I'm making a hardcoe rebalancing mod and I'm trying to figure out how gun accuracy works. I've read the GECK pages on it, but my testing has shown something strange that no one seems to have spoken about.

I test fired a brush gun with a guns skill of 100 and no negative effects. I was in Freeside, facing the North gate and crouched on top of the second wrecked car from the gate (relatively short distance IRL, long distance in game for rifle accuracy, it seems). I lined up the ironsights on the heads of the Kings gang member and Orris (they're standing side by side with their sides facing towards me and with Orris a little in front of the gang member). I fire off shot after shot after shot and get no hits. I fire off several more shots with the sight lined up over their bodies and finally get one hit, killing one of them with a body shot. I reloaded the save and tried again with the trail carbine and the same thing happens (they both have a spread of 0.06).

Then, I reloaded and tried it with the hunting revolver (spread of 0.35) and fire three or so shots before getting a head shot (took about 3 shots to get a head shot for each person I aimed at). I then tried with the La Longue Carabine (spread of 0.05; 0.01 less than the brush gun) and got head shots on ever single shot.

So, what I gathered is that scopes somehow increase the accuracy by ridiculous levels (I mean, the hunting revolver has almost 6 times more spread than the brush gun, but the brush gun can't hit a bloody thing).

I then used the GECK to lower the spread of the brush gun to 0.00 and tried again, with the same results. I tried 0.01 just in case and had the same results. In case that wasn't working, for some reason; I tried the same thing with a hunting rifle (spread of 0.01). The same thing happened as with the brush gun - shot after shot after shot and after about 20 rounds, I finally got a body shot! This rifle has 5 times less spread than the La Longue, which hits headshots every single shot on this test range. Furthermore, to me, it looks like the zoom down the ironsights of the hunting rifle is the same (or close to) the zoom down the scope of the La Longue.

Could anyone please tell me what's going on here? Do weapons with ironsights have inherently significantly less accuracy than weapons with scopes? If so, is there some way to trick the game into making a gun with ironsights be able to hit a man sized target further than 50 metres away? Can I give it a false scope, which is really just ironsights or something? Is there a better way to fix this? I'd really like to make weapons with ironsights more accurate, but I honestly can't see a difference in accuracy between an iron-sighted weapon with 0.06 spread and 0.01 spread - they both can't hit anything at medium (I refuse to call it "long") range.

Thanks for any help and advice.

Edit: I tried moving up to the first car from the gate and still couldn't get a headshot with the brushgun or trail carbine (even with the brush gun modded to have 0.01 spread)! Even body shots didn't come all that easy. This is a maximum of 20 metres away - short distance, easily. I can't tell if my game/save is just screwing up, or if this is how it always is: I've usually either played as a sniper (scoped weapons, therefore actually accurate) or I've played around with shotguns up close, so accuracy didn't matter too much. Is this really what it's like to play with regular guns: where you have to sprint to within 10 m of someone to be able to hit them with a hunting rifle??

Were you meeting the strength requirements? Were you positive the ironsights were aligned correctly? I'm faily sure the default auto-aim game settings could have an impact as well but I wouldn't think it'd be that severe.

I have a minor tweak to my game settings that effectively disables auto-aim, and I hit things at the edge of the NPC rendering distance with iron-sights (10mm pistol, laser pistol and Lucky in particular). I don't know if this is because of said tweak or not, but I can definitely shoot accurately with ironsights.

Queue

Yep, definitely meeting the requirements. I actually gave the brush game the same stats as the La Longue Carabine in my latest test (Str of 5, Guns of 25, spread 0.05, etc) and it was still exactly the same. One thing that I noticed is that without ironsights, at "long" range I have roughly the same chance as hitting the person I'm aiming at if I were to use ironsights - but at close range, ironsights definitely make me more accurate.

You might be right about the autoaim thing - I think I remember people complaining about it before. I downloaded a no auto-aim mod just then, but it didn't really seem to help. What mod/tweak are you using?