I was able to complete my Fallout 2 vintage weapons mod! Download it, play it, and let me know what you think. And, uh, report errors and bugs.

Well, I've finally got a nice hosting location for the latest version: http://www.nowak-kominy.home.pl/Testowy/do...ad.php?view.120

Here is a news page that, as of today, has some screenshots and info: http://members.chello.at/lisac2k/

This post has been updated as of 4/23/07.

I had forgotten to include my item descs in my previous upload.

Here is the *real* release.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/1e9265/

EDIT: New .dat file linked to.

I keep getting a file not supported error in Modrunner.

Yeah, that seems to have happened with other people too. I'm looking into it.

It seems that my previous upload got broken somehow. The file size was only about 70% what it should have been.

EDIT: http://www.filefactory.com/file/1e9265/

New link.

I must say that I like it. I've just got the Winchester and have been using it to shoot people in the eye, which tends to be fatal far more often than it is blinding.

I do like the fact that burst file from a realitivly weapon weapon can kill characters with a huge number of hit points.

Awesome! I don't actually have Fallout 2 any more (CD vs. Toddler - toddler wins). I plan on getting a new copy, and when I do, I very much so look forward to this. Very cool.

I'm getting a File not supported error on the new version.

Oh christ. It's probably another incomplete upload. I'll fix it as soon as I can. I'm in conferences all day this week (HIV/AIDS in the Pacific conference, very interesting) but I'll be able to do it either this evening or sometime tomorrow in the afternoon.

Anyway, that's it. No more Filecrunch. That's the second time I've had the exact same issue with them.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/1e9265/

Try this one. It should work.

Well, I've finally got a nice hosting location for the latest version: http://www.nowak-kominy.home.pl/Testowy/do...ad.php?view.120

Here is a news page that, as of today, has some screenshots and info: http://members.chello.at/lisac2k/

I'm going to update the first post of this thread.

I have been enjoying this mod and the latest release is much more polished than the first.

I have to say I'm enjoying the vintage guns a lot more than I expected! They do seem very much "right" in the setting, much more so than the Bozars and what have you.

A few things that caught my eye when I browsed through items with F2Wedit:

A lot of damage ratings of the weapons seem to scale directly according to kinetic energy. We might disagree on whether this is optimal, so I'll just tinker with a few figures for my own game.

The KE/damage equivalency breaks down most with 7.62x39mm vs. 7.62x51mm (+25% damage for +71% KE), 7.62x51mm vs. .30-06 (+20% damage for practically equal KE, but then you knew I disagreed with that one already ), and .45 ACP vs. .44 Magnum (+18% damage for +140% KE).

A shotgun firing buckshot does the exact same damage as a 7.62x39mm rifle firing JHP but penetrates armor better. I doubt this is a conscious choice?

I assume you figured the ranges of the firearms don't really matter as long as they're long enough to make the average ranged combat to be well in range for nearly all weapons? If not, some simple tuning might make for a more varied list of guns -- for example, a Kar98k could well be given an effective range more than 14% longer than an AK-47 or indeed a PPS-43.

I'm guessing you didn't fiddle with the special abilities of the weapons much (other than the obvious ones like giving shotguns the "knockback" ability, which is a nice touch)? The Long Range Winchester 1894 Trapper and Accurate RPK are kinda funny compared to the plain vanilla M14.

With the firing AP cost of shotguns so high and without the option of burst fire, I figure you can increase the damage shotguns do by quite a bit. For example, even at 25-60 with a 2/1 damage modifier from 00 buckshot, it only takes a 5-round burst of JHPs from a .45 ACP SMG to do even more damage, and that burst costs less AP.

That might be overdoing it, but even with full length shotguns doing something like 26-36 (with x2 from 00 buckshot), they could be given a significantly more poor DR modifier, to the tune of +35% - +45%, and they'll still do some damage against, say, Metal Armor (17.1 with +40% to be exact, vs. 18 as it is). Beyond Combat Armor, I'm quite comfortable with shotguns becoming obsolete.

The ranges aren't a big issue as long as they're more than ~20, since long range combat is pretty limited. The 40 of a Kar98k just looks odd next to the 35 of a PPS-43.

