Fallout 3 Compendium - Release 12 - Beta v0.6.0.2

[SoulmanZ]

heya dubby, i left a message over on the bethsoft forums but you probably arent there too much

so for ease of access, he is some of it (you already answered some other stuff)

"how do bleeding points work? do they tick off at a steady rate or do they tick off faster the more that are built up. but that i mean, i hit someone with a tire iron for 10 damage and 5 bleeding points say, compared to a ripper for 10 damage and 50 bleeding points. to me the person with 50 bleeding points should take the bleeding damage quicker to simulate deeper wounds and more extensive tissue damage - someone hit with a chainsaw would actually die from bleeding out than the damage itself, most of the time

it would also be great to further differentiate between a single high power bullet, and many smaller ones - rifle vs minigun say. the minigun uses smaller projectiles, but the sheer number clock up a huge amount of tissue damage. bleeding is one way to factor this in, with higher bleed rates when perforated rather than just shot

i would love to use this damage system in a mod i am working on, as i mentioned in the pm, and these issues would have direct bearing on the implementation

cheers
SMZ "

thanks for any thoughts

 

[JayTheGay]

i would propose indeed making the minigun small-bullets-spam-weapon, and adding in a bozar-style weapon which is a BG designed to shoot slowly, but with huge-ass penetrating/devastating bullets, equivalent of sniper bullets. you know, a gun that a PA soldier would carry to take out other PA soldiers or even light armour vehicles

 

[Crni Vuk]

why not just add in a 50cal machine gun as well? It could be even a design that just resembles the look of the 50cal just designed for the use with ground units that have the power of the power armor.

 

[chipk]

why not just add in a 50cal machine gun as well? It could be even a design that just resembles the look of the 50cal just designed for the use with ground units that have the power of the power armor.

I have a .30 cal in the works and will be upping to a 50 cal. Fallout 3 does not have any light machineguns or heavy machineguns what so ever... And that's a letdown. The minigun takes too long to rev to be a practical weapon.

here's an awesome .30 cal scene from Death Wish 3... Warning, Spoiler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMW2letSKdQ

Unfortunately the existing Havoc animation does not contain a belt-fed reload and i only know how to do oldschool keyframe animation. All I can do is replace the mini-gun model with the heavy weapon but it's going to have the same box and latch reload anims.

Update: I got the world object of the Laser rifle scope working. How it's going to be implemented as an addon object, I dont know.
Someone also added the idea of building a standard 9mm handgun. I have one in my archive and will be deploying shortly.

 

[Crni Vuk]

...Unfortunately the existing Havoc animation does not contain a belt-fed reload and i only know how to do oldschool keyframe animation. All I can do is replace the mini-gun model with the heavy weapon but it's going to have the same box and latch reload anims...

Well ... someone uploaded already exactly that on the Nexus M2 Browning BETA v1

What I was talking about was more a "conversion" of a 50 cal machinegun to a weapon that could be used with a power armor, something that is not "just" a 50 cal. But meant to be used in particular with ground units, cause thats usualy not what such a heavy machine gun is used for. But with the use of Powerarmor and thus more physical strength such a weapon could be used almost with the same effect like a assault rifle, of some sort.

...
here's an awesome .30 cal scene from Death Wish 3... Warning, Spoiler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMW2letSKdQ
.

Men ... thats ... so awesome ...

 

[Dubby]

i would propose indeed making the minigun small-bullets-spam-weapon, and adding in a bozar-style weapon which is a BG designed to shoot slowly, but with huge-ass penetrating/devastating bullets, equivalent of sniper bullets. you know, a gun that a PA soldier would carry to take out other PA soldiers or even light armour vehicles

I already made the Bozar (and a lesser version), and they do just that - and kick some serious ass.

-

heya dubby, i left a message over on the bethsoft forums but you probably arent there too much

so for ease of access, he is some of it (you already answered some other stuff)

"how do bleeding points work? do they tick off at a steady rate or do they tick off faster the more that are built up. but that i mean, i hit someone with a tire iron for 10 damage and 5 bleeding points say, compared to a ripper for 10 damage and 50 bleeding points. to me the person with 50 bleeding points should take the bleeding damage quicker to simulate deeper wounds and more extensive tissue damage - someone hit with a chainsaw would actually die from bleeding out than the damage itself, most of the time ...

