Laser Rifle with fire modes?

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

It really bugs me that the power-armor-wearing super-soldiers of the future are using dinky laser-weapons that are weaker and less versatile then the small guns they are supposed to replace. Now, there are quite a few mods that add good energy-sniper-stuff, and even the odd laser-shotgun, but they really just make the Energy Weapons Skill match up to the Small Guns Skill, not different, unique or worth the effort.

 

So:

Laser Rifle with fire modes

When you equip it a menu pops up and you select a fire-mode: assault, sniper or close-combat. For the price and weight of 1 weapon and it's ammo, you get the versatility of 3!

 

Now I can't make this myself because I'm to lazy to learn scripting in GECK allergic to key-boards, but I do want to help:

Thoughts on implementation:

I'm thinking you'd make a dummy-laser rifle, for the player to equip, which covers the weight and price of the thing, and stick to it a menu-script.

Then make 3 functional 'non-player' weapons, one for each fire-mode, and when the player selects a mode from the menu, the appropriate weapon is given and equipped on the player using the script.

 

This method does have the downside that it doesn't properly transfer the level of durability to either the new weapon, or back to the dummy-weapon.

Another problem would be that NPCs can't use the gun, at least not to it full potential. This isn't a problem if the player is simply given the weapon, but it will be one if it is added to loot-lists of the Laser-carrying BoS or Enclave.

 

Balancing the modes:

Sniper-mode should obviously have 0 spread and high damage and the ability to use a scope, but at the cost of more ammo per shot and a slow rate of fire. Small-guns Sniper-rifles get 40 damage per shot, and a clip of 5 rounds and drain 38 Action Points per shot. So Sniper-mode damage is mathed to 40, ammo-consumption doubled, and Action Points doubled to 36, this mode becomes a only slightly too powerful tool for sniping. The fire-rate could be tweaked slightly down form standard. If it's simply too powerful, the default stats of laser-rifles could be used, but with the scope option enabled.

 

Assault-mode could cause some problems, since MF-cells aren't abundant enough to simply allow full-automatic fire, not to mention the amount of damage that would dish out. I'm not sure if a shot can consume ammo in fractions, but if so stats from a standard assault could be used at about 1/3 or 1/4 ammo-consumption.

 

Close-combat mode could fire either a spread blast of 'pellet'-beams or several 'pellet'-beams in rapid succession with low accuracy, making it function much like a shotgun. Either way each pellet should do only little damage, but when all of them are added up, they should do about 60 points of damage and consume about triple ammo.

[Ralkahn]

Haha, I just made this. For personal use, though. I guess I could modify it to use the stock laser rifle ('cause I'm using the Prototype Ion Rifle for mine) and release it.

 

But yeah, I'd been thinking about this for a while, and finished it this morning, using the script from the shotgun ammo types mod. And it does - at least, in theory, I don't think I actually tested this part - transfer weapon condition between firing modes.

 

Tell you what, give me some time to balance it, and I'll ask Onyko really nicely if I can use his mesh for this publicly. If not, I'll still balance it and release it using the stock laser rifle mesh. Sound good?

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

That does sound good! Thank you (kudos to you). My attempts at learning scripting haven't been too successful.

Any luck with Onyko so far?

 

'transfer weapon condition between firing modes.' It about the hit-points of the weapon. Normally it degrades with every shot, but when you use a script to spawn weapons, they always have 100% HP. So the damage would never last and you'd never have to repair it.

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

YYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I got my scripts to work. Now I make the mod myself!

I'm so pleased with myself right now, I could do... something, uhm... questionable.

 

Now I need to balance it. Oh boy.

Could people give me some tips on shotgun-type weapons?

What would you say is the level of rarety on MFC's? As rare as 5.56 bullets or more like .44 bullets or whatever ammo comes close?

Any thoughts on how to transfer the weapons damage to the newly spawned weapons.?

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

I just found out about the 'GetWeaponHealthPerc' and 'SetWeaponHealthPerc' commands, but I don't know how to reference them to a weapon in the players inventory, that isn't equiped. Any thoughts?

 

Edit: Right. I figured out a way to transfer a health to the Rifle modes, but not how to set this to the amount of health of the original weapon. In other words: What is the GECK syntax for getting a value and the setting that value to a variable.

 

Also the method I'm using causes a glitch: when the weapon is equiped, it's dropped from the Hot-key menu. This is because the dummy weapon is removed from your inventory on selecting a mode. I could fix this with another dummy item, but I'm hoping one of you could come up with a more elegant solution.

A solution would be to simply not remove the dummy, but that would create a bug, in which repairing the dummy would just destroy the weapons, without improving their health.

 

And that then leaves balancing.

What would you say is the level of rarety on MFC's? As rare as 5.56 bullets or more like .44 bullets or whatever ammo comes close?

 

I know there's nobody actually reading this, but I guy can dream, right?

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

Fixed the Health transfer problem. The problem was that 'GetWeaponHealthPerc' returns a % value, like 50.00 or 99.99 were as additemHealthPerc requires a fraction like 0.50 or 0.9999.

 

Problems remaining:

1) The weapons health is frozen; it takes no damage when fired.

2) The hotkey thing

3) Balance

[TheGrimSleeper55555]

Alright! The first proper version of my mod is finished and available on the nexus. Do give it a try and leave a comment and/or rating about this system for multi-use weapons.

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4439