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Wounded Ronin
For years I always admired the work of modders who brought new life to such amazing classic games such as Fallout and Deus Ex. I always wanted to make my own mod but I never felt like I was smart enough to be able to do it. Back in high school I was the second dumbest person in my C++ class so I figured that if I ever attempted to modify actual real code I'd probably manage to make the game overwrite my entire hard drive or something.

However, a while ago I started working on a Fallout 2 mod which is very modest in scope. All I plan to do is change most of the non-scifi weapons into classic weapons from World War I through the very beginning of the Vietnam War. At first I'd planned to keep everything all Americana in better keeping with the Cold War theme of the setting and the 1950s graphics but Fallout 2 had too many guns so I added burp guns and I'm considering adding the Mauser carbine, a MG42, and that German paratroop rifle. I've already added AK47s and RPKs. I think this enhances the period feel artwork of the game moreso than generic modern weapons and such toys as HK G11s and Pancor Jackhammers. Probably it would have just been easier and better to modify Fallout 1 which had less weapons but Fallout 2 has a most excellent GUI editor which is faciliating my amateurish effort immensley.

The hardest part of this has been doing the research and getting graphics for everything off the internet. My graphics-fu is abysmal so now a lot of the guns in game are poor quality small photographs from the internet next to the other cartoony-looking inventory items. Personally, though, I never cared about graphics in games at all. I usually felt like they were a distraction from the key issue, which would be any number of the following pillars: gamplay, innovative ideas, strong simulationism, compelling characters, effective humor, engaging complexity, etc.

I've decided to tweak the statistics to make the game feel more realistic as well. Obviously, since Fallout is driven by levels and hitpoints it's impossible to be totally realistic. There's no way you can make things so that a rifle is equally likely to explode the head of a peasant as a legendary war hero should the round hit because that's just not in keeping with the style of the game. But, after some playtesting, I believe that I've managed to add the following real-feeling elements:

*There are a lot more rifles, submachineguns, and carbines and less pistols. Pistol rounds do less damage and perform less well against armor than rifle rounds in all cases. Since most powerful weapons require two hands to use pistols now fulfill more of a sidearm role in case your character gets a crippled arm or runs out of ammunition for his primary weapon, or if he really needs to make a key attack but doesn't have enough APs left to use his big bolt action rifle.

*Bolt action rifles are a lot better for long range sniping (and now there are more really long range weapons) but require a lot of APs to use. Semiautomatic or automatic weapons with short barrels (i.e. submachineguns) usually require only 4 APs to fire in semiautomatic mode to represent how they're faster to aim and fire. Pistols usually require the usual 5 AP to represent how recovery after shooting in inferior than with a carbine or submachinegun.

*Getting hit with a .30-.06 round HURTS, as does a shotgun blast at close range. I'm seeing shotgun blasts do around 30-40 points of damage per hit against my character when he's wearing leather armor. .30-.06 does 30-40 points of damage per long range hit against the mercenaries who are raiding Vault City, and on a critical it can do like 110 points of damage on one hit. Using full cover and sniping from as long a distance as possible is really key now because it's very difficult to play Superman when the opponents all have rifles. (Unless I decide to add Mausers, .30-.06 is currently the most powerful cartridge.)

*No more of this irritating and unlikely equipment stepladder where for some reason all the equipment you find in the beginning of the game sucks and it gets better towards the end. I always found that to be blatant and disbelief-destroying. The annoying and pointless Pipe Rifle has been replaced with a De Lisle carbine. Although it lacks power compared to a real rifle it's more accurate at long range than any pistol so it's possible to play strategically by using the De Lisle carbine at first and switching to a pistol when the enemy gets close. Since I changed the Hunting Rifle into a Remington 700 in .30-.06, a very damaging firearm is available near the beginning of the game.

*The most common cartridge of the wastes is not the somewhat newfangled 10mm cartridge, but rather .45 ACP. 1911s have replaced the ubiquitous 10mm pistol. That's more americana.

*I used real world rates of fire for automatic weapons and made the amount of rounds they spray out in Burst the same as that weapon would spray out in real life in 2 seconds. This means that burst mode at close range is brutal but it also chews through your ammunition very quickly. I think that this forces the player to be both tactical (how do I manuver so I can burst and then turn a corner?) AND strategic (how do I come up with more ammunition all the time?).

*I'll have to playtest more to be totally sure but I believe I finally made non-JHP ammo not suck by slapping really heavy penalties on JHP ammo versus armor and getting rid of the half damage modifier that non-JHP ammo was often slapped with. JHP can still really ruin your day with an armor-bypassing critical, though. Which is as it should be, I believe.


I don't think that my mod would be very popular with the general public since the graphics are admittedly ugly, the amount of damage dealt by the weapons probably makes the game more difficult, and most people probably don't care enough about the history of firearms to want to play the exact same game over again with only revised guns. But, personally, I feel that I'm going towards a major accomplishment. If I can say that I made and completed one mod during my life I think I'll really have done something good.