Bleeding damage is handled per frame by a specialized effect script that calculates the bleeding points to convert into health damage on that per frame basis. There's a built in floodgate in the script which allows regulation of how often the script does this conversion. Also, the degree at which the bleeding points are converted into health damage is directly proportional to the ratio between the bleeding points and the victim's maximum health. A big mutie with 400 HP is not going to notice 10 BP as much as a molerat with 40 HP would. A victim's BP can get considerably high when they begin to tank many attacks consistently. As far as removing BP, that's accomplished with using stimpaks as well as the other medicinal items[kits]. The effect should work if an NPC uses the item and consequentially purges some BP at the same time.

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... it would also be great to further differentiate between a single high power bullet, and many smaller ones - rifle vs minigun say. the minigun uses smaller projectiles, but the sheer number clock up a huge amount of tissue damage. bleeding is one way to factor this in, with higher bleed rates when perforated rather than just shot

The number of damage dealt to a victim's HP, as well as the amount of BP that gets tacked onto the victim, is based entirely on two factors: penetration, and cavitation. In short, the wound channel dimensions. It does a pretty good job at emulating the *many* differences between various types of bullets at many various velocities, including hypersonic velocities.


-

i would love to use this damage system in a mod i am working on, as i mentioned in the pm, and these issues would have direct bearing on the implementation

cheers
SMZ "

thanks for any thoughts

Guess I'll take a look at that PM sometime soon then. I would certainly like another GECK'er to help out.

-

The minigun takes too long to rev to be a practical weapon.

Not with the physics doing the damage calculations. The minigun is meeeeaan! At least versus targets that aren't too heavily armored (like tough robots).

 

[chipk]

I got the Chinese combat shotgun working and it is NICE! Spraying brahmin herds has never been so fun.

I also have one gripe. The Mk 23 is an elite weapon. I feel the Mk 23 should be in the hands of Enclave, BOS, and High level Talon company mercs. We now have a 1911 in .45 ACP, this should replace the mk23 as a common weapon in the Raider inventory. Sorry but finding an mk23 on every other raider just doesn't make it feel special anymore.

 

[Dubby]

I'm still busy with life, but I did come up with an idea I'd like to throw at you guys for a yay or nay approval - it involves fixing VATS and AP.

The concept is quite simple. Whenever the player uses VATS to perform a targeted attack; whether the attack hits or misses and regardless of how much AP is used up during the attack; once the VATS cutscene is done playing the player's AP will reset to 0. The AP will regenerate with time, and as the player's agility increases so will the rate at which the AP recovers. You'd always start with 10 AP (just a number- can be anything), for instance. Instead of Agility affecting the maximum AP, it only affects how quickly those points recover. This way, perks and drugs that ramp up the maximum AP have more value, Agility has recognizable value as a statistic, and the players get the advantage of having targeted attacks without being hindered by AP expenditure in real time or being given too much power in combat.

Opinions?

 

[mrowa]

Depends if vats still would allow only for 1-2 shots then using it would be almost a suicade when u exit and still wanna fight, then again if vats wouldnt eat AP player just can spam vats button and kill mostly anything easy. But i think your solution would be good if vats would need some AP to be activated and would be something like finishing move what i mean in this play would deal extra dmg in it and this would reduce his Ap. So in example if player got this max 10 AP he needs 1 ap to activate vats but more Ap he have when activating vats more dmg bonus he can gain

 

[Dubby]

No more limiting the cutscene time. You'd be back to the default 20 seconds allowed.

 

[bhlaab]

I don't like it, prefer it more or less the way it already is.

For one thing it seems like it would cripple low-Agility characters way too much, and it would make high agility characters feel nerfed.

Plus, taking a super-nerdy lens to things, it makes sense that a fast guy would be able to do more things at once. It doesn't make as much sense that a fast guy would gain energy quicker. That seems like more of an "Endurance" thing

 

[Dubby]

Yes, but you're talking about VATS here. Where more or less, it's all reflex.

Think of it like being able to use VATS just like you can now in vanilla F3, but only less often. In other words, even a big bruiser character with 1 Agility will still be able to make timed, targeted attacks with his fist for instance. But a character, such as a boxer for instance, with higher Agility and probably slightly less Strength will be able to hit more often as a result of his Agility. And yes, targeted attacks with melee is possible and not very hard to implement - it just requires the melee weapons (and there is one for unarmed "fists") be converted to projectile weapons without a projectile and a very short range.

