CHECK MY NEW MOD: STALKER INFINITY - VANILLA 2.0 OVERHAUL

Idea
Weapons in vanilla STALKER 2 have very questionable ballistics and damage model despite game engine being capable to simulate realistic ballistics (to an extent). This mod aims to fix that by changing how trajectory and damage over distance is calculated. It also adjusts damage and armor penetration stats of each weapon. I created this mod not only because I'm unhappy with vanilla damage and ballistics, but also to share my findings with the STALKER modding community. In addition to explaining changes done by this mod I'll also explain my findings and how ballistics work in this game. Hopefully it'll become a foundation for many more other mods!

Check video section to see demo.

Переклад опису українською

If you like this mod, please consider supporting me:

How it works in vanilla
It doesn't In vanilla ballistics simulation is very simplistic and damage model has nothing to do with real life guns. Developers had all the tools to make gun play more realistic, but chose not to. Considering the game sold millions of copies already, it could be the right choice, but we are not here for arcade shooting experience, aren't we?

Vanilla has crazy bullet drop-off where bullet starts to drop to the ground suddenly and drastically after flying 10-25 meters. Damage falls off drastically too. Damage balance between guns is not following any particular logic with damage values all over the place and some handguns having more armor penetration than assault rifles. Guns have no dispersion when aiming down the sights. NPCs deal much lower damage than player, but at the same time use aimbot to hit you.

At the same time game engine is already able to:

• simulate bullet trajectory through how much bullet drops over distance
• simulate damage and armor penetration fall off over distance
• simulate damage of different calibers through body armors of different classes
• simulate recoil and bullet dispersion
  

It just needs to be fed properly configured data to do all of that.

I'll explain how it works in technical details section, for now here is the list of changes.


What this mod changes

Bullet trajectory

- Full emulation of trajectory up to 2000m (yards) including projectile rendering
- Full emulation of damage and armor piercing fall off up to 500m (yards)
- Correct velocity for bullets of all calibers including 12/70 pellets
- Each gun has a unique bullet trajectory according to it's ammo and barrel length (which affects muzzle velocity). Even ballistic coefficient of a bullet was taken into account
- All guns are split in 4 categories according to their zero range: 25m (HG, SMG, Shotguns), 75m (carbines), 100m (assault rifles), 200m (snipers). Bullet doesn't start to drop off until it reaches zero range, but damage and AP starts to fall of almost as soon as bullet leaves the barrel
- Dispersion system is changed. Now guns will have dispersion even when aiming down the sights, but not too much so you should expect to reliably hit your target at zero range. When hip firing this dispersion will be greatly multiplied, though

Damage model

- Bullet sponginess should be reduced on average. Assault rifles guns with FMJ rounds have more damage than in vanilla, almost all guns have more damage with AP ammo than in vanilla
- Every gun damage is calculated with formulas that take into account bullet diameter, bullet mass and muzzle velocity
- Drastically different armor piercing values, unique for each gun. Armor penetration not just in video games but also in real life is not something that can be easily calculated, but I did my best taking into account research of ammunition and body armor data and even things like sectional density of a bullet
- Many differences between NPC and player damage models were removed. In vanilla NPC guns simply deal 30-50% of player damage, with difficulty modifiers on top of it
- Headshot damage multiplier reduced from 6 to 4 for NPCs, but since overall damage is increased, you still can expect to one shot everyone without headgear

Ammo

- Base damage and armor piercing is based on a gun, so default (FMJ) ammo has no impact on bullet stats
- FMJ ammo is based on real life commercial ammo, which means lead core bullets, which means low penetration
- AP ammo is based on real life surplus military ammo, steel core, much higher penetration
- AP ammo causes 20% less bleeding
- AP ammo is almost a required upgrade in late game, especially for HG, SMG and 9x3
- Expansive (HP) ammo gives 40% increase to damage and 40% increase to bleeding amount, but reduces armor piercing by 20%
- Sniper ammo gives 10% increase to damage and armor piercing compared to AP ammo, but also increases recoil by 10% and weapon durability wear by 30%

