[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[rfriar]

There are Perk and Skill Frameworks planning to be released as well. I hope it won’t take too much to make WARS work with those.

[antistar]

Hey Anti,

 

will it be possible to install Mods like TrueStorms with Wars without any problems?

 

I don't see why not. In fact mods that make environments darker would probably make the tactical lights and night-vision scopes more useful. ;)

 

 

There are Perk and Skill Frameworks planning to be released as well. I hope it won’t take too much to make WARS work with those.

 

It'd depend on exactly what they do and how they do it.

[antistar]

I've done the weight values and other stats for the remaining new/replacer weapons now; the M79, China Lake, Barrett M107 and Makeshift Anti-Materiel Rifle. The Makeshift AMR ranges from 20.7 to 45.5 lb and the M107 ranges from 28.0 to 39.1 lb. Both are quite slow to aim and have massive recoil.

 

So now there's the remaining weapons to rebalance, including working out the weights for... There are a couple of mods out there that aim to give the FO4 weapons more reasonable/believable/realistic/whatever weight values, and I'd hoped to use them as reference to speed this part up, but now that I've had a closer look at them, their values don't actually seem very accurate, unfortunately! I'll have to do the research myself - for the real-world weapons. For the fictional weapons I'll just make something up of course - based on how they look, what they do, and how I want to balance them.

 

For example I've been thinking of making laser weapons do slightly less damage than (say) 5.56x45mm weapons, but have no recoil and obviously no travel time; they're literally lasers. At the same time though I'll make them heavier than firearms they'd be compared against like the AR-15. For plasma weapons it may be that they'd be slightly more powerful than 5.56x45mm weapons, have lowish recoil, but with slow-moving projectiles and again be fairly heavy.

 

 

Oh - subsonic ammo has come up before in the thread, and it might turn out to be a thing in WARS (via AmmoTweaks) after all. Something I didn't realise - or had forgotten - until recently when isathar was talking about it is that it's not just weapon records and omods that can define a detection sound level (silent, quiet, normal, loud, very loud); projectile records have an option for it too. Combine that with a velocity value and even a check-box for "supersonic", and it sounds pretty promising.

 

"Guns" firearms in the vanilla game are all hit-scan so I guess it wouldn't have come up so much, but now... we may be able to have characters hear the crack of a passing bullet, even if they didn't hear the suppressed weapon it was fired from.

 

I don't want to promise anything as I haven't tested it out and don't know how well it would work in practice, but hey; hopefully.

[Moldy]

About plasma weapons. They operate by containing a portion of energized plasma inside an electromagnetic "bottle",projected by the weapon's superconducting barrel. In the old Winchester series of plasma weapons from classic Fallout,and the Plasma Caster of New Vegas,had a very obvious tube with pointed "claws" on the "muzzle" to facilitate this. When this "bottle" impacts a target,it disassociates,releasing the plasma within,which then impacts the target before its exposure to the atmosphere renders it harmless gas. Wouldn't plasma bolts,thusly,fly much faster than they do even now? You're practically shooting bottled lightning at the enemy. I'm not saying hitscan,obviously. But,maybe... A touch slower than subsonic ammo?

 

Further,realistically,wouldn't this make plasma weapons absolutely atrocious against armoured targets? They lack penetrating power. Plasma is an extremely inefficient medium for transmitting any kind of energy,as well. I'd imagine that a plasma bolt would cause absolutely ruinous damage to unprotected flesh,obviously; You're throwing a little sun at the sucker. But,there's nothing to suggest that this plasma bolt can actually penetrate a target,beyond in-universe pseudoscience. Meanwhile,lasers are designed to penetrate and cut things. While the trauma they inflict is minimal,by their very nature,they're capable of putting a small hole precisely where you need one,armour be damned,provided it's not mirrored.

 

With this science in mind,maybe have plasma weapons suffer against armour,while having laser weapons inherently penetrate it,if at all possible? This way,plasma weapons can see use in the wholesale slaughter of dangerous,yet unarmoured,enemies,while lasers can be used to kill armoured targets.

