[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[Shanzyboo]

I see Antistar, well who knows, maybe if that's something you do find out how to implement and it gets implemented, instructions on how to do it would be great so a variety of knife mods could be made compatible.

 

Celdorash call me cynical but I don't personally think it's going to happen, Bethesda has never really cared about the modding community unless you take one of their money makers for yourself, at best they release tools for mod authors to make their mods, beyond that they usually aren't involved, it also seems like each new title they release in a series they take away more than they give, this is something I've observed in both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. New Vegas had a variety of weapons, weapon mods and ammunition crafting, Fallout 4 is not so varied in weapons and ammunition crafting was lost altogether, they also did very little for lever and pump action firearms, they couldn't even be bothered to do their lever action rifles reload animations properly. To top it all off they seldom ever accredit a mod author for an idea came up by the mod author that they later implemented, like frostbite and hypothermia in Skyrim SE survival mode, an idea that was originally Cheskos for the Frostfall mod, it's sad but this is normally how it goes.

 

I love the modding community for a lot of the amazing things brought into the game, except for the toxic ones obviously, but those can be ignored, for Fallout I always look for the weapons.

[antistar]

The fact they they have interviewed you gives me hope that the next major fallout release might take into account some of the issues with the systems in the game regarding animations and weapon functionality. They always seem to pull a lot from modding in their previous releases. My super uber pipe dream hope is that they will reimagine their survival difficulty or mode to be more functionally similar to WARS in regards to health values and the like. Probably a bit of stretch to make such hopeful statements this far out, but I can only hope that this sort of thing is taken into account even for perhaps it's own specific difficulty mode.

I see Antistar, well who knows, maybe if that's something you do find out how to implement and it gets implemented, instructions on how to do it would be great so a variety of knife mods could be made compatible.

 

Celdorash call me cynical but I don't personally think it's going to happen, Bethesda has never really cared about the modding community unless you take one of their money makers for yourself, at best they release tools for mod authors to make their mods, beyond that they usually aren't involved, it also seems like each new title they release in a series they take away more than they give, this is something I've observed in both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. New Vegas had a variety of weapons, weapon mods and ammunition crafting, Fallout 4 is not so varied in weapons and ammunition crafting was lost altogether, they also did very little for lever and pump action firearms, they couldn't even be bothered to do their lever action rifles reload animations properly. To top it all off they seldom ever accredit a mod author for an idea came up by the mod author that they later implemented, like frostbite and hypothermia in Skyrim SE survival mode, an idea that was originally Cheskos for the Frostfall mod, it's sad but this is normally how it goes.

 

I love the modding community for a lot of the amazing things brought into the game, except for the toxic ones obviously, but those can be ignored, for Fallout I always look for the weapons.

The actual omods and nif files for the off-hand knives with the M1911 would be set up like basically any other bayonets, so a bit of copy-pasting in Nifskope - and the creation of an add-on plugin - should do it when it comes to supporting other knives.

 

 

On the other stuff there:

 

There are definitely design and production-related decisions in BGS' games that I'll criticise - and it feels like there are more and more of them as time goes on - but supporting the modding community isn't one of them. Since Morrowind they've gone above and beyond what the vast majority of studios do in that area. I have worked in the industry before so I know how rough internal tools can be. Polishing those up and releasing them to the public is a lot of work beyond just releasing the game that they don't have to do, strictly speaking. Bringing mods to the console versions of their games in recent times - even if the interface/systems/etc aren't as good as what we're used to with the third-party tools we enjoy on PC - makes me hopeful that they'll continue to improve in that area.

 

I do criticise BGS for over-simplifying their games as time goes on though (e.g. spell creation in Morrowind->Oblivion->Skyrim, removing skill stats in Skyrim and Fallout 4). Plus the stuff I wish they'd adopted from New Vegas that Shanzyboo mentions there. That's all a worrying trend.

 

At the same time, BGS always do some things that surprise me. I didn't expect the settlement building stuff in FO4, and I didn't even dare dream of a weapon modification system as good as the one in FO4 either. (Even if most of the weapons they used that system for were uninspiring in my opinion.) I didn't expect them to add a "Survival" mode to FO4 after release - even if, again, I was disappointed in a lot of how they went about it. (I went into more detail on that in the Commentary part of the second post in the PEACE WIP thread.)

 

Knowing what we know now, it seems likely that FO4's survival mode was kind of a byproduct of those mechanics being designed for FO76 around that time... though I don't know, maybe it instead came out of one of their game jams and they liked it enough to bring it across to FO76 too. Either way, it makes me hopeful that it will be something they think about and integrate into their next games earlier in their development cycles. (I hope they do a better job next time, in other words.)

[Wylight]

I think the survival mode's conception was indeed during the game jam as far as I remember. A couple of developers had pitched the idea during development I believe but it was never fully developed until the game jam after release. Edited June 29, 2020 by Wylight

[SHOXXXYY]

Hello Antistar,

 

you said that you will write a Tutorial about how you can make other Weapon Mods compatible with WARS.

So, is that something complicated that only a "Modder" can do or will it be fairly simple so guys like me can do it as well with a few tweaks?

 

Thanks.

Edited July 2, 2020 by SHOXXXYY

[antistar]

I expect that adding WARS support to third-party weapon mod might be somewhere between beginner and intermediate difficulty. It's a little hard for me to judge because I've been doing this sort of thing for a while and more or less know what I'm doing.

 

Obviously the idea with the tutorial is that it will tell you what you need to do, though. I think adding WARS support to something will require a lot of little changes - lots of steps - but the steps themselves aren't very complicated. Someone who's never even opened the Creation Kit before or flees in terror at the mere mention of FO4Edit may find it overwhelming... but I don't think it'll be too hard.

[SHOXXXYY]

Thanks for the answer!

Well i'm just gonna try it when the time comes ^^

[Longstrider92]

Well the best part of that is that neither is very hard to work with you just have to take the time to learn them and there are guides out there that you can access with a simple google search.

[Moldy]

So,you want an M60 with a visible belt of ammo,and it belches out spent links,right? That's what's keeping you from putting a proper MG into the game? Well,lookie what I found on the Hot Files during my daily visit... According to the mod author,the ammo type is necessary for it to spit out links. As for the belt,I think that's a clever bit of animation sleight of hand to make it look like it's feeding in.

[antistar]

Oh yeah, I saw that pop up; looks very nice - based on art assets from Rising Storm 2, of course.

 

Earlier (notably before I started doing animations for FO4 myself) I doubted it was possible to believably animate belted ammo in FO4 due to the limited number of "bones" we have to work with, but I was happy to be proven wrong by War Daddy with his animations for this earlier M60 mod by Davis237834. Seems like they're the same animations used in this newer M60 mod (though edited, apparently), and like you said they are cleverly done to get around the limitations in FO4, yeah.

 

I think I said this earlier in reference to Davis' M60 mod, but I'm more likely to support that M60 (or this newer one) via a patch than I am to try for integrating one in WARS itself.

 

 

While I'm here; the M1911 is coming along well. I'm just about finished with all the modelling. Unless I'm forgetting something, I only need to do the UV mapping for the "tactical" flashlight and then it'll be time to bring it all into Substance Painter.

[Shanzyboo]

Lots of nice weapon mods have been popping up on nexus lately, Noniacs M1928A1, Hypers Giat Famas, Fallout Londons Luger P08, Winchester 1892 etc. Hopefully many more weapons get brought into Fallout 4, I'm about to try out Nadies M60.

 

Nice to hear the M1911 is coming along well, on a side note any chance for a standalone so I can try to break..I mean hem..test it out (;