[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[antistar]

As a bit of an update:

I'm in the middle of adding support for the FN FAL in the "WARS - Lend-Lease" add-on. There's quite a lot to do there - it's a very detailed mod. So many different parts of the weapon separated out into customisable mods; handguard, pistol grip, buttstock, carry handle, dust cover, bipod, etc, etc.

That made the research part where I work out how much all the different parts weigh pretty time-consuming. It was helped along tremendously by the discovery that the DSA website lists the weight of all the parts they have on there, though. That was a gold-mine. Still a lot of work, of course - and it didn't cover everything that's in the mod.

Now I'm going through and working out what the stats for the different parts will be in WARS. I'm setting it up to fit in with all the other weapons in WARS obviously, but the FAL being divided up into so many separate parts makes it a bit different. E.g. what do I do with carry handles? Anything? I ended up giving them -5% Wear Rate, the vague idea being that they allow you to handle the weapon while putting less wear on other parts of it.

I gave the bipod -5% Recoil but also -10% Aim Speed, the idea being that even if you can't actually deploy and use bipods in FO4, it's at least putting some more weight out front.

Anyway, while doing this I'm also working to finish off the WARS support tutorial, and that always feels like it takes a lot of time. Feels necessary though. People will want to use their favourite weapon mods!


Prior to this work on WARS - Lend-Lease, the general weapon testing went well. (This was just summoning some enemies in QASmoke and trying different weapons/ammo sub-types on them.) Pistols/SMGs are good on small creatures - or even on big creatures if you use JHP and they don't have chitin or scales - but they fall off in usefulness when it comes to armoured targets. Mid-tier armoured targets can be taken out with 5.56x45mm FMJ or whatever, but it'll take much less ammo expenditure if you're using AP ammo. You'll definitely want to use AP on deathclaws and sentry bots and whatnot. (Though ideally you'd have Pulse grenades/rounds to use on the robots.)

That all seems to be working basically the way I want!

I did turn up a bug during testing that I don't know the cause of, though. Hopefully it's a rare one; I wasn't able to reproduce it. The effect that controls Attack Mode switching for a melee weapon got stuck on the player somehow when I switched away from the weapon, and interfered with the Fire Mode switching on ranged weapons. (Same hotkey.)

Took me a while to work that one out. Fortunately it can be fixed by just equipping the weapon the stuck effect was from again. The Active Effects on HUD mod makes it easy to see which weapon the stuck effect is from; it adds a new "Effects" tab in the Pip-Boy that the effect shows up in. I've made a note of this stuff in the Known Issues section of the draft readme.

 

 

Anyway, back to work on WARS - Lend-Lease. (If anyone is wondering why I'm doing a couple of weapons for this third-party weapon support add-on before releasing WARS, it's because they're weapons that I think need to be in the line-up. E.g. there was a conspicuous empty space where a battle rifle should be - hence the FN FAL. Going through the process of supporting a third-party weapon mod myself also makes it easier for me to work out what needs to be covered in the tutorial.)

[SpartanF043]

Don't know if this is been asked by others before but are you planning to increase the effective range of shotgun? I heard in reality shotgun actually have a effective range on par with most pistols. Can't recall about fallout 4 since I haven't play it for a years (was waiting for WARS but didn't expect it will take so many years lol) but recently I'm playing fallout 3 and it seems the combat shotgun only has a effective range that just a little further than point-blank

[antistar]

Yes, I did tighten the spread on the shotguns a bit. I reduced their base spread from 12 to 10. I also made the out-of-range damage multiplier much less harsh, changing it from 0.1 to 0.4. (Most weapons use 0.5.)

 

WARS does give firearm projectiles realistic values for velocity though, and makes them be affected by gravity (harder to judge how realistic the gravity influence is, however), so technically shotguns may have less range than vanilla since their projectiles aren't treated like lasers anymore, but practically speaking... their effective range should be a bit higher now.

 

 

And same re: how long WARS (and PEACE) have taken to make. AmmoTweaks v2 not reaching release was quite a blow; it added years to the development time of WARS. It's why I wanted to use AmmoTweaks v2 in the first place; without it I needed to create or recreate a huge amount of stuff myself, adding massively to my workload. Again though, I don't want to blame isathar for that; it's just how things turned out.