When I'm done and figure out how to send the mod to other people I might put a link here on DSF since there are some people here who like firearms. Then Raygun and AE can tell me I did it all wrong, or something. smile.gif

eidolon
Is Fallout 2 completely turn based like 1 was? Your mod sounds sweet, but I don't have F2 because I dislike turn based games and never bought it.
nezumi
Yes, 2 is also turn-based and slightly more awesome than 1.

I look forward to this mod enough to consider buying Fallout 2 again (my original copy fell to the oatmeal-wielding two-year-old and is fatally scratched and lost).
Wounded Ronin
I'm genuinely honored. I'll make a post as soon as it's ready.
Austere Emancipator
Have you looked here for .frms? I don't think it would be particularly bad form to use graphics from someone else's mod as long as you give them due credit for making them.
Austere Emancipator
Holy crap modding this game is hard! I changed one exotic ammo type from the mod I'm using into 7.62x51mm (so that an FAL and an AK don't use the same ammo) and am trying to add this ammo to some shops but you have to jump through a whole hell of a lot of hoops for something so simple.

For example, a sane person might attach the scripts related to shopkeeping by a character to be attached to that character, just like similar scripts on tables, lockers, etc. are all attached. But oh no, character-specific shopkeeping is handled by scripts attached to boxes that are hidden in the map (and so cannot be found in the map editor) and are not once referred to by their actual name in the characters' own scripts. Because anything else would just make it too easy for a modder...

Nevermind the 5 or more different kinds of handles by which every single item goes -- its filename, its number on the item list, its proper name, its inventory name, its PID name, etc., most of which you can't even find out with any normal editing tools, nevermind actually changing them.

ARGH.

/rant
Wounded Ronin
My approach was very conservative. What I did was I changed the existing ammo types to different types of ammo and changed all the guns using those ammo types accordingly. For example, I changed 10mm to .45 ACP because I wanted .45 ACP to be common, and then I changed the game's .45 ACP to 7.62 Tokarev.

There's another reason for doing things this way besides for what you've noticed. If you change a weapon, say the 10mm pistol, to use a different ammo type it will still appear in the game loaded with 10mm ammo whenver you encounter it. You'd have to do further internal modifications to make sure that all guns started loaded with the right ammo.
Austere Emancipator
QUOTE (Wounded Ronin)
If you change a weapon, say the 10mm pistol, to use a different ammo type it will still appear in the game loaded with 10mm ammo whenver you encounter it.

Yeah. I think what happens is that every gun that's already placed on a map either directly or in a character's or scenery piece's inventory carries with it the information on what it's loaded with. Guns that are created as a result of a script or otherwise get the standard ammo defines in their .PRO files.

I have attempted not to mess with the "caliber" IDs of weapons for the same reason. I was just trying to add one type of ammo (which was already the base ammo type for a weapon) to shops so that there'd be a point in having the gun -- and even that was a massive pain in the ass, as described above. When I finally found out how to do it in principle, I realized that the script code for handling bartering inventories had changed from 1.00: instead of a simple command with the name of an item, the probability of restocking, and the random number limits for the amount of that item that gets restocked, there's now a ridiculously complex several dozen lines long pyramid of commands for every single inventory item with shitloads of "elses", "ifs", single blocks of type with dozens of parentheses, and objects my script editor flat out refuses to identify as valid. Verdict: it is simply impossible to adjust stores without being well versed in the script code language.
Wounded Ronin
I'm maybe 3/4 of the way through playtesting. I really like what I've done with the game. It makes some parts of the game challenging (like in the casinos the bouncers now have burp guns and their burst attack spews out a LOT of cartridges) but so far it's still quite playable and winnable. I think that the game favors tactics more now than it used to, in the sense that the player is fallible if he charges a lot but can do a lot of damage if he works the corners with burst fire or uses a scoped Winchester Model 70 to snipe from really far away.

As a benchmark 7.62 rounds do ~20-30 per hit, and .30-06 ~30-40, so eating a burst from a Browning Automatic Rifle (20 rounds, the entire magazine) can do several hundred points of damage. Again, it's all about the tactical manuvering. You want to either be the one hiding around the corner with the Browning or else you want to take out the guy with the Browning first. It's also more important to take people out in one hit whereas before it was usually hard to take people out in one hit and the tactical emphasis was elsewhere.

