Dark Carnivour: “tried playing BW last night. It's such a nest of bugs”

As awesome as BW is, it’s not flawless. There are many bugs, especially if you try to rock it online in a client-server setup. Due to this, there have been several attempts to fix BW; unofficial fixes appeared and mutators were made to better deal with the various issues. But no matter how much effort was put into them, none of these solutions were ever fully satisfying. All were plagued by other, different issues: lack of inter-compatibility and a schism of the community (and development teams) which otherwise could have created great works together define the current face of the BW modding scene. To keep BW and the community alive for the sake of playing and modding together, a paradigm shift was needed. Throwing all the modders together in a giant pot unfortunately has not worked out. Each modder had his own goals and his own ideas on the best way to proceed.

To combat this, the most talented and encouraged BW modders came together to create something new and future-proof: a common mod base for all current and future modders.
Ballistic Weapons Enhanced was born – the way to go.
But what is Ballistic Weapons Enhanced. What are the goals of this project and how does it help the entire community?

To answer this question, we have to take a look at the current mod situation. What do we have right now?

On the face of it, this looks good, but incompatibility issues abound, and as no meeting of minds, no drawing together of the mod community was in sight, we decided to develop a common base that combines most of the above mentioned mods in one package – that package being Ballistic Weapons Enhanced (BWE).

BWE Enhanced is a fork of Ballistic Weapons that fixes ALL known BW bugs, contains ALL features of the unofficial fix, the CF Mutators and all existing community mutators - rewritten, reimplemented and entirely standardized. Additionally, a mass of new features, gameplay extensions and other enhancements made it in, resulting in a Ballistic Weapons version that is superior to the existing Gold version of BW and all previously created mods. It serves as a common and standard mod base for all future forks of BW and for all future mods that want to utilize the new features and opportunities and the broader development scope. If you decide to base your work on BWE and offer the people out there the greatest possible compatibility with your mods, only one caveat must be accepted: that basing on and using Ballistic Weapons Enhanced means extending Ballistic Weapons Enhanced.

What does that mean?
In order to sustain an ever-growing mod base and a playable, feature rich and improved Ballistic Weapons version, we decided to make an agreement:

If you fork BWE or develop exclusively for BWE, then directly contribute to BWE.
You decide which parts of your work you want to put into BWE. All together, we help you with the migration and integration of your features. In a common sense, we discuss which features could go in in what way.

Together, we can make everything happen and further develop BW as we imagine it.

Base: Ballistic Weapons 2.5 Gold
Current Version: 1.0 - 15.07.2014
Discussion thread: [BWE] Ballistic Weapons Enhanced- Discussion

Use the provided installer to install BWE. It installs all necessary files and let you make additional choices. The BWE installer ships with BW 2.5 Gold. If you have a patched and otherwise untouched UT2004 installation around, use that one ! Its clean and perfect for the sake of getting BWE to work.
In case the installer couldn't locate your UT2004.ini and you want to host games, edit your UT2004.ini as follows and add the following ServerPackages:

The installer let you choose between BWE and BW2.5 host support for the installation.
When using BW2.5 host support only, you will not be able to host a BWE game but you can still play it online on BWE servers, except that you cannot map the new keys in the input menu of UT2004 and as such, cannot use them. When using BWE host support, you cannot host BW 2.5 games anymore but still play them online on other servers as usual. Though, there shouldn't be need for hosting BW 2.5 anymore.

The first fork of BW and the origin of the unofficial fix, BallisticPro is a project focused upon gameplay and balance, with realism taking a back seat. Takes liberties with the gameplay to push it towards a more run and gun style of play, with both iron sights and hipfire in use. Can be viewed as a hybridization of UT2004 gameplay with Ballistic Weapons. Popularly played online.

Balancing reset to BW 2.5 Gold for classic, unforgiving BW combat.
Contains all content from all the various CF Mutators, also the unreleased ones. Continuously updated with new features, gameplay enhancements and weapons. Sgt. Kelly's bonus pack and Hr.Doctors pack will be migrated and further developed with BWX.