[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[Zotman5]

If this mod ever gets finished I will reload FO4 for shure.

[Wylight]

I am quite frankly beginning to think that ammotweaks update is not coming, at least not in a relevant timeframe before everyone else has already moved on to the next Bethesda game over the horizon. I've seen one too many mods get abandoned and never be finished.

[antistar]

I hear from isathar periodically about how the AmmoTweaks update is going, so I have more confidence that it will be released.

 

Pretty soon now though I am going to start working on utilising the AmmoTweaks v1 framework so that I can, at the very least, get WARS to a place where I can do an extended play-test. (I.e. play through the game normally with it installed.) Like I was saying a couple of pages back though, this will most likely be as an add-on plugin for WARS, at least initially - so that it would be easier for me to move from using AmmoTweaks v1 to using v2. (I'd only need to ditch the add-on plugin, rather than painstakingly fish out the v1 integration stuff.)

 

Should it get to the point where WARS is basically ready to go, but it seems like AmmoTweaks v2 isn't, I'll probably have to go ahead with the closed beta and even the public release while using AmmoTweaks v1.

 

That's definitely not my preferred outcome; once WARS is in other people's hands, it becomes much more disruptive to switch from AmmoTweaks v1 to v2. Especially if you start to consider patches to support third-party weapon mods, and the tutorial I'll be writing on how to do those patches.

 

Hey, we'll see how it goes, though.

 

 

Anyway, while I'm here; I haven't been sitting on my hands. Beyond some minor tweaks and features in WARS, lately I've been working on PEACE. It's pretty close to being ready to go now (pending proper testing). I think I'll go post an update in the PEACE WIP thread right now, actually.

[antistar]

So... in the Planned Features part of the second post in the thread, I've had this bit sitting there since the start of the project:

- More plausible ammo crafting using the Contraptions Ammunition Plant.
--- Make ammo from brass, powder and lead rather than copper, fertilizer and steel.
--- Okay some recipes may still call for copper or steel, but you get my point.
--- Will likely feature new items like casings and primers.
--- Some calibres may require schematics to be unlocked for crafting, as in my Ammo Crafting Schematics mod for FNV.
--- Ammo can be broken down into components.
--- The ideal result of all this is that you'd be able to build a factory that takes ammo you don't want as an input, and then outputs your desired ammo.

I don't think I've brought it up very often, but this is a feature I'm pretty keen on having in there. I want to build an ammo factory! A proper one; one that isn't just a single machine that slaps some steel and cow manure together and calls it ammunition.

In the continued interests of working on something that's less likely to have to be thrown out or too heavily re-jigged once the AmmoTweaks update is available, I started working on the ammo crafting side of things recently. (Because this is something that's going to be folded into the AmmoTweaks integration part of WARS one way or another.)

I just finished the script for the Ammo Scrapper machine. It's based on the ammo scrapper script in Better Manufacturing, though relatively heavily changed. (Incidentally I'll almost certainly be making compatibility patches for WARS/PEACE and both Better Manufacturing and Manufacturing Extended, because I think they're great.)

In WARS, the Ammo Scrapper will take small ammo and break down ten rounds at a time into their components. (Large ammo like missiles and mini-nukes will be one at a time.) For ballistic ammo these components would typically be:

- Components making up the bullets - so lead, steel, copper, etc.
- A calibre-appropriate "box of casings x10" item. (Likely with individual casings set as components for that item since you'd be recovering them individually from firing weapons.)
- Pistol/rifle/shotshell powder. (Or maybe just pistol/rifle powder, as in New Vegas. Apparently shotshell powder can be used in some pistol cartridges in the real-world too?)
- A "tray of primers x10" item, in the appropriate variety: Small Pistol, Large Pistol, Small Rifle, Large Rifle, Shotshell or .50 BMG.

These all take specific recipes, as you might expect - basically I'm matching an ammo record to an input quantity and a levelled list for output - so anything that isn't specifically supported by the machine as something that can be scrapped will instead just pass through the machine.

This includes any leftover scrappable ammo that doesn't neatly divide by ten; that will pass out the front because otherwise it ends up essentially "jamming" the machine; stopping it from processing any more ammo or outputting anything else. That's down to the vagaries of how the script works (specifically the DropFirstObject function), and I actually don't mind so much. You could scoop up the leftover ammo with a sorter placed after the Ammo Scrapper in the line, and then re-insert it in the machine or whatever else you wanted. (Or only input ammo in multiples of ten to begin with, I guess.) It makes for more interesting factories, which is actually exactly what I'm after here. I suspect the alternative would be a completely overhauled script that would be much heavier on the script engine.


Other planned machines are:

- Casings/primers scrapper
- Casings builder
- Primer builder
- A separate builder for each calibre. (To handle all the ammo sub-types like AP, HP, etc.)

That last one is also so that builders for more powerful calibres can require higher ranks in Gun Nut to build. It would also kind of alleviate the limitation that vanilla Ammo Plants have where all builders on the same power network receive the same instructions from a terminal; you can't set each of them to produce different ammo types.

