Out of curiosity for how I might need to re-balance my own stuff, I took a look at the new Coalition equipment, chiefly the assault rifle and its respective rounds. So I look at the mass of the assault rifle rounds and I see... 0.11. Now, according to a lot of people and wiki articles, the mass in CC is measured in kilograms. This means that the bullet from a Coalition assault rifle is 110 grams.

110 grams.

Really?

Seriously?

Now, I hate to be a ♥♥♥♥ about realistic detail, but HOLY JUMPING JESUS that's a huge bullet. It's enormous. Gigantic. Gargantuan! For some perspective, an AK-47 7.62x39mm round in real life (and, incidentally, in old vanilla CC as well) weighs 8 grams (and so does a 9mm). A 5.56x45mm round (used by the M16 rifle) weighs 4 grams. A 7.62x51mm round weighs 9.5 grams. Even a .50 BMG weighs 52 grams AT MOST. And that's not something you just fire out of an assault rifle at your leisure. So am I really supposed to believe that the coalition assault rifle fires a bullet that's 13 times the mass of an AK-47 round? Or the size of two .50 BMGs?

Now, before you start saying "who really cares about realism in teh vidya anyway?" just consider this: now that Lua has exposed some degree of physics to the modding community at large, don't you think that maybe the vanilla content should give everyone some kind of consistent and believable basis on which to plan out and calculate such physics? Case in point: I've spent most of today working on a force field that affects high-speed projectiles based off of their momentum (mass * velocity). Now, maybe the coalition bullets have much lower sharpness than the older rounds in order to make up for the high mass, but when you're dealing with a case where sharpness is ignored completely by physics calculations, then this superficial balancing suddenly does no good: the old ak and other such old bullets (the coalition bullets used to be balanced more like the old ak and pistol rounds) have a momentum of around 800, whereas the coalition bullets have a momentum of around, oh, 9000. And no, this isn't an OVER 9000 joke. This is a seriously huge discrepancy that really makes me unsure as how to balance my force field's attributes.

Now, I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't be the first guy who makes a physics-based mod that effectively ignores sharpness, and therefor won't be the first person to have some kind of concern with this odd balancing of bullets (assuming they have any concern with balancing whatsover). Certainly a more realistic - and therefor more INTUITIVE and CONSISTENT - approach would benefit everyone better than the current system of arbitrary values.

tl;dr: vanilla bullet masses are arbitrary and usually too big. This could be bad for consistency in future Lua physics mods.

This is actually a relevant problem right now

There's a unbalance toward mass is simply because extra knock back is fun.
It's a good game play feature, it makes knock back significant.
Realism is nice, but unless you're going for simulation, game play takes priority any day.

Also cc bullets are going at pitiful velocities, so the mass could be used to correct for that.

dude, i use bullets that weigh 5 grams usually. sometimes 7. thats insane.
someone fix this.
incidentally, i should really make an ammo.ini for any future mods to set out everything better, and allow more consistent bullets.. <_<

Man I laughed when I read the OP.
Youre correct, its ridiculous and you can blame me for that.
I've just been used to make weapons that lean more towards mass than sharpness because if I'd be going with the realistic approach, I'd have to do some serious testing using sharpness values ranging from 10-500.

Then the other thing is why I did it this way is knockback and more kinetic force to make actors hit by the weapon be pushed by the force of the projectile more dramatically.

I did the whole balance based on gameplay. Like shooting at a concrete wall and see if the penetration is perfect so you wouldnt be able to dig with guns.
Other than that I dont really feel like changing them to realistic values.
Mainly because I'd need to research the subject which I dont feel is really that important in the end and I just cant be arsed to re-balance every weapon in the list using a the realistic method. I just dont see it worth the time and trouble.

what if we did it for you?

Sure, I'd accept that. But please do it well guys. Its official content after all.

It think what really needs to happen is a 10x buff on material strengths or something. I was thinking about setting up an AWK script to do it for me, but that went out the window with b23.

It would be nice if Data would publish the units his variables operate in and bring some standardization to them. This has been a problem that plagued this game for forever.

Everything is so arbitrary, it's mind-numbing.

Why the hell do you care so much about the bullets weighing the right amount?
I mean seriously - it's an obscure value in some file within the game. It has nothing to do with the actual game, truly. Would it bother you that much? Would you be shooting that gun in-game, think "ZOMG, THESE BULLETS WEIGH SO MUCH WTF?!". You didn't care before.

So what, now you want to take away the weight and kickback with it? Cool, make your game suck. Have fun with that.
Also, as previously stated, you're going to have to make the bullets go a lot faster.

Haw, knew it.


Already way ahead of you here. Actually, no testing is even required. If you look back at the base.rte ammo, the AK rounds have a sharpness of 350 and the SMG/handgun rounds have a sharpness of 250. Since sharpness is a pretty arbitrary value with no basis in reality, I just went with those numbers (250 for handgun rounds, 350 for rifle rounds) since it seemed pretty reasonable that a rifle bullet would be sharper than a handgun bullet. Since then, I've been able to apply realistic masses and typical CC bullet velocities (which seem to range from about 90 to 150) with good effect.


