Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properties?

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akmatov
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Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properties?

Post by akmatov »

Greetings,

I must be the last person on earth to have discovered DX and no surprise I like it. :) I'm currently starting out on my first few sessions and this is a very interesting game.

However, I was surprised at the firearm behaviors and took a couple of days off to troll the Internet to get the tools to crack open and view the Deus Ex.u file. Looking at the various WeaponXXX.uc files, it looks as if they were created by several different people (default properties are very disorganized) none of whom had much of any idea about weapons. I think my favorite two are the 10mm Pistol with a six-round magazine - the term "six shooter" refers to a revolver - (the 10mm Glock 20 - a good representative modern pistol - has a 15-round magazine) and the 7.62mm Assault Gun with a hit value of less than a third of the 10mm pistol. These values are so wrong as to be weird.

I am not a modder capable of creating the complex mods that add so much to games. But I am a tweaker, one who has the very simple ability to sometimes get into the data tables and tweak the values to what I think make a lot more sense. I really like my tweaked version of STALKER a lot better than the vanilla, of modded, version. This level of improvement seems to be under the radar of the very skilled modders like ArtistPavel whose STALKER Complete is a masterpiece.

However, I would really rather be playing than going through the DX WeaponsXXX.uc files to create a spreadsheet of the values and then go in and tweak them. Please tell me someone has fixed this so I can get back to playing more, what mod am I looking for?
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by G-Flex »

You know what I find even weirder than all that?

How pellet spread works on shotguns.
The way spread works is as follows: It calculates the trajectory of each pellet as if it were a separate shot. If your accuracy is really bad, the spread of pellets gets incredibly wide, and if your accuracy is really good, it narrows. This means it's somehow possible to get 100% accuracy on buckshot pellets using the sawed-off shotgun, high skill, and the targeting augmentation. Essentially, the spread works exactly the same as firing several individual shots in a row.

But you're right, some of the weapon stats are a little... strange. Most people seem to agree that the assault rifle is more of an automatic peashooter, and it is pretty strange that the 10mm pistol — a semiautomatic pistol, not even a revolver — only holds six bullets in the magazine.

In addition, some other oddities:
  1. Minicrossbow darts actually do more damage than 10mm pistol shots.
  2. Sabot rounds have spread even though they're supposed to be a single, solid slug, because spread behavior isn't determined by ammo, but by weapon (and even the number of pellets can't be changed in weapon properties; it's always one number for bullet-style weapons and another for projectile-style weapons).
  3. The Dragon's Tooth Sword is very overpowered. It does 100 damage (technically speaking, it hits five times for 20 damage each), and with skill/augs is capable of destroying basically any humanoid enemy in a single swipe, and destroying literally any scenery object/door/whatever capable of being destroyed.
  4. Throwing Knives are so rare that they're effectively irrelevant in single-player.
  5. Does anyone ever actually use the PS20? It's silent, I guess, but barely capable of killing someone in one hit anyway.
  6. The weapon with the highest damage-per-second (if you're into such calculations) is apparently the stealth pistol. Really.
  7. The firing cone (i.e. the possible trajectories for your bullet to travel, based on your accuracy) isn't a cone as much as a pyramid. In other words, if you keep firing at a wall, you'll get a square, not a circle. I'm also pretty sure accuracy in vanilla DX is (invisibly) affected by the weapon's maximum range as well.

Regarding mods: Mine attempts to correct some of these problems, especially the ones I've mentioned here. Shifter also has some weapon changes in it, although I'm not sure of what they all are.

I would have changed more, and might in the future, but gameplay balance has to be taken into consideration, so I'm a bit hesitant. Otherwise, I'd probably give the assault rifle more than a 50% damage increase.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by DDL »

The problem with the assault rifle is that everyone and his uncle has one, toward the end of the game. I suspect they put the damage down so you could have lots of shooting going on but without a whole load of instagib "WTF" player deaths that higher values would produce. With sufficient weaponskill, the gun is still super deadly in player hands, with the added bonus of hugely abundant ammo, because (as noted), everyone and his uncle has one.

Shotgun spread is..admittedly very silly, but I'm not sure if there's a better way of applying increased 'accuracy' to a shotgun otherwise.

The firing square is definitely just horrible code, though.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by gamer0004 »

The assault rifle fires at extremely high speeds as well... I calculated it once, measuring the time it takes to go through one clip, and I believe it was something like 900 rounds per minute. Bringing that down to say 600 rpm while increasing damage would probably be more realistic and wouldn't change game balance.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by akmatov »

Thanks for all the info. As a very new player, I hadn't realized that eventually everyone will have an AssaultGun, hence the castration of the basic values. I changed the values in my current game and now a five round burst to the chest is about 90% fatal, as it should be. Not sure what to think about the issue of weapon mods and skill improvements, something that definitely needs some thought.