 

If you're familiar with my Ammo Crafting Schematics (ACS) mod - and oh man, looking at its release date, it's exactly one month off from its tenth anniversary, oof - you'll know that its titular feature is that you need to find schematics for each calibre to be able to craft special ammo sub-types (AP, HP, etc again). I'm thinking of doing the same thing here, only you get the "schematics" by finding the Guns and Bullets magazines - replacing the vanilla critical hit damage bonus. Maybe I'd do the same with Tesla Science for Energy weapon ammo too.

 

If I go that route, it'd make the magazines pretty important if you care about the associated weapons, so I'm also considering adding notes you can buy (or maybe find too?) that provide tip-offs as to where to find each magazine. In other words, giving you a Misc quest with an objective marker pointing at the magazine.

 

 

I think all this should make for some pretty interesting and satisfying factory building and ammo crafting.

 

 

Oh - something else I'm considering bringing back from New Vegas are the ammo boxes containing surplus ammo in bulk. I think buying a big heavy "spam can" of crappy surplus ammo - or maybe rarely finding one in a pre-war safe or something - and lugging it back to base to distribute to your settlers or process into something better in your ammo factory - would be fun. It'd be dead easy to bang out some art assets for those while I'm doing the trays of primers and whatnot.

[Mavkiel]

Sounds neat. God knows I miss the surplus ammo from vegas. Mainly because I tend to abuse a minigun, and that chews through ammo fast. The factory sounds really neat as well. Never got into building my own ammo. Have you considered making it a sim settlements type plot? I could see it working very well with it, each level of the plot increasing the caliber or number of bullets.

[antistar]

As it happens I'll be changing 5mm ammo to be 7.62x51mm Surplus, so miniguns in WARS will typically be found loaded with surplus ammo. :)

 

I don't really see individual (or collections of) Contraptions machines working well as Sim Settlements plots; the appeal of making factories here (as I see it) is piecing together a system from individual parts that does exactly what you want it to.

 

I guess a plot that produces ammo from resources could work - but surely there must already be plots for Sim Settlements that do that, right? It's not what I'm focussing on here, anyway.

[Winterworld19]

Hey there Antistar! How the grenade launcher (like M203)'s an animation so far (since the last time there is a video of Hitman showcase a wip of M203 animation way back.)? Since that video post on youtube, there is another person that works on M203 for the SERP mods (in which the animator is i_code_i for SERP mod by nadie2283. Here is the link if you wanted to lookup more about it.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/46267?tab=description

 

 

Also, are you planning to work on an animation of the grenade launcher attachment for the AKM?

[antistar]

I can't remember if Hitman posted a video of his M203 animations, but yeah; I did. (... Quite a while ago.)

 

SREP has a lot of great stuff in it, from what I've seen. When it comes to the M203, I prefer Hitman's animations, though SREP's M203 does have one up on WARS there since it has third-person animations. Most of Hitman's sets in WARS lack third-person animations, actually; they were done fairly early on, when it was less common to do them.

 

The animation sets I've done (excepting the Thompson) all have third-person anims, though - and if I get time at some point (I'm leaning towards after WARS' release), I might do third-person anims for the sets by Hitman that lack them.

 

I don't know about doing a GP-25 (or whichever variant) set; I don't have an AK in WARS to begin with. (Besides the tweaks to the Handmade AKM, as it's called in WARS.) I did do animations for the SA80 L123A2 UGL, though.

 

 

 

In other news, I got a new computer yesterday. The last time was ~7.5 years ago (except for the video card - a GTX 1060, from ~4 years ago), so it was well overdue. I've been flat-out trying to migrate everything across to the new computer, including all my tweaks, shortcuts, monitoring software, etc. It's starting to take shape, but so far it's mostly felt like driving a car with the dashboard taped over, while wearing boxing gloves. So many things that I'm so used to that I forgot they're not default.

 

It's always stressful getting a new computer. It's like moving house.

 

So I have to reinstall Fallout 4 (plus tweaks and mods obviously) and all the tools I use. On the plus side, I expect having a CPU that's not from 2013 will speed up my work a fair bit. At least I hope so; so much time in the Creation Kit has been spent waiting for records to open for editing. That's typically because the record has at least one drop-down menu that lets you choose from potentially hundreds of other records, and the CK takes it time to enumerate them all even if you're not opening up that record to do anything with that drop-down.

 

Hopefully that kind of thing will be faster? It could just be that the CK isn't well optimised in some places. It'll be interesting to see.

[Winterworld19]

I had the experience of issue of opening up the CK recently, but I was able to fix it when I disable any of reshade or/and enb (thanks to the F0x01), then it will open the CK, although it takes a little bit longer for loading up the CK.

 

Also, congrats to your new computer!

[Shanzyboo]

I like the progress Nadies made with SREP, theirs still more to do with it since it's still in beta of course, like making the leaf sight usable, though your AR15 has a true A2/3/4 style receiver with the fencing, forward assist and gas block, SREP kinda misses out on this.

 

Oh..and I hope you're happy Antistar, sending a terminator to kill me, taken completely by surprise XD.