Okay, so this is just a video game, I get that. But when we actually begin to claim that the mass values in ini's actually represent kilograms, it might be understandable if the anal retentive military simulation nut within me gets a bit apoplectic when I see this:





That's 0.2 kilograms. That's 200 grams. That's a lot of grams for a freaking bullet. Especially a bullet that claims to belong to an M16.

In reality, the M16 uses the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge. The bullet on this cartridge, at most, barely pushes past 4 grams. So basically, every time we fire this so-called "M16" in CC, we're actually firing a bullet equal in mass to 50 5.56 rounds. Hell, that's about the mass of four .50 machine gun rounds. Holy crap what. How do those bullets even fit in that gun? What are all the actors actually giants or something? Or maybe they're just superdense armor-piercing rounds and the actors are just strong enough to handle the recoil such a round would present? Is that what I'm supposed to assume?

The reason this seriously came to my attention is because I've been making my mod under the assumption that this game actually followed sane mass values, and have been giving my guns fairly realistic values (my assault rifle fires 7 gram bullets, which is a bit less than a real AK-47 round). And this assumption actually does have some basis in the history of CC, which can still be seen in the ammo.ini in Base.rte. If you find the MOPixel "Round 7.62x39" (which, incidentally is the AK-47's actual caliber) you can clearly see it has a mass of 0.008, or 8 grams. That's the actual real-world mass of that round! But now none of the vanilla factions use this round or anything like it, apparently, and instead use crazymassive bullets or something. It's like we had the right idea at one point, and then just completely forgot about realism later on.

For typical vanilla play I guess this isn't such a big deal, but it becomes an issue once you start trying to mod things that actually react to the masses of projectiles. Suddenly such things are way more/less effective against my own weapons than vanilla weapons, and I find myself in the predicament of having to completely change the values of all of my weapons if I wish to maintain any kind of sane balance with vanilla content. And that sucks.

And while I'm complaining, how about explosives? Somebody please explain to me how a 5 kilogram grenade puts out 7.8 kilograms of shrapnel. And yes that is ignoring all the fire and the air blasts and stuff. That's literally just the grenade fragments put out by the grenade fired by the coalition grenade launcher.

It'd be really nice if the vanilla content values had some kinds of standardized sense of boundaries, so mods could have a balancing thought process to follow if they so chose.

Sign me up.

My mods still use old values (e.g. light but sharp bullets) and I recently wanted to update them to current vanilla standards... except there isn't a vanilla standard it seems.
I haven't tested it thoroughly yet, but I do wonder what kind of effect vanilla guns have against mech units or other supposed-to-be strong units. What if a burst of an M16 knocks back my Aegis out of the screen. Hmm...

It'd be nice to have some bullet standardization in the future.

Well, the new huge bullets do have much lower sharpness, so I don't think they're going to wound that much more. Which is why I say for vanilla play its probably not a big issue. Heck even with a lot of mods its not an issue. It's just that it kinda starts hurting your head if you're a modder who looks at this stuff and tries to actually think about it logically, which in a game that purports to be based on somewhat realistic physics is a damn shame.

I added something to my mod where a unit basically neutralizes any round that hits them, but it requires energy to do so, and the energy used to neutralize a round is based entirely upon its mass. Which makes sense since more massive projectiles would require more energy to destroy, and velocity and sharpness probably wouldn't factor into it because its not trying to make the bullet stop moving, its trying to just flat-out disintegrate it. But the problem is that its impossible to balance this between my own mod and vanilla weapons, because now my weapons are balanced against it reasonably, but vanilla weapons just chew through its energy instantly because they're so much more massive. And that just seems like an issue I shouldn't be having, were the vanilla content following any kind of realistic design logic.

I'm sure we'll figure something out.

Thanks man. I had a feeling somebody important would notice this. Glad to know my faith isn't unfounded.

Using Mass*Sharpness*Velocity² you can determine the power of a bullet regardless of the standards it uses, it's what I use for all my energy shields and it works very well.

Edit: still a common standard would be great, but they will always be modders that won't comply to it.

Yeah I figured just lumping in all of the important statistics (mass, velocity, and sharpness) into the calculation would work fine from a gameplay/balance perspective, but based on the explanation of how I decided the armor works it didn't really make sense for velocity and sharpness to matter. Plus I kinda liked the idea of the defenses getting thwarted by more massive (or larger numbers of smaller) particles, even if they weren't the most penetrative. (so, basically, shotguns).

Oh also: I figured out that if you take "realistic" mass values and multiply them by some number between 40 and 50, you'll get values reasonably similar to current CC values. Though if lizard's response is any indication, we might not have to worry about this too much.

Also, I don't really care if OTHER modders make things with crazy/silly values. The only two things I feel I have to think about are vanilla content and my own mod, and that's it. Beyond that, it's up to the player which mods they use. Or don't use.

Well, I'm not really complaining about velocity. Or even sharpness for that matter. Both those values seem to run entirely on "CC units" of measurement, so its kinda hard to pinpoint what a realistic sharpness or velocity is for a bullet is. And even if you can measure out the velocity correctly (I think there's some kind of "pixels per meter" values stored in the engine that you can get at through lua, so I guess that'd actually be possible) its not like you can't just drop the sharpness to compensate. It COULD work.