Guns

- Rebalanced all guns to follow same ballistics and damage model (see above). All damage and armor piercing values are changed, all accuracy and distance related stats are changed
- Corrected rate of fire according to real life values
- Introduced new gun type - carabine! Carabines are assault rifles with a shorter barrel. Slightly less damage and AP. Zero range distance: 75m. Vanilla carabines: AKS-47U (AKU), HK416 (M16), Groza (Grim), AS VAL (Lavina) and VSS Vintorez (Gvintar)

NPC behavior

- Includes Maklane's Better Gunfights both for compatibility (many use it) and because you'd probably be obliterated by NPCs without it

UI

- Fixed vanilla weapon info card! Have you ever noticed how all guns have very similar fire rate and distance stat just doesn't make much sense? Now you can get useful info from the gun tooltip
- Gun damage is simply gun base damage, min value is 0, max 100
- Penetration is armor piercing of a gun (with default FMJ ammo), from 1 to 5. Please note FMJ has low penetration, AP ammo has much higher, though currently there is no way to display it on UI. General rule: gun with 2 Penetration will deal 100% of it's Damage to an enemy with 2 Protection
- Fire rate is greatly improved and now shows fire rate between 200 and 1200 RPM. In vanilla it was from 25 to 1500 RPM. Now the difference between MP5 and AK-47 is not just 10 pixels. But it means everything below 200 RPM will show 0 fire rate on UI
- Distance gauge is increased from 80m to 125m. Now it shows zero range, as I said there are 4 zero range categories all guns fall into: 25m, 75m, 100m and 200m. You can think of this distance as an expected distance of engagement with the target
- Accuracy stat is relevant inside of it's "zero range category". You should compare handguns to other handguns and SMGs and compare assault rifles to assault rifles. There is no point in comparing handgun accuracy to assault rifle accuracy since they measure accuracy at different distances
- For shotguns, info card reflects stats for slugs (AP ammo) instead of buckshot (FMJ)

Recommended difficulty settings

- Disable that crosshair, man, aim down the sights!
- I strongly recommend this settings if you use DifficultyPrototypes.cfg:
- NPC_Weapon_BaseDamage = 1
- Weapon_BaseDamage = 1
- NPC_HP = 1

Included changes and mods

- Included Maklane's Better Gunfights (NPCWeaponAttributesPrototypes.cfg)

Recommended and compatible mods

- A-Life mod, choose the most up to date mod that you like. Use only one A-Life mod, always check for conflicts with this mod.
- AI mod, if you trust it works properly
- Real Weapon Names
- Readable Ammo
- Painter of the Zone Better Blood Wallmarks (ProjectilePrototypes.cfg). Included compatibility, so just make sure my mod overrides this one
- Medkits and Consumables Rebalance

How to install

- Unzip file to get .pak files
- Move all .pak files to the ‘~mods’ folder which you can find at "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Stalker2\Content\Paks\~mods"
- If the "~mods" folder doesn't exist there, create it
- Make sure you understand load order. Below is a list of modified .cfg files. Check for possible conflicts with other mods

Conflict resolution

- Delete ZeeFUBAR_CoreVariable_50_P.pak if you use any other important mod that modifies CoreVariables.cfg, like Shay's Living Zone or any other A-Life or day length mod. Don't try to play with load order by adding zzz to file name, just delete it, it'll save you from headache
- This mod is made to load last even if you add zzz to file name. If you really want to override it, remove _99 from ZeeFUBAR_99_P.pak

Changed files

High priority, don't override if you want mod to work properly
- AmmoPrototypes.cfg
- NPCWeaponSettingsPrototypes.cfg
- PlayerWeaponSettingsPrototypes.cfg
- CharacterWeaponSettingsPrototypes.cfg
- WeaponGeneralSetupPrototypes.cfg
- NPCWeaponAttributesPrototypes.cfg (ok to override with anything that includes Maklane's Better Gunfights)
- GeneralNPCObjPrototypes.cfg, but I made it compatible with all mods I know of modifying the same file. All mods modifying NPCBase should work even if FUBAR has higher priority.

