I'm not really sure how much attention is paid to this forum by members of Runestorm or what their inclination towards doing anything else on BW is at the moment, but I thought I'd just try to offer a review of the mod along with a few other suggestions for some other people - relevant not only to BW, I hope, but other future projects.

First up - what's good about Ballistic Weapons. The modelling, texturing and sound are all, needless to say, of incredible quality - even the worst of the weapons still hit far above the quality shown by most other mods. All of the features at least work - and compared to the vanilla game there are many of them. A significant number of the weapons are innovative and of unique design, and each of these unique weapons has an excellent design and a lot of appeal when used. The spread of the weapons covers every tactical usage now. The amount of work done on the mod considering the time taken is phenomenal, and the dedication to the mod shows.

For the most part, Ballistic deserves the praise it gets - most definitely from the standpoint of anyone who can code, anyone who can model, anyone who can texture, etc. However, from a gamer's point of view, a few of the concepts in Ballistic fall flat. I'm going to try to list them here. Be mindful when you're reading this that I'm not here to try to cause damage, argument or flaming. I'm just stating what I feel doesn't really work properly, and things that, if fixed, would make the mod pretty much the only mod I've ever played for any game that I would actually go to the store and pay money for.

First up, aiming.

- Hipfire, also known as Unaimed Fire.

The first time I played Ballistic Weapons, I had never actually played a realistic aiming FPS before, and thus had no idea that fire, when not coming from weapon sights, is inaccurate depending on such factors as stance, movement and recent damage taken. I didn't like the mod much at that point, and had no idea what iron sights were (noob, lol) so I stopped playing. After leaving UT for a while and playing some realistic FPSes (such as CS and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) I found out about the concept of iron sights and hipfire actually being somewhat useful. Armed with this new knowledge, I came back to play some Ballistic (quite recently), but was still rather disappointed. Compared to other games, the implementation of hipfire in Ballistic is extremely bad by default - I remembered not being able to hit anything with hipfire in Ballistic, and this was still the case when I returned to it. Recoil seems to affect hipfire in a strange way (instead of the view moving with the recoil and the fire being coned around the centre, the view stays the same and the centre of fire moves ABOVE the actual crosshairs...) and the amount weapons sway is greatly exaggerated. Without the ability to adjust the hipfire setting serverside, hipfire would be unusable for any real sort of range on any weapon except shotguns. Thankfully, the server that I play on has hipfire adjusted to 0.3, which is somewhat close to CoD4 submachinegun levels.

Additionally, the hipfire indicator really sucks. I mean, really. I'd rather use a dot like in UT2004 than rely on the hipfire indicator to give me any idea of where my bullets are actually going to hit.

Weapons do not recoil as badly as you think they do. Weapons do not sway as badly as you think they do. Remember this!

- Iron Sights

As aforementioned, the first time I played Ballistic Weapons, I had no idea what ironsights were and how they were the staple of realism shooters as the method by which to fire weapons accurately. Iron sights in Ballistic are neglected, mostly because (and this is my opinion) the community was too busy telling RuneStorm all the things they were doing RIGHT with their mod (which is almost everything) and not enough time giving criticisms to improve it. Iron sights are extremely slow to raise for all weapons, no matter WHAT the weapon is, whether it's got a scope or how heavy it actually is. They don't automatically force you to move at the correct speed to maintain them, requiring either a mutator or a Walking bind on the Sights key to maintain proper movement speed. You can't fire while you're changing from sights to hip, or vice versa. They require you to stop for a short time before you can raise them if you're running, and, most importantly, the speed at which you can move in iron sights is NOT dependent (much like the speed at which you move to your sights and the amount of sway you get on a weapon when you're moving) on the actual weapon you have out. Raising a pistol and moving with it is just as slow as raising a machinegun into sights and moving with it, as far as I'm aware - even if the standard running movement penalty applies to iron sights, it's still wrong to force a player to walk when they're carrying a pistol, submachine gun or carbine, since these weapons are LIGHT, designed to be used for close quarters combat, and thus should be not only more accurate from the hip than heavier weapons, but should move at good speed when sighted instead of walking. As far as I'm aware there's some kind of range modifier in place in Ballistic, or so the default properties say, so I don't see why this isn't compensated for.

