I created a Dummy-esque SMG with a forward shield attached to it, in hopes of creating a good offense/defense weapon for my somewhat fragile dummies. The only problem is that most high-damage (I.E. Sniper Rifles) and some normal weapons seem to punch right through it and hit my dummy behind it anyway. How can I fix this?

Make the shield out of a tougher material. Find the bit like this in the HeldDevice definition;



Just replace 'Military Stuff' (or whatever's there) with a material that has a higher StructuralIntegrity value. Look at Materials.ini in Base.rte for a list of them.

That did the trick. Won't lighter bullets just bounce off of it, though? I need something that'll allow it to still get hit, but protect the dummy/other actor behind the weapon.

EDIT: I tried a couple, but Metal seems to work alright. Some of the really heavy bullets, like the Imperetus Sniper, still get through, but that only makes sense, considering the force behind a bullet like that.

It depends on the material used and the thickness of the sprite. If the SI is too high then yes, shots will just bounce off. If the sprite is too thin, then the shots may still penetrate. If you get it just right then the bullets should cause an entry wound, but 'lodge' inside the target instead of coming out the other side afterwards.

I'd say just mess around until you find a happy medium, but you seem to have done that already.

Thanks. On a completely unrelated note, what does "sharpness" do?

Determines how sharp the bullet is. If you got a really high number, lets say 900, it shoots through terrain. Without any problems.

That's a slightly primitive way of putting it, since it's also highly dependent on bullet mass and velocity, but that's the rough gist of it, yes.

Thanks. Now I just have to figure out how to get bullets to do a lot of damage without throwing my actors around (or gibbing them on the spot) because of insanely high mass.

That may be achieved by using several particles instead of just one for your bullet, each particle doesn't need to be heavy, it just needs to have enough mass/velocity/sharpness to cause a wound, and several wounds will cause more damage than just one.

How do I keep the particles from separating and looking odd?

You have to reduce the separation of the round. Example:

So is it actually separation that affects it?
In most tests it seems the particlespreadrange variable located in the HDFirearm controls bullet separation per round.

IIRC seperation is horizontal - so if you want your particles to form a sort of 'line' and not all strike the target simultaneously (great for anti-materiel rifles!) then you can throw in a bit of seperation and they'll have a very slightly staggered impact.

I think that's what it does, anyway. I might be wrong.

What you can do for more vertical spread is to up the ShakeRange values on the weapon (at the cost of the actor looking really jittery, so maybe not ideal), use a recoil script and spawn the projectiles that way, or you can use an AEmitter that then emits the actual particles with 0.00 spreads. I used the AEmitter trick to have a shotgun that can change its ammo to shoot a multi-particle slug or a spray of powerful shot projectiles without the slug disintegrating mid-flight.