[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[Mavkiel]

Thanks for the information! Yeah those stairs are brutal things, funny thing is four people in the office fell down those same stairs. Older building, and oddly shaped stairs.

[nexusguy]

Hey it's just occured to me now, since WARS replaces all weapons, does that mean you'll add new animations for super mutants? I mean, they used the old assault rifle, so you might need to do that, or you've found other solution?

[antistar]

To avoid needing to make special animations for the super mutants, I've split the (semi/auto) Pipe Gun into two weapons; the "Pipe Pistol" that uses pistol calibres (.380 ACP and 9x19mm), and the "Pipe Rifle" that uses rifle calibres (5.56x45mm, 7.92x33mmK and 7.62x39mm). They still share the same weapon mods, though.

 

Super mutants get the Pipe Rifle to make up for no longer having the "Assault Rifle".

[nexusguy]

Oh that's a neat idea! Good work!

[antistar]

I just uploaded a video showing off the Physical Mags system I've been talking about recently:

 

- Physical Mags System

[Mavkiel]

Looks nice, combined with the auto cleanup via the settler system gets rid of any bloating concerns. I assume the "awful" in the video describes weapon condition? Obvious questions would be, what effect does the condition have? Jamming? Reduced damage? Any graphical indication of quality?

[nexusguy]

Hey quick question, you mentioned 7.92x33mmK and 7.62x39mm, are you going to add 7.62×51mm NATO as well?

[antistar]

Looks nice, combined with the auto cleanup via the settler system gets rid of any bloating concerns. I assume the "awful" in the video describes weapon condition? Obvious questions would be, what effect does the condition have? Jamming? Reduced damage? Any graphical indication of quality?

The "Awful" part refers to Receiver condition/quality, and I'll paste in the part from the readme draft describing this (see the second post of the thread for basically the rest of the readme draft):

 

- Receiver mods have been simplified:

--- Each weapon now has five receiver options representing different condition/quality levels:

----- Awful (-20% DAM)

----- Poor (-10% DAM)

----- Average (No effect)

----- Good (+10% DAM)

----- Perfect (+20% DAM)

----- (There are additional effects here for some weapons, such as reload speed and fire speed.)

--- Semi vs full-auto options have been moved to the Trigger Group mod slot.

--- Re-chamber options have been moved to the Ammo Type mod slot.

--- "Ammo effect" options like armour-piercing have been moved to ammo sub-types.

 

 

 

There's actually two different types of condition in WARS - for ranged weapons, at least; first, the mechanical quality/condition of the weapon (or how damaged it is) and second, how dirty the weapon currently is. (This was mainly inspired by 7.62 High Calibre, but also kind of by Cataclysm DDA.) Anyway I'll post in another part from the readme here:

 

Weapons have a "condition" stat ("COND" on the HUD) that decreases as the weapons are used. Ranged weapons get dirty, and melee weapons get damaged. These condition levels are as follows:

 

- Ranged:

--- Filthy (Inoperable)

--- Very Dirty (Damage Risk)

--- Dirty

--- Clean

--- Pristine

 

-Melee:

--- Broken

--- Weathered

--- Worn

--- Good

--- Reinforced

 

 

- Weapons in increasingly poor condition will suffer increasing stat penalties.

--- "Filthy" Ranged weapons can't be used until they are cleaned.

--- Broken Melee weapons will do virtually no damage until they are repaired.

 

- Ranged weapons in "Very Dirty" condition have a chance (that increases as the weapon gets dirtier) to suffer permanent damage when they are reloaded.

--- When damaged, the weapon's receiver quality level (Awful, Poor, Average, Good, Perfect) is stepped down one level. E.g. from Good to Average.

--- Weapons with an "Awful" receiver will still function, and can't receive any further permanent damage. (The weapon will still stop working if it becomes "Filthy", however.)

--- The only way to repair this damage is to swap in a better quality receiver at a workbench.

--- The check for permanent damage occurs on reload (as opposed to when the weapon is fired) in order to avoid a few technical issues, and also just to be less harsh.

----- Note that swapping ammo prompts a reload, however.

 

 

 

The stat penalties for a ranged weapon getting dirty are actually relatively mild. Mostly some minor penalties to reload speed and accuracy. The main thing is to not let a weapon become Very Dirty, because then it will start suffering permanent damage if you keep using it. And of course it will completely jam up if it becomes Filthy.