Second, movement. Double jumps and dodging shouldn't really be in a realistic mod. I can't really think of anything else to say but that, but if you need any more justification, I'll elaborate more in the section on damage. Additionally, run speed is, at its maximum, at UT levels, which is rather fast for a realistic mod, and along with the damage issues (elaboration comes later) diminishes the value of iron sights even more.

Third, damage.

- Damage modifiers.

Ballistic seems to modify damage based on three factors. Hit location, bullet damage randomness and whether the weapon has a silencer on it or not. All three of these have issues.

Hit location damage is a feature of most FPSes, but its implementation in Ballistic is not only flawed but heavily exaggerated. On average, if limb damage is considered x1, torso damage ranges from x2 to x3.5 and headshot damage is pretty much x4. Sounds okay, right, as most hits are registered at torso... except they aren't. Offline testing and online play with all weapons registers an overwhelming number of hits to limb even when the torso is the actual target. Not only is it unrealistic for shots to limb to do such little damage, but it also makes the weapons look extremely weak when you snipe someone for 44 damage or machinegun someone for 8, and also ruins the gameplay by maximising the impact of a lucky headshot, especially as certain weapons with extremely high fire rate and recoil, such as the XK2, begin to severely outclass other weapons simply because the headshot modifier is so much larger than is good for gameplay. The SRS battle rifle is a particularly jarring example of the headshot modifier problem, as its limb damage is 15-20 but it does 95-120 damage on a headshot, which is an absolute joke difference to have unless getting headshots was a feat of skill and not luck, which it certainly isn't when the movement speed is at UT2004 levels and dodge/double jump still exist in the game. Winning and losing should not be about luck, that's what bingo, the Lottery and other such bilge is for. Effort should always equal reward. Always.

Bullet damage randomness... Not really much to say about this other than "what's the point?" It doesn't enhance gameplay to have random bullet damage, it cheapens it, which is why standard Unreal weapons don't have random damage for most weapons,even though the capability for it exists in instant fire modes. All it does is add more luck-based crap to the game - leave luck-based crap to trash like MMORPGs, which make a profit out of systems based entirely on luck and not skill.

Silencers. Not really a biggie - the idea of weapon special being able to enhance the firing mode of a weapon is a great idea, and the modifier for damage on the SRS at least is 10% less damage. However, the sound made by a silenced SRS is still loud even though the muzzle flash isn't really visible.

- Extreme damage inconsistency.

The damage inconsistencies between weapons are pretty distinct, and also cause the weapon types to be neatly divisible into tiers, from absolute joke (overpowered) to absolute joke (underpowered). Reasons are given in each section. The Flamethrower, Minigun, Lightning Gun and any other superweapons are omitted for obvious reasons, but assume they're in God Tier.

God Tier: Shotguns, Explosives (esp.Mines) the AM-67 and the M75-TIC Railgun

The above are the only weapons which do anything near realistic damage under standard conditions.

Shotguns are launched into God Tier not only because of the small size of many UT2004 maps, but because of the ridiculous damage they can do, even on the move, compared to any other weapon, the high capacity of BW's shotguns with the exception of the Coach Gun, the low damage of other weapons and the enhanced movement speed of BW compared to other realistic shooters, causing any requirement of shotgunning in other games to have proper movement, positioning and sound control to go flying out of the window and cementing the place of the shotgun as the weapon of noobs everywhere. Offline, the best I got from an M290 aimed with sights at the chest was 520 damage. I laughed.

Explosives are just as bad. The Pineapple is one of the most effective weapons in the game under any ping, once again because of the movement speed, the low damage of bullet weapons and its ridiculous damage compared to bullet based weapons. The general strategy is to cook the Pineapple (pulling the pin while it's still in your hand, if you don't know the terminology), dance around with dodge and sprint to dodge most of your opponent's bullets, not as if he's going to kill you with the ridiculously low limb damage, then before the grenade explodes, just throw it at him. Because the NRP is given an actual BAR to count down the time left before it explodes (lol, tbh) this technique works extremely well as long as your opponent doesn't get a lucky headshot.