 

[JayTheGay]

targetable melee attacks are a must, but the new VATS idea i dont really get, because the way you laid it out now it would not make very much difference and keep VATS same bethesda-ish "superpower for occasional usage"-thing, rather then making it a fully functional combat system which you can use for the entire battle, without needing to attack in realtime. the way it should be is that the player would not need to do ANY attacks outside of VATS if he doesnt want to. so that VATS is totally fair and always usable, whenever you want to perform an attack, without standing there like an idiot regenerating AP, forced to fight in real time or hide untill your AP is back.

thats why i had introduced the whole "realtime vats / animation speed bound to AG" idea earlier, to fully get rid of the need for AP, but keep a perfect tactical control (similar to Bladurs Gate), along with dynamics and cinematics of a realtime combat. as a bonus, it would also affect the FPS combat the same way: slower animation=slower attacks, no matter if you use VATS or no (thanks to the same timeflow speed for everyone in VATS)

 

[bhlaab]

Okay, I see what you're getting at. But I don't like that the max AP is a static number. the recharge also sounds like it would conflict with run and gun AP expenditure.

Man, hearing about all the work you've done with the formulas and armor makes me really pine for a solid turn based/iso system to be honest.

 

[Dubby]

the recharge also sounds like it would conflict with run and gun AP expenditure.

Well there wouldn't be run and gun AP expenditure anymore.

makes me really pine for a solid turn based/iso system to be honest.

While that might be nice, F3 is fundamentally a first person shooter. Granted, there are ways to (obscenely) modify the AI and gameplay into a turn-taking system with an overhead NWN2-ish camera (there are tweaks that can be made to the camera settings to achieve that), and ultimately it -might- play somewhat like the original fallout games did. Point is though, the engine is for first person shooters. So therefore, the best thing is to work with that element without taking away from it. Which... is tricky.



I've also been pondering ways of giving [some] weapons a secondary function. It's rather standard in FPS games now, and some are pretty darn nifty. I particularly like the minigun in Turok. It's "secondary" function lets you deploy the weapon on the ground as an automated sentry. Now, I know how to make that kind of effect in Fallout 3 - but alot of other interesting and "neat" secondary functions I'm not sure are possible just because weapons in F3 only have one firing animation. Regardless, I've been doing lots of thinking lately - in my spare time, at least.

 

[Bahktinx]

The concept is quite simple. Whenever the player uses VATS to perform a targeted attack; whether the attack hits or misses and regardless of how much AP is used up during the attack; once the VATS cutscene is done playing the player's AP will reset to 0. The AP will regenerate with time, and as the player's agility increases so will the rate at which the AP recovers. You'd always start with 10 AP (just a number- can be anything), for instance. Instead of Agility affecting the maximum AP, it only affects how quickly those points recover. This way, perks and drugs that ramp up the maximum AP have more value, Agility has recognizable value as a statistic, and the players get the advantage of having targeted attacks without being hindered by AP expenditure in real time or being given too much power in combat.

Opinions?

This sounds fantastic!

It sounds like the way Action Points are used in F3 will actually have some resemblance to the way they were used in the original Fallout. This sounds like the best gameplay compromise between the 'dynamism' of the first person shooter and the strategy of a turn-based system. At least, a far better compromise than the one Bethesda made. It seems very faithful to the original gameplay of the first two Fallout games.

The stuff you're coming up with is amazing, Dubby. Please, keep it up!

 

[chipk]

Were we also going to expand the GNR Radio Playlist? I've got a crap load of old jazz and WWII music from my uncle. Should be easy to implement.

 

[Dubby]

Were we also going to expand the GNR Radio Playlist? I've got a crap load of old jazz and WWII music from my uncle. Should be easy to implement.

Neat! Put them online somewhere, so we can (all of us!) take a listen and decide what fits and what doesn't.

 

[bhlaab]

Were we also going to expand the GNR Radio Playlist? I've got a crap load of old jazz and WWII music from my uncle. Should be easy to implement.

This mod already exists, and I prefer that because I can individually decide what I think fits and what doesn't.

 

[Shevek]

Loving this mod...

Making AGI affect AP regen is great. The more you tie gameplay to the stats and skills, the better it will be for it.

But please keep AP use in realtime play! It really is a very well designed system and you shouldnt scrap it. In fact, I tend to use my own compilation mods for perks/tag/traits/weapons/ballistics/etc but keep realtime AP use and the VATS tweaks from this mod. I like that you are rethinking the one shot only in VATs thing though.

Also, as far as secondary functions for weapons, that would be great! (Like maybe allowing you to shoot one shell or two out of a double barrelled shottie, possible?)

edit.
Also, there is already a great mod for GNR radio that adds like 100 period appropriate tracks (its called "More Where That Came From"). Honestly, you guys dont need to worry about that.