 

EDIT: Oh,and a lore thing,if you're planning on hitting the energy weapons with the renaming stick you plan to use on the ballistics. Red laser weapons are part of the AE-Series of laser guns; AER for rifles,AEP for pistols. I imagine you can use suffixes to identify further complexities to the weapon,determined by the barrel and muzzle; For example,a Laser Rifle with an Improved Automatic Barrel with an Improved Beam Splitter (Please,PLEASE reduce the spread! It's USELESS in the vanilla game! And maybe turn it into three beams,for lore consistency) might be named "Improved AER 9 Assault Tri-Beam". The plasma weapons in the game appear to be based on the Q-Series of Plasma Guns developed by Poseidon Energy,first introduced in Fallout 3. The Institute's laser gun is... I'll be honest; It needs to be smaller. The thing is prohibitively chunky. I can't use the damn thing,thanks to how much screen real estate it consumes. More on topic,the Institute laser gun seems to lack an official designation. However,the Institute being what it is,they'd likely name it the IEW-Series laser gun,or Institute Energy Weapon.

Edited December 16, 2017 by Moldy

[antistar]

I like the idea of lasers being armour-piercing and plasma being a hollow-point equivalent; thanks. There may be some variance there due to multiple ammo types via AmmoTweaks though; I guess we'll see.

 

Laser weapons will definitely use the AEP and AER naming convention. Hopefully I can work out something decent with the numeric suffixes. I'm not really sure what to do with the plasma weapon naming convention. "Q-35" is part of an experimental naming convention rather than a production name, as far as I know. Sort of like the US military's "XM" ("experimental model") thing, I guess? I remember plasma weapons being called "MPL-3" or similar in mods for FO3 - maybe derived from the MPLX? That's another prototype though. Still, MPL-whatever seems like a better fit, standing for "Military Plasma".

 

Like I've said before, energy weapons aren't really the focus of WARS, so I'm not going to have time to resize them like that I'm afraid. (Since it would probably require a redesign.)

 

On the Institute weapons though; my vague plan with those is for them to be somewhat lighter than AEP/AER lasers, and maybe a bit more powerful - but less durable.

[kuzi127]

Sone questions:

 

1. How many rechambering options are you planning on adding for all the different weapons? Something like the glock with many variations and lots of different caliber options makes sense, but things like the original combat rifle with options for pistol, small rifle and large rifle rounds make absolutely no sense. Realistically, going from say 5.56 to 7.62x39 from NW could be feasible given they're very close in length; a new barrel, bolt, and magazine would be needed. But going from 5.56 to .308 is absolutely not possible in the same weapon. Personally I'd like to see a "conversion kit" item (ideally only sold by weapons vendors) needed to craft these, as I doubt the average wastelander would have the knowledge to do it for anything besides pipe guns. Maybe have them craftable at the last rank of gun nut.

 

2. What do you think about the Universal Mods system from Cascadia? I've only just seen it in WastelandMelody's new Service Rifle mod, but the concept is really cool. Things like optics and rifle/pistol suppressors could be universal. I feel like a system like that would be right at home in WARS. No idea how they implemented it though; haven't looked at the esp yet.

[antistar]

I agree with you on the Combat Rifle. In fact the draft readme for WARS has this in it:

Mini-14
(Replaces the Combat Rifle)

The Combat Rifle is an indistinct mash-up, looking sort of - but not really - like parts of several different real-world guns. And despite being called a rifle, by default it uses .45 ACP - a pistol cartridge - though you can somehow transform it to use .308; a (much larger) rifle cartridge, without changing its appearance in the process. Overall it's akin to - when making a racing game - adding a generic, nondescript motorbike, naming it "motor car", and letting you swap out its motorbike tyres for truck tyres if you like. When faced with such a weird chimera of a gun, it was hard to know exactly what to replace it with. I went with the Mini-14 because it has a similar aesthetic to the vanilla Combat Rifle, it fits the American setting quite well, it's actually a rifle - perhaps even a "combat rifle" - and it would be another weapon using the 5.56x45mm cartridge; surprisingly under-utilised in FO4.

I don't want to be too snarky in the readme, but I do want to get across how silly the situation with the vanilla Combat Rifle is.

 

With re-chamber options, I don't want to go too crazy. Some weapons will have different calibre options if their real-world equivalents support those options, but I don't want to add new calibres to the game just because technically you can get AR-15s in .300 Blackout or 6.8mm SPC or whatever. I think I said this earlier in the thread, but my general rule of thumb is that unless it would be weird to not have a particular calibre (e.g. no 9x19mm for the Glock), I likely won't add it in.