Mines do not belong in Ballistic if it continues to retain the movement speed of UT2004. They're not easy enough to spot and they do a ridiculous amount of damage, especially considering the basic UT2004 level's map design.

I hope I don't even need to mention the G5. Guided rockets, massive blast radius, massive damage, complete joke.

The AM-67 has a 20 round capacity (doesn't even look like 20 rounds fit in there), flash, extremely high damage (30-40 limb, 40-70 torso, oneshots to head), the option of full auto and the ability to be dual wielded. It singlehandedly craps all over the entire sidearm class as well as the standard sniper, half of the automatic rifles and all of the long range rifles.

The M75-TIC is pretty much a superweapon. Its limb damage is 100-200, which aside from having a stupid range, causes it to kill any newly spawned player in one shot and have a good chance of killing a player with a few goodies in one too. If that's not enough, body damage is even higher and headshots max at 400, which will oneshot any player in Ballistic. The crappy little standard sniper, so unnotable that I can't even remember its designation, absolutely pales in comparison, so badly as to be completely useless compared to a railgun, and the SRS, while excellent at long range, will be less useful compared to the M75 if the player has basic hitscan skills.

Dubious Tier: XK-2 x2

Only really an issue with dual wield, but it has a high rate of fire, overly-high capacity and a moderate kick, which leads to a significant number of headshots for joke damage.

Good Tier: Machineguns, Carbines, Assault Rifles, Other Non Submachine Gun Automatic Hitscanning Weapons

Bread and butter of any game like this. Nothing really to say about them.

Average Tier: Single-shot long-range rifles, revolving pistols

Aside from being made to look like crap by a mere sidearm (I'm looking at you, AM67), they don't really fill a role. Long range is covered by the railgun and medium range is fine for almost anything with automatic fire. They can be useful as they give peripheral vision when sighted, but they're not automatic and as such don't have the kick to give them the chance of landing a ludicrous headshot. The SRS fills this role, has a silencer, a variable scope and is also useful at close range because of its status as an automatic. Totally outclassed compared to it. Additionally, automatic weapons like the SRS do not lose much effectiveness with ping increase, whereas the single shots require significantly more prediction for around the same rate of damage.

Crap Tier: Beretta-type Pistols, Projectile Weapons

I know what you're thinking. "It's a handgun, it's not meant to do damage." And maybe it would be a valid statement if they had any use. Not only is a weapon randomly chosen from the sidearm class (which contains submachine guns, revolvers and the dreaded AM67) to give the player when they spawn in non-Loadout gametypes, but in these gametypes, carrying capacity is not limited, so a player may as well simply switch to another primary weapon at the same speed after his current weapon's magazine runs out, instead of doing a fast switch to a light pistol as in other games. And of course, in Loadout, you can simply choose a submachine gun or any of the other, better types of pistol. There's no situation in which these weapons are desirable or useful compared to others.

Projectile weapons. The A-series Skrith-type weapons, the ViPeR rifle, the X3 blade throw special. Projectiles, obviously, don't hitscan, so you have to lead even with zero ping. However, not only are these projectiles affected extremely badly by ping to the point of being almost unhittable, they do about as much damage as a hitscan bullet, which is much easier to make contact with, making weapons that shoot projectiles completely useless at long, medium and even short range, as even though you may be able to hit them more here, projectile weapons have a lower ROF than most hitscan weapons, and hitscan weapons hit just as well. Not to mention the dreaded shotgun.

Still awake? Still alive? I'm impressed. Onward we go...

Fourth, weapons.

When one adds too many weapons to the game without thinking properly about role, statistics and class, what results is an extremely poorly balanced game with some downright baffling oddities. There's an issue like this with almost every single weapon in Ballistic - even the melee weapons.

General issues with every weapon: Recoil, hipfire radius, movement sway, ironsight speed, ironsight move speed and even DAMAGE are not logically applied. Some pistols in burstfire recoil more than the M353 Machinegun. Pistol bullets do more damage per shot than some heavier weapons do. Looking at the M806 Beretta and the M353 Machinegun, the Beretta seems to sway MORE without the effects of "chaos" being added to, as the code puts it, much to my amusement, "greatly _ruin_ the player's ability to aim accurately", and sways nearly as much as the M353 does under the effect of full "chaos." God damn, it's a game. It's still got to be playable, and the way to make a game playable is not to keep in dodges and double jumps and them penalise players for using them so badly that their hipfire becomes utterly useless. Jumping in CoD4 hardly even shakes your aim.