Do you know what the mechanism for determining bonuses from special abilities like Accurate, Long Range, Scope Range, etc. are? Or, for that matter, how the actual range, the Range attribute of the weapon and other factors affect the hit probability of shots? That would help immensely in what stats to give which weapons. I was thinking of doing it the other way around -- giving manual action long arms (and those weapons renowned for their accuracy) the Accurate ability and all other rifle-caliber weapons with longer effective ranges the Long Range ability, MGs and battle rifles included -- but your way may well work better.

The longer effective range of MGs I simply handled by giving their burst fire a longer range -- e.g. I have the burst fire of an M14 a range of 30, that of an M14E2 a range of 40, a BAR 50 and an M60 60. Since I don't know how the Range attribute factors into the hit probability calculation, I have no idea if that works or not.

Speaking of hit probabilities, do you know whether the AC % modifier of ammunition is limited to reducing the AC to-hit modifier from armor to zero or will it, as I expect it does based on playing around with it, reduce AC below zero, effectively being a straight to-hit bonus? If it's the latter, giving the large caliber rifles a -35 AC % modifier might make hitting with these guns at longer ranges a tad too easy -- by which I mean 99% always except at extreme range in pitch black.

Also, a -35% DR modifier effectively makes the DR from any armor other than Advanced Power Armor useless. After all, these are only lead-core FMJs, all of which are handily defeated by ~3mm RHA. I suppose whether you consider that a problem depends on how useful you want body armor to be.

One idea for making ammo conservation a serious issue: reduce the ammo box sizes across the board. For example, dropping the size of a 12 gauge 00 shell box from 50 to 7 cartridges, even if you also cut the price by 6/7ths, would suddenly make you think a lot harder about shotgun ammo expenditure -- something that's not really a problem when you can buy about a thousand 12ga rounds on one visit to NCR.

Well, a lot of the things that you see in the game right now are a product of my not knowing exactly how things are handled in game. As I descibed before I was concerned that if I made range values uniformly much higher than in the original game I might break something so I decided to go with weapon traits instead. So, certainly, it could be worth playing around with different ways of doing things and see what works the best.

I do know that Weapon Scope Range actually gives large penalties against things that are very close, i.e. within 8 hexes. I'm not sure if the penalized range is affected by the maximum range or not.

Ammunition's AC modifiers essentially become a to-hit bonus versus armor. The rationale is that the armor's AC bonus reflects the possibility that something might just bounce off the armor with no effect. Therefore armor-defeating rounds must be less likely to do this than rounds which don't defeat armor. Personally, I think that this is a little bit broken but since it's part of the game I decided to work with it.

Now, to address your question, I don't actually know whether you can jack up the armor defeating value and end up with a to-hit net bonus. If the Fallout devs weren't totally asleep on their feet while coding that should not be the case. I hope that even they would realize that blue-jumpsuit-seeking ammunition is bad logic.

Lastly about the ammo sizes: in the past I felt that certain ammo types were abundant (like the 5.56 ammo and the 5mm ammo) and certain types were weirdly scare (why is 7.62 NATO less common than 5mm?) so I started out by increasing clip sizes to try and even things out. So, certainly, there's room for experimentation and revision to try and find some optimal value.

All in all, as you point out, there's plenty to be worked on and experimented with.

After one quick and dirty test, I think we have to assume that the devs were indeed asleep on their feet while coding. Heavy Weapons 44% + BAR with -99% AC Modifier .30-06 ammunition = 95% hit probability on a New Reno pimp at ~25 squares.

This is kind of useful with the shotguns, but it does require care with using that modifier overall. Currently, the -35% .30-06 and 7.92x57mm give you a net to-hit bonus of +10% even against Combat Armor, and a hefty +25% against Metal Armor.

It wouldn't be too hard to get a rough idea of how the range of a weapon and the Accurate and Long Range abilities affect hit probability calculation through testing -- but then if it requires that effort to be able to tell there is any difference at all, it really isn't much of a problem to begin with.

I tried dropping the 12ga. shot mag size to 7, and I'm still looting way more shotgun ammo than I'm ever going to use. This is true for all the ammo that can only be fired from manual action and semi-automatic weapons. Fortunately there's plenty of reasonable excuses for limiting the availability of just about any ammo in the post-apocalyptic world.

