Is the weapon ammo capacity has a hardcoded limit of 255?

[broccolimonster]

I noticed when I edit the ammo capacity of a weapon it wont go beyond 255.

 

Is there anyway to increase the clip size beyond 255? I hope someone can help me on this if this is possible to achieve. Thanks in advance!

[dubiousintent]

Probably not. "255" is the limit for an unsigned integer, (which starts at "zero") which is probably how the game engine has "ammo" or "magazines" defined. You would first have to determine which variable or "game setting" is used and then change it's declaration to "long" (possibly in the game engine itself).

 

Realistically you aren't speaking about a "clip" or "magazine" anymore at that size. Such use "springs" to push the rounds vertically into the chamber, and as you approach 50 the weight gets to be too much (which is why they are in "drums"). Gravity feed isn't much better. You should be thinking in terms of a "belt" of ammo, and they generally come in belts of 300 at a time. "Belts" use a "mechanical pull" mechanism. Anything longer has a nasty tendency to kink and jam (because of the tapered geometry of the rounds they don't stay "flat" beyond a certain point). Some weapons, like "miniguns", combine several 300 belts into a long one, but they use mechanical feed mechanisms and enclosed "feed tubes" to prevent the problems from just linking longer belts together. There is a reason a MG crew has two people: the "loader" makes sure the belt doesn't kink and feeds smoothly as well as replacing the empty boxes and passing new belts as needed. (You also need the breaks in the firing to let the barrel cool off somewhat and get swapped out.)

 

-Dubious-

[broccolimonster]

Probably not. "255" is the limit for an unsigned integer, (which starts at "zero") which is probably how the game engine has "ammo" or "magazines" defined. You would first have to determine which variable or "game setting" is used and then change it's declaration to "long" (possibly in the game engine itself).

 

Realistically you aren't speaking about a "clip" or "magazine" anymore at that size. Such use "springs"' to push the rounds vertically into the chamber, and as you approach 50 the weight gets to be too much (which is why they are in "drums"). Gravity feed isn't much better. You should be thinking in terms of a "belt" of ammo, and they generally come in belts of 300 at a time. "Belts" use a "mechanical pull" mechanism. Anything longer has a nasty tendency to kink and jam (because of the tapered geometry of the rounds they don't stay "flat" beyond a certain point). Some weapons, like "miniguns", combine several 300 belts into a long one, but they use mechanical feed mechanisms and enclosed "feed tubes" to prevent the problems from just linking longer belts together. There is a reason a MG crew has two people: the "loader" makes sure the belt doesn't kink and feeds smoothly as well as replacing the empty boxes and passing new belts as needed. (You also need the breaks in the firing to let the barrel cool off somewhat and get swapped out.)

 

-Dubious-

 

Thank you for your time in shedding some light on this. Since 255 is at the at most limit, I'm just going to attempt some workarounds on it. The weapon I'm trying to work on with the huge ammo capacity is not a conventional one. It loads bb's and it shoots it out like a gauss rail system but in rapid fire much like an automatic gauss shotgun. It consumed 6 bb's per shot with a fire rate of a minigun thus the 255 ammo limit burns it very quickly that's why I am looking for a solution to go beyond the 255 limit.

 

Appreciate your explanation on this, I learned something new. Thanks again!

[GamerRick]

I tried to change the clip size of one of my weapons in FNVEdit, and even it won't allow anything above 255. So, they must have only used 1 byte for it. I can only guess that a design decision that stupid to us (PC players) was made for consoles.

[ashtonlp101]

Yeah, console RAM was very small (512 MB). I'd gotten FNV on Xbox when it came out and remember weapons like the Gatling laser lagging out at times. So 1 byte was probably the limit for that reason, since a two byte limit would go from a manageable 255 to an absurd 65,535 which Bethesda would have no reason to ever need, and on top of that you would likely have to free up memory for the engine to be capable of even doing that, so you'd potentially double the memory requirements for all weapons.

 

If you think about it that's incredibly hard to even make an open world game on 512MB of RAM since on PC we've essentially had to jail-break the exe to allow up to 4GB of memory loading for optimal performance. So I'm sure it was likely a memory issue with consoles rather than an oversight in development.