The icing on the cake is that these soldiers can apparently hold a PORTABLE MINIGUN AT 3600 ROUND PER MINUTE without it being blown out of their hands, yet moving and firing a pistol leaves them flailing their arms everywhere in sight...

Issues with melee: The X3 has more functionality than the other weapons.

Issues with sidearms: The AM67 outclasses all of them, the balance between pistols is extremely poor. The XK-2 should be buffed, made actually useful in the role of an SMG, have its dualling ability removed and be added to the primary weapon class. Same with the other submachine guns in the sidearm class. The MRT-6 is strong enough to be a primary weapon.

Issues with machineguns: The M925 obscures the view when fired from the sights, greatly diminishing the value of the weapon. The M353 doesn't act anything like a machinegun, in that it has low damage and extremely low recoil.

Issues with shotguns: M290 outclasses the others due to raw damage potential.

Issues with automatics: The M50 grenade has a low range, exaggerated blast effect and slow speed for a grenade launcher. The M50's primary fire mode has a low rate of fire, low capacity, significant recoil and low damage while having bad sights and retaining the poverty of hipfire that all Ballistic weapons have. The S-AR 12 in most situations outclasses the other automatics, due to good hipfire, improbably low recoil and high damage despite the short barrel (defying all known laws of physics while it's at it), with the exception of the SRS provided hipfire is set to reasonable values and the player has a good ping.

The Skrith rifle is the Link Gun of Ballistic.

Issues with grenades and mines: Real grenades don't give you a little bar that shows, conveniently, exactly when to throw to avoid being pulverised. Mines just shouldn't exist unless they're going to be tripped by anyone's proximity and not just enemies.

Issues with single-shot weapons: No role. R9 outclasses the Redwood.

Issues with snipers: The M75 and SRS both outclass the standard sniper heavily. The scopes do not sway when the player is not moving, which renders people trying to ironsight instead of just running around with a shotgun easy prey for getting railgun oneshotted.

Fifth, default settings.

Ballistic is very customisable, and this is one of its advantages. However, most servers running Ballistic use the default settings, which are bad.

- Hipfire's default setting is almost unusable.

- Dodging is on.

- Stable weapons when jumping etc is off.

- Keep Super Weapons has absolutely no effect. Standard Ballistic incorporates superweaponry like the mines, railgun, flamethrower, lightning gun, G5 RPG and minigun into standard play, including Loadout menus. Because of this, most servers running Ballistic don't even bother with all the time you spent writing the hipfire code and just use guided G5s, auto-aiming HvCs and spray-and-send-the-other-guy's-aim-to-Hell-flamethrowers. While that may be fun to noobs, most people will get sick of it very, very fast. There's a reason you don't see loads of UT2004 servers running a mutator to replace a weapon with the Redeemer or another superweapon - because it isn't fun.

Customisability is all well and good, but most servers will not take advantage of it, so the best way is to have the standard settings give the richest possible gameplay, even if that means dumping a few dubious weapons or concepts.

That's pretty much all the criticism I can level at the mod. If ironsights worked properly and logically, hipfire wasn't so stupid, the superweapons were actually classed as superweapons, locational damage was dramatically toned down and all weapons were given a real role in the game and some proper attention to what they should actually be like and how they should work, Ballistic would be pretty much a perfect mod. I'd be happy with just the second, third and fourth though, as I think the low damage as a result of the limb modifier being the one that's used most often combined with crappy hipfire is responsible for most of the issues with Ballistic.

One final thing. I keep noticing weapon packs being made for Ballistic. While the custom work inside the packs is always great, there's one simple fact, and that fact is that a game does not need a shitload of weapons that are almost clones of each other, with the only minor separation being a throwaway feature such as a laser on a pistol. Nor does it need even more superweapons, like the second Minigun or the artillery cannon. I respect the abilities of those who like Ballistic to make custom content for it and by no means am I trying to tell anyone what the hell to do with their time - if people want to keep making weapons, keep doing it, it makes most people happy and if nothing else it's at least something nice to look at. However, I don't really think that adding even more weapons to Ballistic has any real purpose, and the role overlap between the standard weapons (in 2.1) and the weapons released in the various packs is extremely high. I'd personally find a lot more use in trying to fix the gameplay and balance of Ballistic instead of worsening it by adding even more variables to the mix.