As soon as I'm done playtesting, and after I edit some of the text files so that the text is referring to Winchester Trappers instead of deagles, barring catastrophic hard drive failure, I should be ready to release.
Austere Emancipator
Any particular reason .30-06 is so much more powerful than 7.62x51mm -- just a stylistic thing? Are those damages to unarmored targets or against, say, metal armor soldiers? Do you have all automatic weapons firing off 20+ round bursts or did you just find that the BAR's awe-inspiring 650rpm cyclic RoF required that? wink.gif

Oh, and have you run into any 7-man Enclave Patrols yet? I didn't tune my weapon damages up by all that much and I had my whole crew fully leveled up (PC at over 30) and in hardened or advanced Power Armor, but those guys with their Gauss, Plasma, and Pulse Pistols killed one or more characters on the first turn 2 times out of 3. When they all get to fire first with what amounts to double damage Vindicator Miniguns... *shudder*
Wounded Ronin
QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)
Any particular reason .30-06 is so much more powerful than 7.62x51mm -- just a stylistic thing? Are those damages to unarmored targets or against, say, metal armor soldiers? Do you have all automatic weapons firing off 20+ round bursts or did you just find that the BAR's awe-inspiring 650rpm cyclic RoF required that? wink.gif

Oh, and have you run into any 7-man Enclave Patrols yet? I didn't tune my weapon damages up by all that much and I had my whole crew fully leveled up (PC at over 30) and in hardened or advanced Power Armor, but those guys with their Gauss, Plasma, and Pulse Pistols killed one or more characters on the first turn 2 times out of 3. When they all get to fire first with what amounts to double damage Vindicator Miniguns... *shudder*

.30-06 is a lot more powerful than 7.62 for a number of reasons. There's only one automatic .30-06 weapon (the BAR) whereas there's plenty of 7.62 weapons that have automatic fire. So, .30-06 is more powerful to keep sniper rifles effective at very long range for one hit kills. Your .30-06 weapons are generally the best at long range whereas your 7.62 spray rage is best at close range.

That being said, the BAR does HEAPS of damage, so I might consider toning down .30-06 and 8mm mauser so that the MG42 and FG42 paratroop rifles aren't too crazy.

Perhaps what I'll end up doing is having 7.62 be 20-30 and then have .30-06 do 25-35. It's only five points off what it was before but I think that it would add up when we're talking about 20 round bursts.

I haven't run into any Enclave patrols yet. I'll have to see what happens. Note that I didn't beef up the energy weapons; only Small Guns and Big Guns. So, if anything, the relative power of the player should be increased.

I decided to make the number of rounds discharged in burst mode equivalent to two seconds of automatic fire. It was just something I arbitrarily decided to do. It ends up making burst fire more powerful, which I like, so I decided to stick with that amount of ammo coming out. It also means that the game is more realistic in that if you use automatic fire all the time a thousand rounds of ammunition just isn't that much, really. So, overall, I think I like the effect.
Wounded Ronin
OK, .30-06 now only does potentially 5 more points of damage per hit than 7.62. The code is now 25-35. Scoped rifles have a slight damage bonus on top of that to represent more accurate shot placement. The drawback is that Fallout 2 makes aiming with a scoped weapon at close range difficult, so that's nice.

All those damage values are before reductions granted from armor.
Austere Emancipator
If it's just an issue of having the sniper-type weapons be effective, you could of course just have the sniper rifles have the raised damage. That's what pretty much every computer game has done since time immemorial. smile.gif I doubt that'd grind on anybody's sense of verisimilitude more than +5 damage for +2% Kinetic Energy.

The increased ammo expenditure angle is a good one. I assume you don't have any miniguns left in the game, then. biggrin.gif I just finished a game, and my 33-level monster averaged ~1000 points of damage to Enclave soldiers at 10-20 squares with a Vindicator (16-22 damage, 50-round bursts) -- of course, he had Bonus Ranged Damage, Living Anatomy, Sniper, etc.

I'll hold my evil re-run for your mod. That ought to give me enough chances to test the combat. wink.gif
Wounded Ronin
QUOTE (Austere Emancipator)
If it's just an issue of having the sniper-type weapons be effective, you could of course just have the sniper rifles have the raised damage. That's what pretty much every computer game has done since time immemorial. smile.gif I doubt that'd grind on anybody's sense of verisimilitude more than +5 damage for +2% Kinetic Energy.

Well, with the backdrop of beefy characters who can heroically eat .30-06 round after .30-06 round due to high amounts of hitpoints, I figure that 5 points is the smallest bonus you can give while still being more or less meaningful.

Since the 1941 Johnson rifle replaced the .223 pistol in my playtest I just had Lo Pan say "look what I found!" and produce said classic battle rifle in the martial arts duel arena in San Francisco. Not only was it funny to see him pull it out in that context as though it were something that could be easily concealed but it was also funny how my character could be shot with it multiple times at close range and not instantly die due to hitpoints.


Anyway, I'm really enjoying the ammo expenditure angle of the mod, myself. In normal Fallout 2 I usually find that there's an abundance of the 5mm ammo if you never use miniguns. In this game 5mm was converted to 7.62x39 WP and using a RPK and the 2 second burst my character was always running out of this plentiful ammunition. I actually had to plan my logistics around the costs of buying a lot of that ammo and around the carry weight of hundreds of rounds of ammuntion minimum to be able to use the RPK effectively. I suppose now killing shopkeepers to loot their stocks is probably a bad idea in the long run since you really need their restocks to keep shooting.
Wounded Ronin
The mod is almost ready to be released. I am currently involved in a kampf with compliation software but hopefully that should be over soon. You can see the progression of said kampf here: http://survivor.10.forumer.com/viewtopic.p...der=asc&start=0
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