter into damage calculations from skills and perks. I tried attaching a 'gooify' script to them so at least i could have special crit kills, but I think scripts on ammo run before the damage is dealt and thus I wouldn't be able to check if the explosion killed them (and would GetLastHitCritical work there either?). An easy fix could be changing the weapon's resist type while plasma ammo is equipped, since I doubt many enemies would be using grenade launchers at the same time the player does, but overall I'm more interested in the 'gooification' since I doubt any enemy has energy resistance in the standard game.

 

 

I do realize these are all kind of very technical and very minor issues, if they are issues at all. I'm posting it here since it would seem the BGS FNV section is very quiet lately, so perhaps I can get more input here. I've you've read through all of this drivel, and still want to contribute something, I'd be grateful.