I'm okay with going with unrealistically low velocities though, if simply for the sake of allowing players to see bullets travel and maybe actually avoid them a little, since sight ranges are so short and actor movement is so damn sluggish in this game. If velocities were any higher you'd basically be shooting each other with unavoidable lasers. At the very least, there does seem to be some standardization of velocities. Bullets tend to go somewhere in the range of 80 to 120, as far as I've seen.

There's a TC idea in that... Man I wish I had the attention span for that sort of major change.

I suggest that whenever standardizations are attempted, if devs really want to nitpick on it, that standards be made to get realistic outcomes for whatever isn't purposely changed for gameplay purposes.

Here's jsut an overview of what I would keep in mind when developing a set of standards for CC's ballistics and such.

--Speed of bullets? The consensus seems to be that we want them slow for gameplay. And that's necessary, because of the silly global speed limit of 500m/s. While you could come up with a mathematical equation to scale between realistic and gameplay projectile speeds, it may just be simpler to just apply discretion and vaguely make faster bullets go faster than slower bullets. 5.56x45 obviously shouldn't lose a race with .45 acp, etc
--Momentum? If you don't want some wacky heavy-punch&kicker or anomalous negative-recoiler for gameplay purposes, adjust the mass so the momentum is realistic. (Scale it up by the amount velocity was scaled down)
--Bullet drop? Unless for gameplay purposes you want a flat-shooter or a heavily arced-trajectory gun, scale down the GlobalAccScalar respectively to the scale down of the speed, to get realistic drop values at certain ranges.
--Maximum range? This is something that should be toned down for gameplay, due to CC's looping maps. You could do this mathematically based on realistic values, but it would again likely be more easy and quality-assuring to tackle this on a individual basis. Use air resistance to slow projectiles to near-harmlessness, and lifetime can be set to remove them sometime after they become uselessly slow. Or you could just let them fall to the ground, but this doesn't work so well with .ini airresistance, or with lessened globalaccscalars, so it may be good to involve Lua scripts in this process, if you want the falling to the ground effect.
--Accuracy? Well, since this can be relevant to the actor shooting, it's really a matter of the dev/mod's discretion rather than something mathematical, but generally, because CC gunfights are rather short range, the accuracy being less than would be realistic would be reasonable for gameplay purposes.
--Penetration? Adjust sharpness to get a realistic value of penetration of flesh, unless you want an unrealistic value for gameplay.
--Barrier Penetration? It might be good to have scripts that detect terrain and dullen the sharpness accordingly, if you want low 'terrain rape' for gameplay purposes.
--Extra wounding capabilities? Multiple projectiles with the regular mass you'd use divvied between them, and then adjust the sharpnesses to get the number of entry wounds and exit wounds you want.

Adding some features as standard, recoil particularly comes to mind, might be good too for vanilla stuff, but I can see where applying moderately complex scripted features on such a wide scale over all of that content would simply be unfeasible for the devs, so I won't go into that too much. I would consider suggesting Data revamping the situational accuracy/spread systems to incorporate recoil, but I get the feeling that that's not really something likely to happen at this point.

While we're on this general kind of subject, I can't help but also (once again) suggest changes to the wounding system. Although I know that's also on Data's side of things, I've heard Prom agree that the current wound system is lackluster, so that makes me a little more hopeful on this than other features that would be Data's work due to being engine-side.
Revamping the wounding system is something that should really be looked into, it would greatly improve the ability to make distinctions between the levels of damage various weapons inflict. An expanded 12 gauge slug just under the skin on the opposite side of entry, and a BB just under the skin on the side of entry, should not cause the same damage, [inflicting one entry wound on the object in question] and should not need to be 'expressed' as multiple projectiles to achieve this. Giving damage relevance to depth of penetration, and some manner of new variable for MOPixels/MOSParticles that effects wounding 'widths' would be both far more realistic and much more dynamically useful for gameplay distinctions between various weapons than the current system of predefined wounds that are simply based on boolean achievements of surface or complete penetration. The emissions of the wound could also be affected by this dynamic wound magnitude system, for appropriate visual effects and bleed damage.

The actual bullet is 4g and the M16 muzzle velocity is 948 m/s, but the current FireVelocity is 100m/s so going off of that perhaps realistic velocity/10 and realistic weight*10 should be used? (gives the same momentum as the real thing) So using this system the values should be Mass=0.04 and FireVelocity=95. I think that would work, just tested it and it works well enough in the game.

Yeah, I suppose maybe upping the mass to account for loss in velocity makes sense. I think I might actually do that. But even then the current vanilla values could still stand to be scaled down.

Oh, but something to be wary of: if we're speaking in terms of forces, you probably wouldn't simply multiply mass by ten if velocity is 1/10 of the real value, since we're running on the formula of "mass * velocity^2". So the formula for the new mass would be more like:

RF = real force from the real bullet
GV = In-game velocity
GM = In-game mass

GM = RF / GV^2

Or... should we be working with momentum instead of force? I've actually always been a bit confused by that in this game.

Based on some tests I made terrain penetration is proportionnal to Mass*Velocity*Sharpness

I'm pretty sure CC operates in momentum, as i recall reading SOMEWHERE that anything related to impulse is defined in kg, giving us the much easier formula of m * v. At least, that's what i've been doing the last 3 years. I'm pretty sure i've also done some testing, especially in regard to that silly Sharpness variable. I might still be wrong though, it wouldn't be the first time. :U

Well, I guess that does make things easier...