Adding a second solar scorcher (or other ammo-less weapon)

V

Velizar

First time out of the vault
I'm working on a mod and I would like to add a second solar scorcher. From what I gather, the solar scorcher's logic is hardcoded in the game engine. An old post claims that it is actually in the exe, but I looked for the solar scorcher's ID number (00000390 in decimal, 186 in hex) and I couldn't find it in the exe, so that might be wrong.

How would I go about adding the solar scorcher reloading mechanism to a weapon I made, without changing the original solar scorcher? The reason I want to do this is that I would like my mod to be compatible with other mods, and since other mods might have the solar scorcher, I don't want to break it for them.

Alternatively, is there a way I can add an ammo-less weapon to the game? The reason why I want to do this is that my mod adds a weak solar scorcher before the temple of trials, so that energy weapon characters can do something better than struggle with melee weapons / small guns for the first half of the game.

I could make it use BB pellets (description: it melts them and shoots them at enemies), but lore-wise that isn't very goo in my opinion. The lore for the solar weapon (Solar Needle is its name, might change) is that it was crafted by a tribal who had a passion for energy weapons, but could not afford the ammunition, so crafted this which uses solar energy. I think that's considerably better than the BB version? Opinions welcome.
 
Solar scorcher's logic is indeed hardcoded in the engine.
For the weapon you want, the easier solution I can think of is to add a new weapon and a new ammo, and use sfall's ammocost hook script to make it doesn't really cost any ammo when attacking. It's not a real "ammo-less" weapon as it still requires having the ammo loaded, but you can take this as attaching a jury-rigged solar panel to the weapon. Or you can use the concept of New Vega's recharger pistol to set it as a weak self-charging EW (i.e. infinite ammo).
 
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Great idea! But I also wanted to add a burst mode, so I don't think this will work with that. I might abandon my burst mode idea or go with BBs if nothing else works.

Are there tutorials / tools for modifying the game engine? I just want to change the logic to apply to weapon IDs 390 && 532, rather than only 390 - are we sure that this is hard to do? I'm currently looking at fallout.exe from within a hex editor.........

Edit: Upon further investigation, I might be going with BB ammo.
 
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I don't quite understand the problem. Making it "use" a new ammo pid, and adding a script to auto recharge it after a shot should be enough, no?
 
Originally I wanted to specifically use the solar scorcher's logic, since I liked the lore - for this it should only recharge on sunlight. But I managed to convince myself that the BBs version is more realistic.

Also, in hindsight, 99% of the time fixing lore should be way easier than changing the game engine.
 
Adding a check for light level and/or indoor/outdoor area in auto-recharge also should be easy enough.
(Of course auto-recharge is slightly different from scorcher's "0 AP recharge", but arguably it's even better)
 
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