Take a look at these four frames:


Notice something interesting? Look at which points the enemy actor gets surprised, and then turns around and looks at the source of the noise, as compared to the stages of the firing of the gun. It looks like the enemy is only alerted the frame AFTER the gun actually fires, and then he only actually turns around a frame AFTER he is alerted.

Why am I talking about all this? Because I think this information could be put to use to effectively design suppressed weapons. Say instead of just firing particles, the gun fired something fairly short-lived and stationary with some script attached. Well, that thing would get created in the second frame, which means that it's Create() and Update() function would kick in in the third frame. This would give you time to determine which way nearby enemies are initially facing, and then see if they suddenly turn around in succeeding frames and face the actor firing the gun. Once you figure that out, you could then maybe force them to turn back around, or create some other distraction for them. This would make it seem like they didn't hear it. Or at least if they did, they didn't determine the direction.

Thoughts?

could set the aimangle randomly and hflip randomly as well, for not knowing where it came from. it would be super annoying for that to happen if you were controlling an actor though. i thought that having no sound made it so ai actors didnt "hear" it. but i have never really player with it. I like this concept though.
actually, i think setting their aimode to network temporarily would cause them to not respond..

Well you could check if they were player-controlled and then just not do anything to them if it's the case.

And no, any gib or gunshot will alert nearby actors, I'm pretty sure.

Well, I've taken this idea about as far as it can go, and I don't think this approach is going to yield suppressed weapons. The problem is that even if you immediately disable an actor's controller and force them to look in a certain direction, the moment you give back control to the computer (which you kinda need to do, or else you just wind up deactivating all enemies in earshot permanently), they remember where they where first alerted and turn to that point, even if you hold them there for a long time beforehand.

I've tried simply forcing them to turn with aim angles and controller states, and I've tried combining it with various distractions, such as emitters, emitters that gib, and even short-lived actors. It's all to no avail, since they still tend to wind up turning around anyway.

It seems like making suppressed weapons won't be possible until we can get more control over things. Either there just needs to be explicit settings on how easy/hard it is to hear a weapon (or any sound maybe), or we need to have access to an actor's "targeting" so we can force them to forget about things they notice.

thats quite a shame... i could have sworn making no sound made it so the didnt notice, but apparently not <_<

I thought it was assigning the bullet to be HitsMOs = 0...
You could potentially do that and switch it back when in range of an Actor.

If you do so, and set a Lua script to revert it to HitsMOs on creation, the enemy actors still panic due to hurty particles moving towards them. I think. I'm not too sure.
But anyway, if you set it to HitsMOs only when about to collide with something then it could work alright I guess. Though someone should do some more testing with the HitsMOs on creation idea, I probably didn't test it enough.

Finally! An alternate approach is suggested. I'll try this out right away.

Really, it's pretty obvious that the guy getting shot is going to turn around. I mean, he's getting shot, and can probably tell where he got shot. So he's gonna turn in that direction. The suppression is more for dealing with everyone else who's in earshot.

Even should the bullet switching back to HitsMOs = 1 alert people nearby, it will hopefully only alert actors to the spot where it got switched, rather than where it initially came from.

EDIT: Nope, doesn't work. I think the problem is the fact that actors get alerted to when emitters emit, and a firearm is essentially a specialized emitter. It's the fact that it emits at all that's alerting them, not what its being emitted. So basically, it has nothing to do with the bullet. It's the gun itself.

Once we get Lua'd attachables can we just make the bullets appear in front of the gun? Do the actors get freaked out by particles appearing out of thin air via Lua?

Is the enemy alerted to the emitter or the actor, if it's the emitter, you can place it so that it emits somewhere off-screen, then you use some fancy Lua to make a bullet at the gun.

But it's not the emission point. It's the absolute position of the attachable, which cannot be changed (mostly) to anything offscreen, which isn't even the issue.

Also, we can ALREADY make bullets appear out of thin air. SEE: a whole shitload of mods that do just that

a script on an actor can do lua-controlled firing comically easily

Yes, but that's not a silenced weapon, but a silent weapon equipped actor.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the AI doesn't freak out about magically out of the air appearing particles, so having the gun fire only by Lua would work. Once that's possible, anyway.

addendum to previous post: an addition to a weapon to control firing with lua is only marginally less easy