There seem to be quite a lot of people in the ideas sections playing Mary-Sue as well, by suggesting ideas for weapons which aren't remotely balanced. It might seem cool to you for such a weapon to be made a reality and put into the game, but it's not cool for other people who just want to play a fun, balanced game which isn't reduced to 3 or 4 overpowered weapons, making anything that ISN'T related to those weapons a complete waste of the coders', modellers' and texturers' valuable time. If it's not at least remotely balanced, it's not going to be implemented unless you take time out from suggesting ideas to people and learn to actually model yourself.

That's all. Comment, flame, agree, although I'm expecting a lot of the second and none of the third. Surprise me.

RS devs have moved on to another project called Crucible Weapons. It's for UT3, so you could check that out sometime. Just to note, I'll be taking massive chunks of your post in my quotes out so I don't make a mess of a reply.



Last statement a bit of an aim at a few mods that turned into retail? Hehe...



Hip-fire really is hated in BW it does seem. With one of my mods, I had tested with doing 100% view recoil scaling, and found out that it was practically impossible to control (although that was the Fifty-9 I was testing, so that might have been a reason). I'll agree hip-fire is absolutely useless unless you have a shotgun, laser sighted weapon, or just the minigun.



Ironsights are quite slow to raise up by default weapon sets, yes. A few of the BW mods tried to address the issue, but when something was made for standard BW, they usually went with the slow ironsight speed as to balance with the base BW weaponry.



Actually, the mod did remove dodging and double jumps for a time, but it was complained about by a number of users, so the RS devs put that back in. So this issue was originally not supposed to be here, but was changed by the masses wanting it back.



CW tried to fix that issue of hit location, but that's obviously not BW. As for bullet damage randomness, one of my mods was working with trying to reduce randomness by a lot (making it a variance by 4dmg), but it never got finished (ha, it was too large and I got bored!). As for silencer things, they are pretty useless to even try to implement with UT's AI code. UT's AI isn't finding you by sound or by sight. They ALWAYS know where you are; they just don't have to make your death their goal.



Gonna skip the entire section because it's pretty true. Only a few things I'll have to place into special thought. And on that note, it's the M75 and the AM67. First, AM67 holds 14 per clip IIRC, but definately not 20. Second, the M75 usually is treated like a superweapon, really meant for stuff like ONS gameplay. So in a way it is meant to be placed in the slot for the Redeemer and Target Painter (or the Ion Painter).



The M900 grenades are worthless, yeah. A few of the BW mods changed that up, but most don't play with the mods, so that kinda makes the idea a mute point. Other than that, I can't say anything else that I haven't said (pointing to M75 as a superweapon really again)



We can't make servers change their settings at this point, but I know what you are meaning.



Which ones have you played with?



Not even touching the ideas section part of the post (there are some good ideas in there as well, but there's a reason why we've got a few threads for ideas to be possibly used for a BWCP, organization). Oh, and you might be pleasantly surprised with a few of my responses being in agreement or simply commenting. Or fixing a few issues with stuffs. Still don't understand how you have AM67s holding 20 per clip.

Thanks, not only for reading, but for the replies and bits of history you gave.

First off, the AM-67 thing. I checked it a while ago today and felt like a bit of an idiot, but I played a lot of BW 1.7, back when you could not only sight on the run by holding down your sights key, but use a trick to cause dualwielded weapons to be sighted, which was a hell of a lot of fun with a pair of altfired D49s. ^^ I'm pretty sure the AM-67 had a clip of 20 back then, but it does indeed have 14 now. I stand by what I say about it though.

Yeah, I guess that was a bit of a dig, wasn't it? Ballistic is of much better quality and much more fun than the few UT2004 mods I've seen that have gone retail.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who doesn't like the implementation of hipfire. Thankfully, as I say, the servers I found have got it scaled to something at least approaching usability.