In the abstract, a five round burst of 7.62mm to the head or torso should drop anything except some of the bigger African mammals. Yet in reality the human element plays a huge role. If the firer can't hit anything, then all the fire power in the world is useless. Maybe I should be calibrating my head to the idea that average firepower should reflect a level 2 (half skilled) player and then cut back the hit points to reflect unskilled inaccuracy rather than the theoretical power of the cartridge.

Hmm, I 'think' the upgrades in skill levels is 10% per level, so a fully skilled shooter is 146% better than a skill level 0 with a base accuracy of 1.0. If I tweaked the rate of improvement to 20%, the same fully skilled shooter would be 207% better, which I like better.

Maybe a 'happy' formula would be to determine a real world value for the weapon hit points, then roll that value back so that a shooter would reach that level at skill level 2 with skill levels 3 and 4 be progressions toward awesome. I think I like that idea.

Anyone know what the skill level of the NPCs is? And does it change?

Really something, even at this late date as this is primarily for my own amusement, needs to be done when a five round burst of 7.62 has a damage value of 3 and a single shirikan has a value of 20.

And I'm not even going to speculate on what the designers were smoking when they created an automatic only weapon firing 7.62mm rounds. The 7.62mm and the .30 06 are about the same and both KICK, these rounds are not found in shoulder fired automatic weapons, they are found in machine guns - rather different animals.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by akmatov »

Ops, need to mention something about the cartridges. There is at least one very well known fully automatic shoulder fired weapon, the AK-47!

However, it fires the 7.62x39mm cartridge and I was thinking about the full power 7.62x51mm NATO round (the one that is identified as being used in the game), which is very similar to the .30 06 round which is a 7.62x63mm round.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the first number is the diameter of the bullet and the second number is the length of the cartridge case. The size of the cartridge case governs just how much power you can stuff into it and how fast the bullet can travel. For example, a typical 7.62x39mm bullet leaves the muzzle at about 2,400 feet per second with about 1,500 foot pounds of energy. The values for a full power 7.62x51mm NATO would be about 2,800 feet per second and 2,600 foot pounds of energy or about 170% as much energy. A .30 06 clocks in at 2,600 feet per second and 4,000 food pounds of energy or about 266% as much energy. (BTB another factor is the weight of the bullet, so the numbers are not just a variation on the muzzle energy.)

So while there are automatic shoulder fired 7.62mm weapons, they are the half powered 7.62x39mm with about half the kick of a full powered 7.62x51mm NATO round, which is the round used in DX. Once again we are back to a group of developers who seem not to know anything about weapons who are busy smoking something. "Hey man, don't know nothing about those nasty guuuuns, but shirikans are like totally badass - lets make a shirikan SEVEN times more damaging than a little rifle bullet!" :shock:
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by akmatov »

gamer0004 wrote:The assault rifle fires at extremely high speeds as well... I calculated it once, measuring the time it takes to go through one clip, and I believe it was something like 900 rounds per minute. Bringing that down to say 600 rpm while increasing damage would probably be more realistic and wouldn't change game balance.
Just checking Wiki,
AK-47(1949) = 600 rpm
AK-74(1974) = 650 rpm
AK-12(2011) = 850 rpm
M-14(1959) = 700 - 750 rpm
M-16(1963) = 700 - 950 rpm
M-4(1994) = 700 - 950 rpm
SCAR(2009) = 624 rpm
G3 (1959) = 500 - 600 rpm
G36(1997) = 750 rpm

I have to agree with you that 600 rpm seems to make a lot of sense. I wonder how to do that - got to go look at the .uc files.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by Jonas »

Game balance. Simple as that.

I think it's great that you're tweaking your own game to be further towards your preferences, if everybody had the energy to figure out how to mod games instead of just complaining about their small gripes, I think the gaming corner of the Internet would be a nicer place (with much more interesting discussions). But ION Storm weren't making a realistic shooter for you, they were making a cyberpunk stealth-FPSRPG for the mainstream market. Worth keeping in mind :P

They could've done more to bring the fiction in line with reality, sure, for example by making the pistol .50 and the assault rifle 5.56mm, but in setting the numbers up, realism had to be pretty far down the list of priorities - making sure the game is roughly equally playable at the start and at the end, for a combat-specced player and for a stealth-specced player, on Easy and on Hard, was obviously much more important. It's also pretty clear they prioritised clear variety over realism, which accounts for eg. the lack of semi-auto on the assault rifle, which would make its function overlap too heavily with the pistol and the sniper rifle. If a single bullet from the full-auto assault rifle is fatal, why would you ever carry a sniper rifle? It's not like the game is full of wide open terrain.