 

Beyond that I don't currently have jamming in there. Without something like custom "jam-clearing" animations and behaviour, I don't think it would work well. Needing to reload the weapon is a kludge that some games/mods use to represent clearing a jam, but with other stuff happening in WARS when you reload (like the whole Physical Mags system), it could become messy.

 

 

A visual representation of how dirty/damaged a weapon is is something I've thought about. Something like how it works in Far Cry 2 would be nice. Theoretically it's easy to generate different levels of rust/dirt in Substance Painter, but a different set of textures for every quality/condition level for every weapon would balloon the mod's file-size out like nothing else. It would be gigantic. Not to mention unimaginably tedious to implement.

 

It actually looks like vanilla FO4 was trying to do something like that more procedurally (with the Pipe weapons, if nothing else); similarly to how the different colours of Combat Armour and whatnot work. It's just that it works very poorly; the game's material system and/or shaders and whatever else just aren't up to the task.

 

 

Hey quick question, you mentioned 7.92x33mmK and 7.62x39mm, are you going to add 7.62×51mm NATO as well?

Yes, .308 Win and 7.62x51mm are considered to be the same Ammo Type in WARS, with different varieties of each making up different sub-types of that ammo type. Since I'm on a copy-pasting spree, I'll paste in this bit from the readme on it, listing the sub-types:

 

- .308 Winchester (.308 Win) / 7.62x51mm

- (.308 and 7.62x51mm are similar enough that - in WARS if not in reality - any firearm that can use one can also use the other.)

--- .308 Win FMJ

--- .308 Win JHP

--- .308 Win JSP

--- 7.62x51mm AP

--- 7.62x51mm Match

--- 7.62x51mm Surplus (SURP)

--- 7.62x51mm Tracer

 

 

 

7.62x51mm Surplus is actually (technically) the vanilla 5mm ammo, renamed - and with all its stats and whatnot changed. It's what miniguns spawn with - though they can use the other .308 Win / 7.62x51mm sub-types too.

 

It's going to be interesting to see if my minigun rebalance works out in practice. With it using .308 Win / 7.62x51mm ammo now, it's absolutely devastating - but it also has some powerful, chaotic recoil, and is extremely heavy. The Physical Mags system applies to it, too; it takes 300-round ammo drums, which themselves are pretty heavy. (10 lb each, at the moment.)

 

It also has a Strength requirement of 10, so most characters will need to be in power armour if they want to move at more than a crawl while carrying one.

[nexusguy]

Awesome! Tks for the answer! Yeah 308 and 762 NATO are almost interchangeable, though there were some exceptions. Anyway, it's good to see the mod progressing so much! Can't wait to start a new playthrough with it, btw, did you manage to finish the patch tutorial you talked about?

[antistar]

I think probably the majority of the tutorial is done, but definitely not all of it. Something I'm not covering in it - at least for now - is how to add new ammo types. I talk about that a bit in the tutorial intro, and I'll paste that in here, actually:

This tutorial does not currently cover how to add new ammo types to WARS' system. The ammo setup in WARS is quite complicated, and it takes a lot of work to give a new calibre/type the same range of features as the existing ammo types. E.g. multiple ammo sub-types, the framework to support those sub-types, factory machine crafting, perk mag/s unlocking sub-type crafting, etc.

If there's a lot of demand for it, I can see if I'll have time to add that to the tutorial, but it would take a lot to describe it all. If you happen to be interested in adding WARS support for a new ammo type, I'd encourage you to first have a look at the WARS plugin/s to see how it's handled. You may be able to work it out without a tutorial.

The ideal would (usually?) be to have new ammo types be part of WARS itself, so that multiple weapon mod support patches could make use of the same ammo type – or for there to be something like an add-on for WARS that adds a bunch of new ammo types and acts as a common master for other weapon mods/patches to use.

That would be a lot of work, though; I can't promise to do that myself, and I wouldn't ask/expect others to have time for it either.

(Having said all that, more basic support for new ammo types – such as just the framework to have multiple ammo sub-types and be able to swap between them – may be easier to manage. We'll see how things go.)

I'm not looking to cover obscure - or even relatively obscure - calibres just for the hell of it. Like, I don't think we really need .300 AAC Blackout in there just because it exists.

 

Some more common calibres that aren't currently covered by WARS though are (off the top of my head):

 

.22 LR

.32 ACP

9x18mm

.50 AE

5.45x39mm

9x39mm

7.62x54mmR

.30-06

 

(Some of those are more on the "common in computer games" side of things, but that's what we're talking about of course, so...)