Yeah, I tried playing with dodging disabled in the settings today, and it does feel a little weird, but I guess that's because of UT2004's scale, its HUD and its feel making me think that it should be there. I felt okay on Blackhawk, though, which I consider THE Ballistic map in UT2004.

Good to hear that the hit location modifiers are being worked on. And yeah, there are a hell of a lot of firemodes to modify to eliminate randomness. I guess that's part of the reason nobody since Kaboodles really wanted to tackle the issues of weapon statistics and balance. I play online, though, so I don't mind what bots are going to think about my cute little silencers, I'm just concerned with the stealth option. Walking around with sights up controlling one's sound is great for getting kills.

The M75 is absent from the East Coast-based server I play on (I can't find many European servers running BW ) but it's present (presumably by default) along with the other superweapons on a European loadout server that I found. Even though I ping 152 on the East Coast server and 44 on the European server, I'd much rather play on the East Coast server simply because everyone who joins on the European one loads out the AM-67 as a sidearm, mines in the grenade slot, and any combination of the HvC, G5, RX22, M75 or XMV for the primary and secondaries.

I didn't know there were actually submods of BW. Is there a list anywhere?

Yeah, it's true, most servers are going to be pretty set in their ways. I wish I'd done more when I was playing a year ago.

I couldn't really give you a name, but the weapons I've seen are from the HSP server. There's a clone of the Barrett M82A1 .50 cal sniper, a minigun that shoots incendiary rounds, a small pistol with a laser on it, an M763 clone automatic shotgun, a grey G5 clone recoiless rifle, a Desert Eagle clone, an RS8 clone with black skin chambered, apparently, for .45 ACP and a few others. Almost all of the weapons are reskins of standard BW weapons, with some that have slight variations in modelling.

I know Sergeant Kelly is pretty much in charge of making all of the packs with new models in them, and his team's work is pretty damn amazing too. I think my post comes off as a little rude and insulting to people doing hard work to progress this mod, so I'll clarify. From a pure gamer's standpoint, more weapons are absolutely excellent if they're both unique and balanced. If they're not balanced, the game becomes either a reduction to that weapon or the weapon is simply not used at all. If they're not unique, the weapon conflicts with an existing weapon and whichever is more powerful will end up being used. I mean no disrespect to the skills of those working on custom packs.

So i was reading, and falling asleep (sick, not bored...no wait i was bored just not from this) and I discovered, i have no idea what the AM67 is (can you tell me what its Pfire and Sfire are?) and that i havent noticed any of those things except maby the minigun thing and hipfire accuracy, but i fixed that by going all shotty.

P.S. is the AM67 the pistol that does the flashy thing?

Yes.

No problem, I like making good posts... most of the time (haha, the sometimes is usually on FA (not related to UT2k4 at all, don't ask))



It's mainly just that there needs to be a modification of BW that completely redoes a lot of the things with movement and such. I tried a few times with changing the weapons balance, but I never really nailed what I felt would be actually worth anything.



Hey, I'm still here with that practically defunct mod of BW, although it's pretty dead. I might pick it up again and work with trying to make it better than before (working weapon to weapon and not in sets like I was doing for a while).



Kelly's BW pack is an addon pack, but there was also Kab's balance pack (no added weapons FAIK). I had 2 different packs, both being rebalances, but also horribly executed. I might start a 3rd with a serious attempt towards the way some weapons might be better balanced according to the caliber they fire. It's just not really much help that the weapons tend to have such varying calibers in the same class, resulting in some being much better by default.



Sergeant Kelly's Bonus Pack.



Actually it just so happened that Kelly's pack is the only one actually getting released with new content. I personally had a lot of weapons that I never finished working on, always unreleased to the public.

I'd definitely be interested in that. I was in The Generals (Kaboodles' clan) back when they were playing Ballistic, and contributed a little bit in terms of ideas (or to be fair, a hell of a lot of whine ) for weapon balance to that mod. I haven't seen Kaboodles around in ages though.