 

I'm dying to actually play FO4 again - and to play the DLC for the first time. Not long now though.

[Mavkiel]

Neat think you will done by Thanksgiving? My new computer should hopefully arrive by then :laugh:

[WaterHazard]

And how's progress? The FAL is balanced along with other WARS weapons?

[antistar]

Neat think you will done by Thanksgiving? My new computer should hopefully arrive by then :laugh:

Oh no, definitely not; you'd all know if a full release of WARS was only days away. ;)

 

I'd actually been wondering if if might be out by the end of the year - and it's possible that the closed beta might start by then - but it's more likely to be early next year. It depends on how testing goes, of course.

 

 

And how's progress? The FAL is balanced along with other WARS weapons?

Yes, general implementation of the FAL (in the WARS - Lend-Lease patch) is done. Since it uses the same ammo, it does the same damage as the Hunting Rifle - which is quite a lot, in WARS: 150 DAM. (With FMJ ammo and an "Average" condition receiver - better/worse condition receivers will increase/decrease that damage.)

 

It has a STR requirement of 6 and some powerful recoil, though. (Not meeting the STR REQ also doubles the base recoil of a weapon, among other penalties.) Still, I've got it pitched as an end-game kind of weapon.

 

 

Anyway, currently I'm working on the Levelled List injection system for use in WARS add-ons. It uses a slightly modified version of the vanilla DLCLegendaryLLManagerScript script, with a struct in it that makes it easily expandable in the CK. You can add however many things to however many Levelled Lists via a script that runs once when the game first runs with the add-on installed.

 

I'm in the middle of setting up a template quest (it's technically a quest script) with all the most likely LLs people will want to use (including myself - I'll be using this in WARS - Lend-Lease) pre-entered, along with brief notes for each on what that LL is used for. LLs for weapon loadouts carried by NPCs, weapons at vendors, weapons in loot, etc.

 

It's a bit tedious right now to set the template up, but it'll save me - and anyone who makes a support patch - a lot of time in the long run. (I'll of course be covering how to use this template in the WARS Support Tutorial.)

[UlyssesBennett]

I'd actually been wondering if if might be out by the end of the year - and it's possible that the closed beta might start by then - but it's more likely to be early next year. It depends on how testing goes, of course.

 

What would your requirements be for closed beta? I'd love to help, but I'd also want you to get useful feedback.

[UlyssesBennett]

I'd actually been wondering if if might be out by the end of the year - and it's possible that the closed beta might start by then - but it's more likely to be early next year. It depends on how testing goes, of course.

 

What would your requirements be for closed beta? I'd love to help, but I'd also want you to get useful feedback.

[123yozard123]

there's going to be a closed beta? If so, would also like to inquire about requirements.

[antistar]

Based on how I've done closed betas in the past, I'd send a PM to each tester with a link to where they can download the beta versions of both WARS and PEACE. Any updates during the beta would go in the same place, so that I wouldn't need to send another round of PMs out with new links every time.

 

So yeah - testers would have access to both WARS and PEACE (and I'll put all the relevant compatibility patches in there too, come to think of it) - and they can use either or both of them. I'll of course be testing/playing with both WARS and PEACE, myself.

 

What I'd like testers to do is just play the game with the mod/s installed and then post in the WARS/PEACE WIP threads about how they go with it. Posting any bugs of course, but also if they like/dislike certain parts of it, think certain things are unbalanced, etc.

 

For anyone thinking they may like to help as a tester; this won't surprise anyone who's been following the projects, but you'll need to be prepared to start a new game, and be aware that any third-party weapon mods will need to be patched to support WARS. (Similarly, third-party clothing/armour mods will need to be patched to support PEACE - though that's much easier than patching a weapon for WARS.) Could be a good time to actually use that multiple profiles feature in Vortex - or whichever mod manager you use, if it has something like that.

 

Actually, on the topic of support patches; anyone who thinks they may want to make a patch for a third-party weapon mod they like can get a head-start on that during the beta if they take part in it, since I'll also make the WARS Support Tutorial available during the beta. (The finished tutorial; obviously I already posted that draft of it a little while ago.)