Well, also, as far as shotgun ammo is concerned there's also the fact that quite a lot of NPCs carry it. Of all the ammunition types that might become scarce I think shotgun ammo would be some of the hardest to do that with.

Ding-dong! The sergeant's dead!

I think that we can safely say that the devs had been playing too much d&d and got really confused. The problem is the relationship between Armor Class, Damage Threshold, and Damage Resistance.
AC determines how difficult one is to hit. As such, it really shouldn't be increased by armor at all. If anything, armor should reduce AC. DT and DR are the stats that determine if a shot actually penetrates the armor and causes damage.
DT is the ideal way to represent the penetrating power, or lack thereof, of various ammo types. DT subtracts directly from the damage caused by an attack and can reduce it to zero.In an ideal world, you should be able recode the higher quality armors to have a huge DT and have powerful rifle cartridge greatly reduce a target's DT. The only problem is that you can't because ammo doesn't have a DT modifying stat.

This only leaves you with DR to work with, but DR isn't bad. The thing is that DR reduces damage by a percentage after the DT is applied. Assuming hat the target has DT of 0, this means that every point of DR is reducing the minimum and maximum damage values for a weapon by 1%. This applies even to unarmored targets. One thing to remember is that the more powerful a weapon is the more powerful DR is, because it is a percentage of the weapon's damage. Buckshot, having a damage multiplier of 2/1 and a DR of 20 actually causes 160% base damage against unarmored targets, instead of 200% base damage. For every point of positive DR a type of ammo has, you have to increase the weapons' base damage by 1% to keep the same base damage against unarmored targets.
Really, the only advantage DR increases have is that they make it far more likely for powerful armor to reduce the damage to nothing.


Personally, I don't think that it is possible to adequately solve this issue without modifying the armor, as well. Instead of giving huge -AC bonuses to some ammo and huge +AC, +DR penalties to other ammo one could remove AC bonuses of armor and instead give armors huge normal DR bonuses. With everything above combat armor having a Normal DR of 100% or more, one would be forced to use armor piercing ammo or take called shots against characters so equipped. As a tradeoff, bulkier armors could provide a -AC penalty, actually making the people wearing them easier to hit.

There is the issue of deflection, which could make getting a "sticky" hit on someone wearing metal, combat or power armor significantly harder than on a person wearing nothing or soft armor. Beyond that, I agree that AC is an unrealistic mechanic for portraying the effects of body armor.

In addition to there being no DT modifier for ammo and weapons, there is the problem of ammo damage modifiers being counted first. This basically makes DT more effective at stopping armor piercing attacks than JHPs and the like.

I hadn't really considered the full implications of the ammo DR modifier working fully when the target is completely unarmored. On the other hand, I always calculate the DR level at which FMJs start doing as much damage as JHPs, where rifle FMJs do as much as 12 gauge buckshot, etc., so all that's happened is that JHPs, buckshot, etc. have less of an edge against unarmored/very lightly armored targets than they optimally should. Oh well.

The only real problem with giving wearable armor DRs in the 90%+ range is that in effect the PC and teammates become practically invulnerable to all melee damage -- with additional problems if you don't also switch the default ammo type of all ranged weapons to something other than JHP or shot. In effect the PC is already invulnerable to all non-armor piercing regular damage ranged attacks later in the game anyway, since New Reno Prizefighter Champion + Toughness-1 + Combat Armor ~= 80% DR with a DT in the 20s.

I don't think the Advanced Power Armor baddies actually have a chunky salsa autofire death animation. They just shudder while getting holes crushed into them and the bodies look like those in the screencap, even when the damage is in the high 4-digits.

With a bazooka though...

Also, killing the pack of wild dogs at the evacuated military base/mutant mine with the MG42 was really fun: 4 dogs exploding into bits with one burst with the sound effect involved quadruple-amplified was quite comical. Splurt.

Keep in mind, I toned down the MG42, making it do 33% less damage per hit on average and fire bursts 33% less long.

I don't know if this helps, but I heard that both Fallout 1 and 2 are based off of the GURPS system, so perhaps looking at the game mechanics for that would help you determine what to tweak? Just a suggestion.

It was originally planned to be GURPS: The Video Game. However, that fell though, and in the end the system is completely and utterly different.