[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[antistar]

It is so inconsistent its not funny but it does not seem to happen with the WARS standard weapons just the ones I've made patches for. The no mag OMOD works appropriately. And to make matters even more confusing sometimes it is just in the workbench that it is invisible not in 3rd/1st person. So the magazine OMOD is still attached and the gun shows as having the right capacity but its invisible. I can't seem to add pictures to my post other than this way

Yeah, that's... mystifying, so here are some scattershot ideas that come to mind:

 

- Confirm that this doesn't happen in the base mods. Maybe ask the authors if they've seen anything like it? (Probably search the comments on the mods first.)

 

- Did you make any changes to the nif files?

 

- You mentioned that the rounds of ammo are still visible when the magazine goes invisible? Maybe have a close look in Nifskope to see if there are any differences in how the meshes, etc for the mags are handled vs. the ammo. (E.g. which nodes are they under, what mesh flags and shader flags do they have - stuff like that.)

 

 

At the 24 hour mark on my current WARS and PEACE save and have a few thoughts. The gun play has been massively improved, the weapons feel much more powerful and satisfying to use, blasting a guys head off with a 12 gage slug will never get old. In the beginning I did find it easier then normal survival but when enemies with automatic weapons and explosives became more common the difficulty ramped up, instead of treating every enemy as the same as in vanilla you sometimes have to focus on one or to guys, taking cover and being careful before going ham on the rest of them. The carry weight changes where hard to get use to at first but after a while I became much more selective on what I pick up and will not bother looking lower level enemies now. Power armor feels much more distinct then in vanilla, the massively increased carry weight along with the armor changes makes it feel like you are really a walking tank instead of just having some extra armor. The different kinds of ammo makes using some of the early game weapons much more viable and adds extra consideration when it comes weapon choice. I don't think I ever used Pipe weapons but it actually feels good in a way, the are use by the raider masses and one guy with a proper weapon defeating 8 with junk pipe weapons feels more believable. Gun sounds are much improved as well, more crack less boom. The mag system was a bit confusing at first but got use to it, some of the smaller magazines are hard to get your view on them to pick them up though. The amount of ammo dropped does seem excessive at times, getting around 40-60 rounds of ammo per guy when you only use 5 to kill them leaves me with way more ammo then I could possibly need. Breaking them down does give lots of resources but I could easily break the economy by selling my massive pile of extra ammo and have to choose not to for game balance. Going back to the power armor it does make you a walking tank but again with a lode of extra fusion cores I have to RP not to use it as doing so would make much of the combat trivial.

 

All and all though I have greatly enjoyed myself with WARS and PEACE and have not encountered any bugs I can remember. Only a few changes I would suggest if they are possible. Increase the hitbox size of the smaller magazines so they can be picked up more easily, it can be a bit frustrating to see the mag and but not be able to easily pick it up, having to move the mouse slowly over it. Either decrees the drop rate for ammo by about half or have a way to not be able to sell 1 cap ammo in order not to f*#@ the economy if you are playing optimally. Increase the drain rate of fusing cores in power armor so it there is a greater cost in using it to counterbalance the buff that PEACE does to the armor.

Thanks for all the feedback; glad to hear it's working basically like I intended, for the most part. :)

 

WARS doesn't change the fire sounds for vanilla weapons (and some of the new weapons use vanilla fire sounds too), but maybe it's that you're hearing more supersonic cracks from all the ballistic projectiles?

 

With the collision for the mags (which determines their selection area), I ran into some technical issues there. Initially I made my own more accurate collision geometry for them, but they would cause the game to crash when the mags were spawned as part of the Physical Mags system. There must be some export setting I need to use to prevent that, but I have no idea what it might be. So I'm limited to using collision geometry from vanilla nif files.

 

Broadly speaking I'm happy enough with the amount of ammo you come across - at least when considered alongside how difficult and time-consuming it is to re-balance that. (If you look at all the ammo-related levelled lists in the WARS plugin, you'll see what I mean.) NPCs now consuming ammo makes this a lot more complex, obviously.

 

Hostile NPCs obviously need to spawn with more ammo so they can use it - but then you can get more of it if you take them out quickly (which is an intended reward for doing well in combat/stealth/planning/whatever). But then you also need more ammo if you're going to be supplying companions and settlers. And also you're probably getting a range of random different sub-types, rather than enough of what you want to use, so you'll need that extra ammo to break down and feed into your ammo factory. And how are you going to carry it all?

 

I find the way that even the cheapest, nastiest, weakest round of ammo is still worth 1 cap each to be frustrating too. I agree with you there; it's an issue. It's almost as if there are some problems inherent in a currency system based on bottle-caps and nothing else. ;) It'd be like having only $1 coins and that's it.

