This will probably need NVSE, but I think it would be really cool if weapon reloading was magazine based rather than ammunition unit-based.

To explain, the current setup is that you have a pile of rounds in inventory, and when you reload, you take some from your pile, and shove them in your gun. Your bullet pile decreases in size accordingly. And yet, the animation used is you taking a magazine out of a magazine well, and putting a new magazine in. Where do these magazines come from and where do they go? Why are they always full?

A more realistic approach would be to have interchangeable magazines based on ammo type and potentially some other factors about the weapon. So, 5.56mm magazines would be interchangeable between varmint rifle, service rifle, etc. and .308 magazines would be interchangeable between the few sniper rifles that use those rounds. So, reloading would take a magazine from inventory for that round type, and you fire the weapon, which removes rounds from the magazine. If you reload before your magazine is empty, you have a partially full magazine sitting in inventory. If its empty, you have an empty magazine sitting in inventory. You can't just take rounds from your pile, which you found on some dead guy - you have to put it in a magazine first (which you should be able to do in the field, but it shouldn't be so quick you could do it during combat). This means that in combat, reloading after firing just a round or two is a bad idea, because you end up with a lot of partial mags.

It would mean more prep required for assaulting enemy strongholds. It would mean that extended magazines would be a property of the magazines used rather than a particular mod on the weapon. It would make sense if you could make magazines (extended and regular) with the proper guns/repair knowledge.

A system like that would be wonderful, but it would necessitate changes that I fear may be impossible with the tools available. Someone more knowledgeable than me would have to speak to that. Though if such a system was implemented by someone, I sure would like the option of restricting magazines by weapon type too. You would also need a limitation on reloading mags (cant do it with the game paused, should take a little while to prevent doing it in combat) and a limit the the number of carried magazines.

Do you often reload part-empty clips more than 3-4 times per fight?
If not, then this wouldn't really achieve anything. As long as people have 3-4 full clips then they can happily swap them in and out in a fight without having to worry about running into problems, as they'll just reload the part-filled ones out of combat. And even if you did do that, it'd probably be from compulsive reloading after firing off 3-4 rounds so you'd just cycle through part-full magazines without running into any problems because you don't empty all 100-odd (or whatever) rounds in them and you reload after firing half a dozen shots anyway.
There's very, very few situations in which you might actually need to fire that many bullets without existing combat- maybe Hoover Dam.

I had kind of / sort of the same for FO3.
The animation for reloading a revolver shows you dumping all the rounds from the cylinder, then popping in a speed loader.
If you still had two live rounds in the cylinder, what happened to them?

It looks pretty on paper, but game wise, it would be frustrating.

One, inventory clutter. There would be multiple objects to keep up with.
If you have some 5.56 clips that hold 30 rounds, and in a fire fight, start swapping out clips before they are empty, by the end of the fire fight, you might have something like this in your inventory:
5.56 clip (10 rounds)
5.56 clip (2 rounds)
5.56 clip (11 rounds)
5.56 clip (3 rounds)
etc, etc... ad nausium...
Also, the modder would have to make 31 entries in the GECK for just that one clip... one for each possible number of rounds still in the clip.

Two, ammo management. When you choose to swap out clips, how will you decide which clip to use? Will you have to open the pipboy and select one? Or make a script that will automatically select the clip that contains the most rounds?
It could be done, but is the result worth the effort?

Three, mod compatibility. In FO3, we had CALIBR (and already, a CALIBR for FO:NV is in the works). It added a bunch of ammo to the game. Whoever would take on the project would have to decide whether or not they would offer compatibility to something like CALIBR, or only support the vanilla ammo.

I like the idea, but it looks like a project that would easily reach the overwhelming stage in a hurry.

My original idea for this would be to reduce overall carrying capacity and to introduce a new encumberance system that gradually slowed the wearer depending on what they're carrying, causing people to run light and fast or heavy and slow. This would mean not running around with 1000 5.56mm in the backpack, but instead, some limited number of magazines, an extra weapon or so, and a light backpack for the other random crap one picks up when running around. So, you wouldn't have dozens of mags sitting in inventory.

As for items, I was thinking it would be possible to use the item condition system. A magazine is x% full. If that were possible, you'd only need a single item per ammo type.

Regarding mag-loading, I would think loading the most full mag would make the most sense. That's how it is in many other games with mag-based reloading systems.


Lastly, I am a compulsive reloader except in games that are mag-reloading based. I also quick-save after every successful stealth kill.

No but I almost always reload before the magazine is empty, as I imagine most people do.

