Issues making Aliens use Automatic Weapons

[Lagruej]

Hey everybody, recently I abandoned support for my ZKG mod series on PS4, and decided to bring it over to PC and nexus, this time starting from scratch. Anyway, I decided since I'm on PC now, I want to pull out all the stops - new textures, better weapons designs etc. - and this is where the problem begins.

My issue is that the NPC Alien, which I use as a template for my own Aliens, is seemingly unable to fire automatic weapons for one reason or another.

Now there's some weird stuff about this. You can take the Alien Blaster, his own pistol, and if you click Automatic he will still HOLD it in game, and point it - but will not fire it. He will only fire Semi-Auto weapons.

Now this gets weird because it applies to basically all weapons in the game.

The alien will literally 1 hand wield a rocket launcher because it qualifies as Semi-Auto - but any weapon with the automatic tag just confuses them.

Is there some sort of script or something I can add to the NPC to force them to use automatic fire?

I know I can give the aliens Semi-Auto versions and let the player add Automatic triggers for themselves, but it's not the same. I want some of my Aliens to function in different roles for real.

Things I've tried:
- Making the Automatic come from a weapon mod instead of the checkbox in the weapon's form
- Changing between different Combat AI packages.
- Crying
-Changing hand type (Right Hand, Left Hand, Both - I tried them all)

Edited August 30, 2018 by Lagruej

[ehtyeci]

Aliens are stripped of most of the gun logic. They simply lack the behavior framework for automatic weapons. Eg. they only have single shot animations available to them.

Until someone creates a nodal editor that can parse XML blocks into useful data, the easiest way would be to hack it by creating a subgraph and referencing a custom FireSingle.hkx that contains a sequence of weaponFire annotations - this is essentially how people can turn a single shot weapon into burst fire without adding new logic. They probably still won't be able to shoot weapons with the automatic boolean flag, but they would treat single shots as pseudo-automatics.

[Lagruej]

 

Aliens are stripped of most of the gun logic. They simply lack the behavior framework for automatic weapons. Eg. they only have single shot animations available to them.

Until someone creates a nodal editor that can parse XML blocks into useful data, the easiest way would be to hack it by creating a subgraph and referencing a custom FireSingle.hkx that contains a sequence of weaponFire annotations - this is essentially how people can turn a single shot weapon into burst fire without adding new logic. They probably still won't be able to shoot weapons with the automatic boolean flag, but they would treat single shots as pseudo-automatics.

 

Wow, alright... I'll give that a try, I've never done anything like that but I'm always up for a challenge.... as of yet I've never messed with subgraphs or .hkx files. Exploration time :tongue:

 

That said, I want to be clear - are you saying the Automatic boolean will have to remain off? Because I guess that would mean when the player picks it up they will still have to mod an Auto-Trigger. Regardless that's still a bit better than the Alien only having semi-auto. Not a perfect solution, but workable from the sounds of it. Wish me luck.

Edited August 30, 2018 by Lagruej

[ehtyeci]

Yes, weapons would probably need to be non-automatic for it to work - this kind of hack doesn't change the fact that they can't use automatics, it only circumvents the problem by redirecting actors with a specific keyword to use a subgraph with custom shooting animation containing multiple weaponFire events (instead of just one event). Weapons fire because the fire animation sends an event to the game.

 

Definitely not an elegant solution, but if you really want "automatic" firing aliens, this might be the only way for the time being.