Dev Blog: 5.4 Weapons Classes

So, 5.4 is probably one of the largest updates to come to LitR so far. Maybe not in terms of content, but the amount of design work that went into it's been way more than I originally anticipated. What started as a simple idea to try and make the degrade and salvage patcher scipt easier to maintain kind of balloned into a full pass on weapons and weapon classes in the modlist. Previously, the list had a bit of a kitchen-sink approach to weapons, I hadn't really sat down with a spreadsheet and made sure that the different weapons classes had decent coverage.

So, 3 new ammo types, several new standalone versions of mods already in the list, an entirely new integration framework, and multiple script re-writes, and a bunch of patches later, I've finally gotten 5.4 more or less where I want it.

The big differences here are the obvious splits. Splitting Pre-war and post-war weapons. Splitting shotguns/rifles into manual and auto (and adding a new shotgun ammo type to support this), splitting .45 ammo out from rifle class weapns and replacing it with the new .223. Splitting out Institute laser weapons from normal lasers, and bringing into standard distribution the zap gun and wattz laser as additional manual action options. And formally splitting manual action out from semi/full auto, so commando is no longer a 2nd class perk.

The end goal of all of this, is to classify things out further. Ammos belong to specific weapon classes, and weapon classes belong to specific perks. And generally, only Unique weapons are allowed to cross those lines. One of the thigns Lunar Fallout really does well, is ensuring that weapons have specific niches- and with this approach a lot of new niches are created, which has allowed me to integrate some new weapons into the standard distribution, that previously weren't part of it.

With this finally done, I'm hoping to slow down on development for a while (yeah, I know, I keep saying this). There are a few minor bugs remaining, and the way Dak and Micalov are going over on the nexus I'm not likely to have a shortage of interesting weapons to integrate. But with this new framework stuff in place, it should at least be a bit easier to maintain the next time I want to patch thigns in.