I like the concept, but I think it would make things a lot more complicated. Certain bullets like the 5.56 wouldn't even be used in most guns - you'd load them into an "Aid" item Ammo Magazine, which then converts itself to an Ammo item. Then you equip that like you do the Surplus ammo and so on. (Question - can a single ammunition item be uses more than once before it's discarded - or does it have "uses" before being chucked?"

Maybe a proof of concept for a copy of the Varmint Rifle could be made up, to see just how feasible it would be to extend to the rest of the weapons.

But then that doesn't matter. You have 4 full clips. Get down to 4-5 bullets in one, switch. Get down to 4-5 bullets in one, switch. Get down to 4-5 bullets in one, switch. Now you've fired about 70 rounds, the fight is almost certainly over, so the fact you've only got 1 full clip left and 3 part-full doesn't come up, because combat's finished and you refill the part-full ones.

I like this idea, are you working on that mod already, or is it just an idea?

You're missing the point of this mod man. The idea is to make it more like a military simulator type game, like Operation Flashpoint/Arma, where you don't have bullets, you have clips. Take this example, you are fighting 3 guys and you have two assault rifle clips that hold 20 bullets each and it takes you 12 shots to kill one guy and you reload after each kill.

Current version -

You start the fight with 20/20
First kill 20/8
Second kill 16/0
Third kill 4/0

With clips

You start the fight with 20/1 -1 other clip
First kill 1/1 -The hud only indicates you have 1 clip in the gun and one other clip that isn't empty not how many bullets you have
Second kill 1/1 - You've now switched to the other clip but you still only know that you have clips. Reloading after the second kill just replaces the clip with the other clip that only has 8 rounds left, same as the one you were using
Third kill 1/0 -You end the fight with 1 used clip and no spares. You also had to reload half way through the third kill because you didn't have enough ammo in either clip to kill the last guy

There were mods for FO3 that did this which had a pop up in the top left that gave you an idea how full the clip was, eg The clip feels heavy when the magazine was used but still had a lot of rounds left. If you can't see why all this makes a difference then the mod isn't for you

ahhmmmmmmmmm

Well....

when I used to go shooting (had a 9mm handgun) the slowest part of everything was reloading the clip with the rounds. And it's kinda a pain on your fingers.

I'm not sure how far into realism round and clip handling can go before its moved from 'interesting feature' to 'pain-in-the-ass'.

I'm not convinced that a mod which has no practical effect except in edge-cases where you somehow only have two clips on you and adds a bunch of script overhead to do it is a mod for anyone, really.
New Vegas is a game, not a religion- anything without a meaningful, measurable impact in regular play is a pointless addition to it.

My question is, will the enemies have to follow the same rules? Maybe "realism" mods seem to fall short in where it adds realism for the player, but doesn't affect the AI at all.. Like Fellout in Fallout 3.. Made nighttime darker than midnight in the middle of the Arizona desert-- yet the enemies could still see and target you like it was high noon.. Basically walking around at night was like putting a bag over your head.

Would svck to go through all of this clip planning if the enemies are going to still be able to draw from infinite clips.

yes this point seemed to me to be a downfall of some of the difficulty-increasing mods I saw for fallout 3.

You are making the slightly odd assumption that all your clips would magically fill up at some point? It's irrelevant how many clips you have. You could have 100 clips and reload after every shot. You'd be left with 100 clips with 1 bullet missing.

...you're making the very odd assumption people aren't going to stop and refill their clips once combat ends?

The AI never reloads without emptying the clip so this is a non-issue.



The idea of a mod like this is to discourage you from slapping a new clip into a sniper rifle after every headshot. You empty the clip before you reload to avoid having to refill clips. As for it being a pain in the ass, it's not like you are adding a mini game where you have to fiddle around with individual rounds to press them into the magazine, it would just be a single round reloading animation, like the level action rifle, except with clips.

In a way this sounds interesting to me - though more if each weapon had unique magazines rather than one generic one for an ammo type (especially since you have the difference between the 5mm ammo drum for a Minigun and the 5mm magazine for the assault carbine, etc). In addition, I'd want to see magazines have a noticable weight to them, such that there was some actual forethought going into how many magazines of what type you wanted to carry with you.

Of course this would get more complicated with different ammo types.

It would also add an interesting twist to ammo capacity increasing weapon mods, as to do them correctly at that point, the mod wouldn't actually be a weapon mod at all - it would just be a single instance of a larger capacity magazine.

