The Blue Sun Mod

[safoolfool]

Originally Posted by Chortles

Also, I'm looking at the ITEMINFO (where weapons' display names and Info are kept... but what's "a SUM rifle"?), WEAPONINFO and WEAPONINFO_ALT (can't tell which is entirely yours, though I see that they have different weapon stats), but how much of the weapon attributes are editable by text editor? For example, I'm guessing that I can change the HK416's default magazine to a standard "M16" magazine instead of a "C-Mag (M16)," as well as allow a MP5A5 RIS to accept "Weaver Rail" (should be called Picatinny) optics?...

First of all, as far as I know, SUM stands for a Stephan Uribe modified (or something).

As for the iteminfo question, as far as I can see if you open up an entry (say G36) you'll find this:
ATT Laser 1 "Rifle Laser"
ATT Light 1 "Rifle Light"
ATT Scope 3 "G36 sight""G36E sight""HK G36 Scope"
ATT Bipod 1 "G36_bipod" blocks Bayonet and ILauncher
ATT Silencer 1 "Supressor - 5,56" blocks Bayonet
ATT ILauncher 2 "M203""M203PI" blocks Bayonet and Bipod
ATT Bayonet 1 "StdBayonet" blocks ILauncher and Silencer
ATT Magazine 1 "G36 mag"

Some things seem to be listed in groups (e.g. this lists only 1 type of magazine, but the g36 can take double mags and cmags, as well as (I think) reduced size ones (e.g. 20 instead of 30, but I'm not sure if there are g36 20s)). If you wanted it to take WR sights, I think you'd add "WR" in the scopes list. So the new scopes line would be:
ATT Scope 4 "G36 sight""G36E sight""HK G36 Scope""WR"
or, if you only wanted WR sights, it'd be
ATT Scope 1 "WR"
Additionally, it looks like you could delete the "blocks" part of those lines to allow you to have a bipod, suppressor, launcher, and bayonet all at once.
I don't see why you couldn't add in the m16 magazines to the ATT Magazine line, but I have no idea what would happen if you tried letting it use magazines of a different caliber (e.g. enable .458 socom magazines on the g36). It might work fine, and calculate damage as if it was a 5.56, but since I think damage is based on bullets, and not the gun firing them (not sure though, since different guns of the same caliber have different damage ranges on their in-game info pages).
I'm not sure what the number before the list of what you can attach means, but it seems to always be exactly the same as the number of things listed (e.g. g36 takes one magazine family, the number is 1; it takes 3 scopes, the number is 3; 2 launchers, the number is 2 etc.)
For changing the store default attachments and magazines, I think you go to the line
StdPlug "Rifle ammo clip (G36/30)"
and change the thing in quotes to whatever you want.

What I'd love to know about iteminfo, is how range is calculated. It seems to be based off of 3 numbers, max, effective, and curve. I think max is where the "standard" curve on the in-game info page touches 0, but effective I'm not sure. I'd assume it's the halfway mark (range where hit probability is 50%), but I don't think it always is. I know that the higher the range curvature, the faster range drops off. For example, the AS VAL has an 11 curvature, and its accuracy goes from something like 100% at 0m, 75% at 75m (so not much dropoff), then drops really fast, to the point where the hit probability is like 10% at 87.5 meters. On the other hand, guns with low curvatures, like 1, seem to drop linearly, or even experience (slow) exponential decay when less than 1. I'd guess it's using some function that varies by three parameters (max, effective, and curve) but I wish I knew what it actually was.

For now, I'm gonna go test letting a g36 use WR sights, and stop the blocking, and try a Beretta that accepts socom mags.

Edit: so I got the g36 to both use WR sights and take everything on it at once (despite the fact that the bayonet is shorter than the silencer, maybe you can use it as a polearm, instead of a spear? Putting socom magazines in the Beretta also worked fine (and looked hilarious, since it puts the magazine in the same place as a pistol mag, but its bigger than the grip, so it looked like a barrel and trigger sticking out of a box mag). I'm not sure if it was actually doing .458 damage though. Shooting an unarmored merc in the chest with both a .458 and a 9mm from the Beretta did the same damage (in HP and bleeding), but so did having a guy with an HK chambered naturally in .458 shooting at one of my guys. I did notice that everyone I shot with the .458 got their chest to show up red (as in a special injury, like when you're immobilized in the legs) and none of the 9mm guys got that injured. From that it makes me think that a Beretta loaded with a socom mag actually was doing socom damage, which is also pretty funny. I think the problem might be that I'm playing with critical hits on the player off. I just tried shooting an unarmored merc in the chest with the KS23's car-stopping round, which did the same damage (15 to health, ~45 bleeding). I guess "no criticals" just caps the amount of damage you can take from any one shot. I though criticals were like in other games, where you'd have a random variation in damage, so sometimes you do triple damage (to simulate hitting something important). Maybe in this game damage doesn't vary that randomly, and its just 0-5 damage = slightly hit, 5-10 = hit, 10-15 = heavily hit, 15+ = critically hit (or something). This really makes me rethink turning it off. I'm fine with not having criticals if they mean that luck becomes a huge factor (i.e. it's annoying to lose a merc because some asshole happened

As for effective range: I tried also editing the Beretta's effective range to 100m (from 41) while leaving curve at 6 and max at 150. The numbers I got for the "standard" hit curve in the info screen were: 87.5% @ 50m, 75% @ 85m, 50% @ 92m, 25% @ 100m. So effective range is definitely not the 50% mark.
When I then changed it by keeping effective at 100 and curve at 6, but made max 300, I got 87.5% @ 38m, 75% @ 60m, 50% @ 90m, 25% at 105m. So increasing max range actually made the guns less accurate at almost all ranges, up to about 100m, which doesn't really make any sense to me.