And by the way, those 3 points of damage on the assault rifle are per bullet, so if you land hits with all five shots in the burst, that's 15 points of damage. Deus Ex uses some pretty outrageous multipliers for location-based damage, so if you place those shots right, that's an insta-kill on regular troops.

Like I said, I think it's awesome that you know enough to tweak your own game closer to the experience you want, but try not to make quite so much fun of the devs for making a game that appeals to a broader group of players ;)
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by akmatov »

Jonas you make some very good points that I will try to keep in mind regarding the developers intentions. Some of their choices just scream to me WRONG, but I'm not quite their target audience and to have a successful product they have to appeal to a wide spectrum of gamers. I'm thankful that I think the few changes that will make me a happier gamer are probably within my very limited skill set - I can edit a text file. :D

This is a great game and I'm very grateful to the people that provided it to us, in spite of my occasional snarking. The games that stay on my HD are ones like DX where the developers have left the door open for modding and where great modders have donated untold hours of their time to make those games great for ppl like me to enjoy.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by akmatov »

:lol:

Trolling around in the WeaponXXX.uc files I see that being shot with a 7.62mm round (i.e. a bullet about 1/3rd inch in diameter) causes as much damage as a cat scratch.

Jonas is so right, this is not a realistic RTS :lol:
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by Jonas »

akmatov wrote:RTS
*FPS.

There is no such thing as a realistic shooter. The closest we get is ArmA, and I hope nobody here wants Deus Ex to be like that.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by gamer0004 »

It could use some more realism, but balance is important as well obviously.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by Jonas »

The thing is that those cat scratches aren't subject to most of the multipliers that the player's weapons are. There are damage bonuses for skill levels, certain augs, and hit locations, so the bullets will almost never end up just dealing 3 points of damage. There's also the matter of DPS - a cat scratches a lot more slowly than the player can fire bullets with the assault rifle.

You're not getting the whole picture based on the code. Set the values in a way that creates gameplay that seems realistic, don't try to translate real-life measurements directly into the code.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by DDL »

For reference, a five round burst of assault gun fire to the face with master skill and augtarget will do 58 damage per shot, for a total of 290.

A single pistol round to the face with master skill and augtarget will do 269 damage.

If those are being fired your way (i.e. by NPCs, who have no weaponskills), you have a lower head multiplier, so those values are (w/r/t difficulty)
easy: 6 per shot, total 30 (assault), 28 per shot (pistol)
normal: 9 per shot, total 45 (assault), 42 per shot (pistol)
hard: 12 per shot, total 60 (assault), 56 per shot (pistol)
realistic: 24 per shot, total 120 (assault), 112 per shot (pistol)

Basically a single pistol round to the head will kill you, on realistic. If assault rifles did "damage per shot" on an equivalence with pistols, the last half of the game would be very, very difficult for any playstyle other than 'stealthy', since even augballistic would only reduce that by 65%, and 112*0.65 = 73..so they'd only need to hit you with two stray rounds and down you'd go, even specced as a tank.
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Re: Has anyone ever proofread/modded the DX weapons properti

Post by G-Flex »

DDL wrote:Shotgun spread is..admittedly very silly, but I'm not sure if there's a better way of applying increased 'accuracy' to a shotgun otherwise.
Eh, I think the way I did it works pretty well. My code chooses a firing trajectory just like with a single-shot weapon, and then deviates each pellet from that trajectory in a similar random fashion based on a hidden "spread accuracy" variable. It was pretty easy! It effectively gives you lower accuracy at extremely skill, but the grouping makes a lot more sense, and shotgun-sniping is something I always found pretty weird.



Regarding game balance: I've never found the assault rifle to be a particular good weapon in-game. A burst does barely any more damage than a pistol shot, but suffers from the time it takes to fire it and the fact that it's easier to land a single shot dead-on than a burst of five shots. It also takes up four times as many inventory slots. The only saving grace, in my opinion, is the 20mm explosive shell launcher they somehow tacked on. Otherwise, it's a rather mediocre weapon, in my opinion, especially in a game where precise shooting is favorable to rapid shooting.
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