Well, I'm not going to sit here and tell anybody that this is unimportant. Especially since it makes sense that somebody slammed by bullets will probably get knocked around a bit by them. The only problem though is the fact that in CC, getting knocked around is kinda rigid, since characters don't really ragdoll or anything. If a character gets knocked back, its literally their entire body getting knocked back perfectly and evenly, whether its a strike to the leg or a strike to the head. Now, if getting hit in the head threw their head back and made them fall backwards...


Woah woah WOAH. If we're going to let this happen, then I think we need to go somewhere and figure out exactly who is involved. We don't want multiple people doing their own thing. Honestly, I would like to be the one to personally head such a project. With that said, anyone interested in this re-balancing work, go ahead and PM me. Maybe I should start a new thread, though I don't know where to put it...
Disregard all this.



And THOR points out the REAL issue right here. The most important thing I said in my opening post is "Certainly a more realistic - and therefor more INTUITIVE and CONSISTENT - approach would benefit everyone better than the current system of arbitrary values." It's actually not about realism so much as it's about consistency for the sake of giving the modding community some kind of basis to work on. If half the guns are balanced weirdly and half of them are balanced realistically, then we don't know what the heck to think. And fine, if you want to go with unrealistic balancing, that's okay. But it MUST be given some kind of logical flow and consistency. I only suggest a realistic approach because its intuitive and already lends itself to consistency. But the consistency is the most important part.

Also, I do know that it's been explicity stated in various places (in the wiki even) that CC mass is measured in kilograms. But if we're firing bullets with mass values like 0.11, then it obviously ISN'T kilograms. So if we go with an unrealistic system, we can't go saying its kilograms anymore. But again, a realistic approach is more intuitive and already lends itself to consistency, so I would advise against it.

look at it this way, the average coalition is probably 6 foot tall. Count the pixels from a screencap. Now, what is the real-life velocity of say, a 9mm bullet? convert Feet per second into I think pixels per sim or some such nonsense. Now, I believe that averages out to a velocity of +10K. Now do you really, honestly want to dodge that? do you have any idea what that would do to the map? Can CC even handle 4 grams at vel +10k?

I didn't think so. also, according to materials.ini, the forces are calculated with KG, you know Mass = 1 is mass = 1KG, How much does the average coalition light weigh in at? isn't it somewhere along the lines of 300KG? what is he lead man?

CC is a physics based game that throws realistic physics out the window, in favor of playability and fun. In real life you cant eat a hole through a steel reinforced concrete wall, with a few magazines of an AK-47. In real life, you can't dodge bullets from 30 feet away from a stand still. In real life we don't have working jetpacks.

If you want realistic physics, say goodbye to a reasonable speed of harvesting gold, and the ability to clear debris.

TL:DR Cortex command requires unrealistic physics or it won't be a good game.

I'm talking with Prom about setting up some standardised bullet types to reference within CC.

All these wacked out stats will be sorted, leave it to the devs

Thanks for alerting us.

Thanks for the response bubs. I have faith in your ability, so I won't worry about trying to re-balance anything on my own.

Jesus christ I hate virtually all of you.

So we're setting the various attributes to entirely unrealistic standards. Sure, that's cool, whatever. If it's for gameplay, then why in god's name have we kept everything to 1500+ lifetime? Getting shot by my own bullets flying around a map isn't fun, it's shitty. And yet because it's been like that we decided not to change it. Because we're ♥♥♥♥ Numgun, and we decide to give everything stupid ♥♥♥♥ values.

Numgun, I didn't realize you were a ♥♥♥♥ contractor, and both willing and capable of authorizing someone ELSE to make official content. I guess that's why you duplicate everyone's ♥♥♥♥ code; you're making them developers! Without their permission!

I mean jesus CHRIST I did better vanilla weapons from Prom's sprites in Build 18 than you can in build 22. I have people who have TOLD me they replaced the new weapons with my weapons. This whole "random people off DRL are content developers" thing is pissing me off; it's taking people just barely familiar with something and asking them to make stuff that's perfect.

Why the ♥♥♥♥ do we have non-prom sprites ingame? Having totally different looking sprites in the COMMERCIAL RELEASE of a game is ♥♥♥♥ STUPID. Why do we have missions using cobbled together masses of bad looking modules that weren't really designed to be next to each other? Why does the Tutorial missions look ten times better than Dummy Assault? Why does VANILLA CONTENT, that I PAID FOR, feature missions where if you take too long, actors start exploding? Why can't lua do many things advertised, including add attachables or even just manage limbs?

Good god, Maginot is such a perfect example of this. Let's put people into a map where you're not sure if you can even win it (since previous FIRST-PARTY content could not be won), give them barely any directions, and then just send hordes of enemies at them. I mean, jesus, the AI still kills themselves more than the player, and yet we're sending 20-30 guys at a single entrance? What the hell is this?

Why does every dummy weapon have a ridiculous glow on it that looks absolutely terrible? Why do some of them use more glow than a mod from Whitty? WHY IS THERE A GODDAMNED ROCKET PROPELLED CHAINSAW YOU EASTERN EUROPEAN ♥♥♥♥?