Weapon Upgrades Thread - RCOM mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

So, I'm kind of confused by the weapon upgrades. Do the text-based, "one advantage + one disadvantage", descriptions count, or is it the ones next to the blue rectangular pictograms - "one advantage only" - at the bottom of the hover box?

And what's the deal with the pistols that're supposed to have automatic modes of fire, such as the Makarov and the Fort? They don't actually have it, and the vast majority of their upgrades seem to be pointless Rate-of-Fire boosts - what's this good for?

Text based updrages are accurate. The blue rectangle shows the postive attributes. Hard coded game engine limits won't allow two icons with integer values.

I'm not answering the second question when you address in a rude tone like you did. Bolded what I'm referencing on your quote, in case you're not sure what I mean...

Shrugger wrote: And what's the deal with the pistols that're supposed to have automatic modes of fire, such as the Makarov and the Fort? They don't actually have it, and the vast majority of their upgrades seem to be pointless Rate-of-Fire boosts - what's this good for?

Remember, this isn't my job, and no one pays me to work on RCOM. I'm using my own free time. If you're gonna ask questions, please don't do it in even a slightly condescending way, as you have no right to do so on a clearly marked Beta that you downloaded for free.

I don't see how that's rude, actually. Might be my tentative grasp on the language is to blame, so apologies here. The question was well-meant, as I was simply curious.

I see, good to no there's no attitude. I suppose if a large part of your grasp on English is from the internet, then those kind of attitudes are much of what you read, lol.

As for the second question:
By have automatic fire mod, do you mean they have a blue icon for it without upgrading? If so, that's just an accident and it isn't meant to be there. The rate of fire boosts are meant to be relevant to the gun mostly if an automatic trigger is modded in. I spent much less time on pistol upgrades as I did them last and was getting sick of reworking upgrades, and figured most people wouldn't use pistols much anyway since in CoP both slots can hold any weapon. I'll probably make the pistol upgrades a bit more interesting eventually.

The web is no nice place, indeed

Actually, pistols are pretty neat since the can usually be silenced, are very light, and their ammo doesn't weight much either. And with full auto, they're actually as good as on par with the SMG and the Sawn-Off.

I've been hearing more desire for pistol upgrades lately for others as well, so I'm sure I'll end up adding more diversity to the upgrades for next release.

ROFL, poor guy, even in Beta we hassle you.

I've been having a similar discussion with MacB about the upgrades. The modifications in the base game are extremely powerful, to the point some of the weapons hit the same spot at hundreds of yards, on every shot, with 0 recoil. MacB tried to modify them so you could still customize your weapons with bonuses by adding negative attributes, this prevents them from becoming god weapons that the NPCs never have access to.

With all the negative/positive values, I mentioned to him that I think they end up cancelling each other out a lot. We shot ideas back and forth and had a hard time coming up with good alternatives. A lot of things are impossible to achieve because of the hard coding of the engine.

The base game has mods like +30% accuracy, -30% recoil etc. Maybe if the values were cut down a fair amount they could retain their usefulness without being massively imbalanced? So maybe reduce them to make total change once fully upgraded 1/3rd of what the game had originally?

I think having weapons slightly better than the NPCs isn't necessarily a bad thing since we'll often be engaging bunches of them at once, and the base weapons aren't real world accurate starting out. I think if the game presents an increased challenge having improved weapons isn't going to take away from the realism. In the end though it's Mac's mod and it has to fit his vision, not necessarily ours, and every time he changes them he has to modify a ton of values since there are a dozen mods for every weapon. Although I'm sure some people would be willing to tinker with it and see if they can create some mod values that improve the guns without making them doomsday lasers if he wanted to start a fact finding mission.

The most important thing to note is that MacB is trying to add in a bunch of maps from other STALKER games before he delves too deep into other areas. I would expect he wants to get the world squared away before he starts working on the things the world contains. =)

Heh, no heat from me. I can still use pistols, after all, even without the upgrades. My only real gripe ATM is that the BIS Circle Quest is buggeroo, which blocks access to a number of other game events.

Anyways, maybe I've played too much JA2, but I'd suggest that you just make the weapons and upgrade paths similar to what'd be possible in the real world. So that perhaps some upgrades have significant and generally and useful effects, while others are purely speciality or novelty devices. Balance, imho, doesn't always have to be enforced - sometimes it's better to just let things go the way they have to.

In that vein, wouldn't it be possible to give the NPCs weapons with randomised upgrades?

Shrugger wrote: Heh, no heat from me. I can still use pistols, after all, even without the upgrades. My only real gripe ATM is that the BIS Circle Quest is buggeroo, which blocks access to a number of other game events.

I have a work around I'm pretty sure will fix it (once I try it out) without having to drop the range in which NPC's go offline (means they can't be seen by player and combat them until they get within a certain radius of player, having it higher in RCOM is what causes the bug).

Shrugger wrote: Anyways, maybe I've played too much JA2, but I'd suggest that you just make the weapons and upgrade paths similar to what'd be possible in the real world. So that perhaps some upgrades have significant and generally and useful effects, while others are purely speciality or novelty devices. Balance, imho, doesn't always have to be enforced - sometimes it's better to just let things go the way they have to.

I'm not sure what you mean specifically by real world upgrades, but I'm guessing you're talking about custom grips, different sights and scopes, ect. I described it to Draxanoth in a bit more detail when we talked, but generally its hard to state that particular gun customizations are going to make a gun particularly better than stock. This is especcially the case with with more modern weapons in the game. There's also issues of different sights and the such requiring modeling and excessively "not worth it" scripting work around to get a gun to handle more than just one type of scope, as well as engine limitations. I'm trying to keep my work focused on features/content I know will get realized.

Shrugger wrote: In that vein, wouldn't it be possible to give the NPCs weapons with randomised upgrades?

I'm pretty sure not. The only method I know is to make a new weapon for every possible upgrade possibility for every weapon, and assign them to NPC's. Of course, this would mean a stupid amount of weapons prefetched and take years of copy/paste/configing to get several thousand done. I'm pretty sure the engine only has a certain amount of addresses it allocates for weapons anyway. There's still unique guns in I've been putting into RCOM (mostly for new unique NPC's) with different stats/upgrades, but there aren't thousands, let alone hundreds of them.