 

Having said that, in roughly comparing caps to player character levels, I had more money in my original vanilla playthrough than I do in my WARS and PEACE playthrough. That's still a lot of money, though. The economy in FO4 is kind of a mess; I think it's a larger issue than what I'm doing with the ammo in WARS.

 

Fusion cores though; I've been thinking about it for a while, but I think I will need to reduce how many of those spawn - probably dramatically. I've been using power armour near constantly, and I've still got a huge stockpile of them. I don't really like the idea of messing with fusion core drain rate, though. It'd feel weird in terms of immersion to have to swap them out all the time, not to mention how annoying it might get.

[Crylec]

I figured out the ammo tweak mcm, it was a detail i missed from the install guide. As well it was a compatibility issue for the SMG but the life of me can't figure out what caused it and it was a light weight only UIs and essentials.

[ginster567]

Hi Antistar, If your still looking for people to try out the mod and look for bugs I'd like to help.

[antistar]

I figured out the ammo tweak mcm, it was a detail i missed from the install guide. As well it was a compatibility issue for the SMG but the life of me can't figure out what caused it and it was a light weight only UIs and essentials.

That's good. Was there anything in particular about the installation instructions that was confusing? It'd be good to sort out that sort of thing ahead of the full release, obviously.

 

 

Hi Antistar, If your still looking for people to try out the mod and look for bugs I'd like to help.

Sorry, like I said a couple of pages back, closed beta applications are closed now.

[stellarview]

I'm having an issue with Preston not being able to carry any items, possibly similar to Longstrider92's problems with Dogmeat a few pages back. He just has the items he spawned with, and "getav carryweight" reports his carry weight max as -1.75. I'm guessing its not the same as the known NPC carry weight issue as equipping & reequipping LBE doesn't fix it, his carry weight maximum stays in the negatives.

[antistar]

When un-equipping/re-equipping an item with LBE on him, did you exit his inventory after re-equipping and then re-enter it, before trying to give him anything else? That's always fixed it for me.

 

Not sure what causes this... Maybe a weird order of operations thing with these CW bonuses being on equipped clothing?

 

We'll see if the change I made restoring CW effects (with a small bonus rather than the vanilla penalty, which previously PEACE simply removed) does anything to prevent this. It's in the pending update to PEACE - but I'm right in the middle of working on some other changes in PEACE, so it's not a good time to push an update.

 

In the meantime, if that continues to be an issue with Preston, try using modav to set his CW to be something like 60 with no LBE equipped.

[stellarview]

Yeah, I was exiting and then reentering his inventory. I checked my load order in xEdit and saw that Preston isn't in the WARS and PEACE patch and I had PEACE loaded above WARS, so he still had the vanilla carry weight penalty. I moved PEACE under WARS so the CW penalty is removed from him but his CW is still lower than it should be, -20 without any LBE.

[antistar]

Oh yeah - I just noticed the other day that Preston's Actor record isn't in the WARS-PEACE patch, resolving conflicts - as it should be. I fixed that when I noticed it, and again it will be in the next round of updates.

 

That shouldn't be an issue here with PEACE loading after WARS, like you said - but maybe something re: his stats has been baked into your save. I just jumped in and checked him out in a new game, and (due to recent changes I've made, or otherwise) his CW was as it should be. You can do the same if you want, to see if you get the same result. From the main menu, bring up the console and use:

 

coc qasmoke (Then, once loaded in:)

prid 0001A4D7

moveto player (may not be needed)

getav carryweight

 

Or, if you've got Better Console, you can use its menu to find both his base and current CW using its menu, under "actorValues".

 

 

In any case, probably a good idea to use modav carryweight on him for now, in your game.

Edited June 15, 2023 by antistar

[stellarview]

Yup, in a new game his CW is what it should be at. I guess base CW gets baked into saves.

[antistar]

Okay, that's good. In the next round of updates, that should hopefully not be able to happen anymore.

 

 

Speaking of which; The WARS - Tactical Reload patch is finished, and I'm in the process of giving the AR-15 some third-person animations, so that it doesn't have to use the vanilla SMG third-person animations. (It's still going to use those when in power armour, though; I'm not planning to do PA third-person animations. The rig is different, and seems to require doing them from scratch - unless I'm missing some trick for converting animations made for the standard human rig. I did try a few things.)

 

Anyway, there are a lot of different reload animations for the AR-15, so I'm doing relatively basic conversions of Hitman47101's first-person animations. Still, better than nothing. Working on it has been a bit hairy on the technical front - and you can see me talking about it in the comments here if you're curious - but I think I've got that worked out now.

 

Once those animations are done, I'll upload the updates.