For many I suspect this would add a level of tedium that would not be interesting at all to them... for myself, I could see it adding an interesting flavor to things. I'm not necessarily convinced that it would turn out being worthwhile (guessing that such an implementation within this game engine would likely have a few drawbacks or compromises to be made), but I'd love to be able go give it a try.

This would also have a few other effects: making single load weapons more advantageous in a way, as well as possibly creating more/additional situations where a sidearm might come in handy. Ie, figuring that 5 magazines for your "All American" would suffice (and not wanting to carry more weight in magazines around), till you get into a particularly long and drawn out fight where you empty all of them -- and find yourself needing to draw your 9mm sidearm that you carry a couple of extended magazines for, etc.

...of course this would also only be particularly helpful if the process of loading ammo into magazines wasn't possible during combat...

No I'm not? Obviously they would, but the mod is meant to encourage you to use your clips in a more realistic way. As in not just hitting reload after every kill regardless of how many bullets you used. You don't want to have to reload 10 different clips after clearing out a building.

Like I said before man, if you don't see why this makes a difference then the mod isn't for you, why are you posting about it?

It would require an epic amount of scripting but ideally what you'd want is for empty magazines to be something you carried alongside individual bullets. For example you might have 5 empty assault rifle clips and 1 LMG drum weighing something like 2 and 8 each respectively. When you emptied one of your clips you'd have to reload it or find a loaded one to pick up.

Keeping track of how many extended magazines you had would be an excellent touch, but I'm not sure NVSE could achieve that.

Yup. Not easy to implement, but about the only way that I can imagine finding myself interested to be honest.


The only way that I can see it being that difficult, is in switching a single weapon back and forth between extended and non-extended... and even then the biggest hurdle seems like it would be the visual side of it - otherwise it shouldn't be hard to work around at all.

But you will reload 10 different clips, because in-game it will just be 'click to reload your clips' once combat ends. Games are not real life, you realise- there is no equivalent to the 10 minutes of dull pushing bullets into clips within the framework of a videogame. And even if you did reload 10 times, it would only be after firing 2-3 bullets from a clip so you could just cycle between a handful of part-empty clips with no problem rather than needing 10 separate full clips.

It's not that I don't see how it makes a difference, it's that I can see it won't make any difference, except perhaps in your head. It annoys me when people don't put any thought or consideration into what they're doing. Consider the consequences of your changes- if there's no consequences, then why make them?

That very much depends on how you implement it.

- if magazines have weight of their own, there would certainly be a difference
- if magazines are weapon specific (rather than ammo specific), I can see plenty of differences when carrying multiple weapons using the same ammo
- depending on how rarity is done, plenty of circumstances where not having "enough" magazines would make a difference (ie, you just found the "All American", but have never even seen a magazine of that class before - so now you have tons of 5.56 ammo that you've used with other weapons, but only a single magazine for your new found friend --- 1) resulting in a change to gameplay until you are able to find/buy more, 2) creating an additional stage of hunting/searching/trying to find something, so that your new weapon is of more use to you


Overall, it does depend a great deal on the specifics of implementation - but unless you are referencing a very specific and limited implementation of the general concept here, saying that you "can see it won't make any difference" strikes me as a bit shortsighted.

You'd probably want to make virtually every gun in the game clipless, so that only guns looted from NPCs had usable magazines. Even that might not be enough regulation but it would be hard to justify not being able to loot clips from guns that have just been fired at you. At least that way it would make guns like the Anti Material fairly hard to find clips for.



I've given up trying to explain the intricacies of how the mod could possibly work. He's decided in his head exactly how this no existent mod will be and then come to the conclusion that it's worthless.

[quote name='Ringosis' date='05 November 2010 - 12:47 PM' timestamp='1288986451' post='16635604']
You'd probably want to make virtually every gun in the game clipless, so that only guns looted from NPCs had usable magazines. Even that might not be enough regulation but it would be hard to justify not being able to loot clips from guns that have just been fired at you. At least that way it would make guns like the Anti Material fairly hard to find clips for.[quote]
Many, yes - but by no means all. Don't want to take away the excitement of finding a new class of weapon that would normally be "over your level" by making it totally useless until you gain more levels (and thus making them available via vendor lists), especially for those weapons that there really aren't enemies that use them in most of the game...

[quote]
I've given up trying to explain the intricacies of how the mod could possibly work. He's decided in his head exactly how this no existent mod will be and then come to the conclusion that it's worthless.
[/quote]
On the one hand I can understand the feeling that talkie has made up his mind and isn't looking at the possibilities -- on the other hand, too many times over he has earned my respect, for it to be easy for me to dismiss his opinion.