Low priority, you'll lose something non-critical if other mod overrides this
- ProjectilePrototypes.cfg (bullet speed, affects trajectory to an extent)
- CoreVariables.cfg in ZeeFUBAR_CoreVariable_50_P.pak (you'll loose my weapon stats UI fixes, but many important mods modify this, so just delete mine at any signs of conflict, or merge manually)

Technical details for modders

I suggest unpaking .pak files and comparing them with vanilla files. You'll find many insights into how variables affect ballistics and damage. But here is how I think all of it works.

Trajectory and damage fall off
- EffectiveFireDistance(Min|Max) - zero range, aka distance over which bullet just flies straight as laser beam. Measured in centimeters. For some reason has Min and Max values, but they are always the same in vanilla. In mod all weapons have one of 4 possible EffectiveFireDistance values: 25m, 75m, 100m and 200m. After this distance, bullet drop ark starts
- BulletDropLength - length of bullet drop ark, set to 500m for all weapons. Measured in centimeters. In vanilla was between 40 and 100m for different weapon types
- BulletDropHeight - height of bullet drop ark aka how much bullet dropped to the ground when it reached BulletDropLength distance (500m), in this mod individual for each weapon according to real life trajectory simulation. Measured in centimeters. Vanilla value was same for all guns - 170cm
- FireDistanceDropOff - damage doesn't start to fall off until bullet traveled this distance. Measured in centimeters. In this mod damage starts to fall of almost immediately after leaving barrel. Vanilla values were in 8-30m range
- DistanceDropOffLength - length of damage fall off distance. No impact on trajectory. In this mod set to 500m for all weapons. Was ridiculously low in Vanilla, like 10m
- MinBulletDistanceDamageModifier - damage at max distance (FireDistanceDropOff + DistanceDropOffLength) aka damage drop off. 0.1 means the gun will deal 10% of it's damage at max distance (500m in this mod). After reaching max distance, damage will stop to fall off and will remain at this value until bullet is deleted from the game (2000m in this mod)
- MinBulletDistanceArmorPiercingModifier - same as MinBulletDistanceDamageModifier but for ArmorPiercing. 0.1 means the gun will have 10% of it's original ArmorPiercing at max distance (500m in this mod)
- MaxFlyDistance - I believe bullet will be simply deleted when reaching this distance, which is 1km in vanilla. I increased it to 2 km, which means you can see the bullet flying long and far

Damage model
- ArmorPiercing - part of damage formula, compared to player/NPC Strike protection. I don't think there is a complex simulation of penetration/non penetration. Bullet ArmorPiercing is simply divided by Strike protection of target, result value is a BaseDamage multiplier. See formula below.  In vanilla AP values were... I don't want to talk about vanilla. In this mod all values were calculated to match real life expectations: weapon with 3.6 ArmorPiercing should be effective against 3.0 Strike protection (class 3 body armor in real life), but less effective against 4.0 Strike Protection
- BaseDamage - base HP damage of a gun
- ArmorDifferenceCoefProjectiles - quite important for armor penetration simulation. It basically amplifies the difference between bullet ArmorPiercing and Strike protection
- Ammo stats are mostly self explanatory, but you can find my comments in AmmoPrototypes

THE Formula of damage in Stalker 2, probably

FinalDamage = BaseDamage * ArmorDifferenceCoefProjectiles ^ (ArmorPiercing - Strike)

where

BaseDamage = Gun->BaseDamage * Ammo->DamageMod
ArmorPiercing = Gun->ArmorPiercing + Ammo->ArmorPiercingMod
Strike = Strike protection stat of body armor or helmet. Yes, head and torso have separate protection for NPC. Limbs are also protected by body armor
ArmorDifferenceCoefProjectiles - penetration/non penetration amplifier, separate config for player, mutant and NPC: in ObjPrototypes.cfg, MutantBase.cfg and GeneralNPCObjPrototypes.cfg


Special thanks

- Stalker modding pioneers like Grok, Maklane, shaytech and many others from GAMMA modding discord community
- GSC for making one of the best Ukrainian cultural products
- воїнам ЗСУ які боронять нашу землю від навали орди

MY NEW MOD, STALKER INFINITY - VANILLA 2.0 OVERHAUL