Tell me about not releasing things... I recently started to learn how to model in Blender and I've made a few thing for UT2004 so far, but I'm too embarrassed to release anything. I want to make a playermodel, but I don't see any way to do the skeletons in Blender.

when you said long i thought at least 2 paragraphs but wow you wrote a damn book
anyways nice to meet you
back onto topic i prefer blender its easy in a metaphorical sense
and i like the skeletons on ut3 even though they last for two seconds

Araz: Well Kab's in the Army now, so that's why he isn't around. As for models and such, just show a few pics. We can't help out if we don't know where to start!

Griz: Skeletons in this sense aren't actual bone structures, but rather the rigs that models use to dictate animation movement.

Didn't realise Kaboodles was joining the Army. I assume he is or is going to be a commissioned officer, with his intelligence.

Well, as far as modelling goes... I can't really say it's anything to do with being a weapon, and it's my third model so far.



Venom Gunship from G-Police: Weapons of Justice. Kept the finer detail off as it's intended for UT2004, and I see no point in adding detail that a (theoretical) skinner could add more efficiently. Plus, the original gunship was designed for a PlayStation game, and as such there's not much detail to omit... Thrusters move, custom fire effects and stuff like that, I think I spent more time coding for it and messing around with the six firemodes than I did actually modelling it... UnrealEd has a habit of ruining my day when it comes to importing stuff.

Aye, I was referring to the rig. I have .max files for the skeletons, but they're native to 3d Studio Max, which I don't own, can't afford and am unwilling to pirate. Shame though, I had quite a few characters I wanted to have a crack at, and making a good playermodel would be getting my modelling wings.

Hey, that looks pretty good actually! You might be embarrassed by it, but I think it's a good start with modeling. How long have you been modeling anyways?

--

Started working on that BW mod I was thinking of. Only have the M806A2 working, but it still needs tweaking for the player speed. As it stands, limb and torso damage are the same, and all randomized damage is just very small. 17 to 20 damage for non-headshots, 77 to 80 for a heashot. Reduced clip amount to 10, changed firemodes to only allow semi-auto, made view recoil to 60%, player speed will be 20% faster than default (but I'll be making the 0% change to be around 50% of original speed, so the M806 will later have 60% speed to reflect a 20% addition). I still got quite a few things to change on that gun...

It's been three weeks since I started working with Blender. I can say I'm happy with how the Venom turned out, as I learned a fair few things when working on it. I'm confident that if I need to make a high detail model that would require a lot of work, I'd be able to do it now.

Sounds okay to me, apart from the persistence of the large headshot damage modifier.

What do you mean by that? Headshots are much more deadly than torso hits, so I try to reflect that with the change in damage to be so much. If it was only a 2x or 3x change, it'd not make any real headway with a shot to the head.

Due to the way I'm trying to also change up the way aiming and such works, it's supposed to be more skill based on headshots than just some pure luck.

Ah, I see. As long as effort is proportional to reward it's all good.

I might upload what I have so far with just the M806 for you to try in an arena match with only that gun. It seems bots are able to actually use the weapon now that chaos was removed! Or at least impossible to attain for having any visible chaos...

Aye, I'll be continually checking these boards.

Checked your signature links, too. I hate UV mapping just as much... but since I have nobody to skin for me I at least have the option of using a hack-y method like Smart Projections to get scaled default UT textures to show up on models, using Materials liberally too.

Ha, I check on the boards very often myself! It might seem like I'm continually on here, but that's because I keep a tab open here in Firefox. Anyways, I'm uploading Alpha 3 of Ballistic Combat. There is only the M806A2 and the X3, but don't use the X3, it's not really even been worked on. It's literally useless in difference besides max knives able to be carried!

Movement speed is slow compared to the standard variant and other sidearms (seems like automatic speed) but as far as firing goes it acts as a pistol should.

Well, that's very good to hear! I actually slowed down the movement speed stuff on purpose. The rest of the weapons I'm putting together work off the base movement speed to be 50% of standard UT speed, so this weapon has a 20% boost over that (60% of default in other words).

I getcha. Sounds good so far.

Oh, just to note, I'll be updating whatever progress I am making with the mod in a thread called BallisticCombat, and it'll be in the Works In Progress part of the forum.