 

Off the top of my head, there are these options (and some I'm forgetting I'm sure). Subject to change:

 

- Glock: 9x19mm, .45 ACP, 10mm Auto

- Walther PPK, Skorpion vz. 61: .32 ACP, .380 ACP

- M700 (Hunting) Rifle, Bolt-action Pipe Gun: .308, NOT .50 BMG, .30-06 (maybe; it'll be in AmmoTweaks, and I'd want it for asXas' M1 Garand, via patch)

- Pipe Gun: .380 ACP, 9x19mm

- Pipe Revolver: .38 Spc, .45 ACP

- Volkssturmgewehr: 7.92x33mm Kurz, 7.62x39mm (maybe)

 

I suppose 7.62x39mm for the Mini-14 is a possibility too (i.e. a Mini-30), but it might look a little odd with its usual 5.56x45mm mags, rather than an AK banana mag or whatever.

 

 

On this universal weapon mod system in Cascadia: I've heard about it a couple of times before and have tried to work out how they would get it to work. Get it to work well, anyway. Basically the weapons in such a system would all have to be made from scratch with that system in mind - for the sake of things like laser sights and (especially) reflex sights, at least. Other things like muzzle devices would be easier to work out.

 

The issue is that the camera offsets used to make different sight omods (iron sights, reflex sights, glow sights) line up properly in aim-down-sights mode are defined on the omod records themselves, and these offsets are going to be different for every weapon unless their relevant bits (grip and sights/attachment points) are in exactly the same place across all of those weapons... which is extremely unlikely.

 

Earlier on in WARS' development I wanted to do something similar - e.g. optics that attach via picatinny rails being universal across weapons of suitable size - but my idea was to have one loose mod (what you get in your inventory when you detach a weapon mod) shared by every instance of (say) the Railway Reflex Sight omod - so you could take it off the AR-15 and put it on the Mini-14, for example. Unfortunately you specifically can't do that. (See the Notes at the bottom of the page.)

 

This leaves you having to have one omod used across multiple weapons, which for universal sights omods can only work if the camera offset is not defined on the omod itself. The offset needs to be defined on another omod (e.g. the carry handle RIS mount in the case of WM's Service Rifle), or maybe on the weapon's zoom data record? I haven't really done anything with those, but I think they define the default camera offset for a weapon. In practical terms this forces you to (1) make all reflex sights have the same dimensions, with (2) the reticle lining up with the weapon's iron-sights. (Not the case with (1) or (2) for the reflex sights in WARS - intentionally.)

 

Otherwise you get awkward stuff like the set-up with the carry handle RIS mount in the Service Rifle mod. Its omod changes the camera offset to line up with the reflex sights when they're attached to it, but if you don't then go and attach one of those reflex sights (which have the same dimensions as each other incidentally, like I was saying), you're left looking down the empty space above the weapon when you press the aim-down-sights button.

 

 

It's a real shame these technical obstacles are in the way, because otherwise I'd like to do something similar!

[Nuclear3D]

To be honest the mini 30 magazine isnt really different looking than a 5.56 magazine the curvature is a bit different because of 7.62x39 but it isnt drastically different because mini 14 and pretty much all 7.62X39 rifles that use AR-15 type magazines are like that.

 

Mini 30

 

Mini 14

 

And just because

 

AR-15 7.62x39

 

AR-15 5.56

Edited December 21, 2017 by Nuclear191

[Anarchi25]

Sorry if you've already answered this in the past but console players don't have access to the mod that adds in different ammo types (sadly) so will WARS come with its own cilibres mod? Or will they have just a simpler version of the mod using the vanilla ammo?

Absolutely astounding work so far, simply amazing.

[antistar]

To be honest the mini 30 magazine isnt really different looking than a 5.56 magazine the curvature is a bit different because of 7.62x39 but it isnt drastically different because mini 14 and pretty much all 7.62X39 rifles that use AR-15 type magazines are like that.

Well hey, maybe a Mini-30 will end up being a thing in WARS after all. We'll see when I get to doing the re-chamber options, which will probably be when the AmmoTweaks update is out.

 

Speaking of AmmoTweaks...

 

 

Sorry if you've already answered this in the past but console players don't have access to the mod that adds in different ammo types (sadly) so will WARS come with its own cilibres mod? Or will they have just a simpler version of the mod using the vanilla ammo?

Absolutely astounding work so far, simply amazing.

This is covered in the FAQ in the second post, more or less.

 

I'm not just using AmmoTweaks for the new ammo types it adds; I could do that myself. The plan is for WARS to rely on a lot of the framework in AmmoTweaks (ammo type switching and fire mode switching via hotkeys, among other things), so separating it won't be a quick or simple thing to do. I'm afraid that means no XB1 version of WARS unless a "lite" version of AmmoTweaks is made that could work on XB1.