Hehe lots of text. Interresting thoughts though. Most of it is simply to have to fun of many types of weapons in the game but avoid making them useless. A think that bother's me the most is the damage of the D49 (2 shots in torso often kills from that "little" handgun), the mentioned am-67 (best weapon of all?), shotguns and last the heavy machinegun. The HMG does really poor damage realism wise. A 12,7mm BMG bullet should do more damage than a shotgun blast. (I asked a friend who spent some time army stuff as weapon instructor, he compared shotgun and HMG. A shotgun close gives a big hole in a stomach, while a HMG might make body into 2 pieces). I have always been bothere by the unfairness to the M925 or what it's name is. I have a feeling it's RoF is way too low as well, recoil too.

It wouldn't suprise me if all the pistols did higher damage per shot than the rifles. Just to keep them useful. The Ranger does way higher damage than the automatic rifles as well for no logical reason. Just to make a semi-auto non-sniper rifle catch up with assult rifles.

The minigun shoots same bullets as the M50 doesn't it? Still I bet my arse it does less damage per shot than the M50. Otherwise it would be... a little bit too powerful. Flamthrower and lightning gun aren't balanced at all. On the other hand it might be impossible to do without making them into weak boring weapons that doesn't feel like what they should be. They are simpyl there for fun. Those are the kind of weapons that would be great for SP games but pretty much ruins MP games.

The explosive weapons as said, do quite some damage. I have no problem with the grenade shooter on the M50 I find it balanced while the G5 in small rooms kills too often. Even if you shoot the missile it will still explode with full power.

Projectile weapons are always hard to balance I think. The only real way me thinks is to make their recoil to be 1/10 of other weapons.


Litte bit different topic
Have you peapople noticed that the beam of constant beam weapons always has a fixed length? Stand close to a wall and compare to a long range. Take 2 screenshots and compare. They beam is exactly the same length and angle. It's all an illusion that it reaches that wall far away. On the other hand, the secondary beam of the skrith pistol does not "suffer" from this. The beam length is real. Shoot a beam and walk to the side and see the beam in the air. It reaches from the player's previous position to the target. I would like if all beam weapons had true length on their beams.

Well, all those problems are quite important i agree, but BW is very much the same as other real style fps's, like you said..

In our futer projects there will be a much greater measure of precise adjustments, you will be able to tell the difference, overall a more professional product..

I will say I never had a problem with hip firing at all in ballistics

the main things I do to make it easy to do is turn off the sights

learn where the weapons are going to fire or the recoil pattern

and also make the walk key very easy to get at

I mean think about it you run or jog all the time in unreal but to hipfire in real life you are not going to be running you are going to be staning still or walking

and this walking or standing helps alot with the recoil the rest is you having to move the gun to compasate for the recoil

what might would be a neat thing to add to the game would being able to blind fire around corners and over things

and of course much better AI is needed

I'm still reading the text, though remember that hipfire is heavily influenced by 'chaos', which is why the gun moves around and not the view.

There's a slider that you can adjust in the menu if you want it removed or lessened.


Edit: All right, I've gotten about half way. You should definitely try Kaboodle's weapon realism pack. He's covered almost all the issues you've brought up so far. Non-dual XK2, less recoil, no leaping around with chaotic MGs, etc.

Edit 2: Phew, all the way. The clone weapons you see in the packs, like the black minigun and the black sniper M50, were put in to compete against the standard Ballistic Weapons. With the guns swapping out and BW's specific loadout system, you won't likely see people with both variants. While they do suffer from the same base issues, (eg. miniguns not defaulting to super weapon spot, slow ironsights), they can be used to defeat their counterparts while retaining a sense of balance. (With the obvious exception of the superweapons. Those are supposed to be like the redeemer of the original.)


Either way, all your points are valid and well known. Sadly, they're not going to be fixed anytime soon, and Kaboodle's balanced weapon server was just recently taken down. Personally I'd recommend playing his pack offline, and on the 'realistically' modified servers online.

Though on a side note: if you have any criticisms on my pack, I'd love to hear them as I'm still working on it now.

Ok, first off I ignored a couple of posts(sorry) and:

1. Thx 4 letting me know about the am67, I suck with names.
2. I didn't get the whole thing with the beam length ( I will re- read later and EDIT this post.
3. G5 rocket needs to have a lower explosion power when shot in midair.
4. Does anyone know where to get free skin editing softwar? Or just tell me where it is.