Ranged Weapon Animations Make No Sense - Slide Racking On Equip & Partial Reloads, Lasguns With Slides?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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I agree with not having to rack the slide on swapping to a gun every time, it gets old and it very quickly “dulls the eyes” so to speak, like saying the same word over and over makes it lose meaning. However, I don’t agree with the other two things - always racking the weapon on reload (with a caveat), and the lasgun lever (though it’s just a lever, there’s no moving slide).

Darktide, for whatever reason or another, doesn’t support the ability to +1 guns, i.e. you will always end up with the exact same magazine capacity every time you reload, empty mag or not. Once you take that gameplay mechanic into account, the animations are correct. IMO just making the reload shorter when reloading mid-mag would undoubtedly annoy people even more since it would be half-baked - either go the full distance and implement a +1 mechanic alongside tactical reloads, or leave it alone.

As for the lever on the side of the lasgun, the way I see it, it’s basically a safety that opens or closes power to the firing capacitors (this is my own viewpoint, I don’t know if this is actually stated in any writing). When you pull the mag, power is disconnected and capacitors discharged automatically so when you insert the mag, there’s no potential arcing happening that could damage the magazine, the weapon, or yourself depending on the materials the frame is made of. Hit the lever to open up power again. I don’t get this anal viewpoint people have about lore - if it evolves in a manner that makes sense, I’m all for it.

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@TheSoldier - I agree with much of what you say, but 3 things:

  1. My suggestions are predicated less upon lore and more upon the fact that the animations feel silly. It just so happens that the animations also go against the lore afaict, which makes it even more compelling to change them.

  2. The solution to nonsensical reload animations for partial reloads is not to say “Well they don’t correctly model a round being chambered in the weapon anyway, so we should do everything else wrong too”. The solution to what you mentioned here is to have the separate animation for a partial reload I suggested, and add 1 more round to the weapon in this instance. That part is trivial to implement (I’m not talking out of my behind here, I write code for a living). It also poses a minimal and, in my opinion, beneficial balance change. The game already heavily favours melee in its current state.

  3. The last point you make is, not meaning to be rude, just you inventing a ‘macguffin’ about how lasguns work, post-hoc in order to justify the existing implementation. It doesn’t change how it feels, or what it looks like, which is just ‘off’. If it exists in lore, eh, ok I guess, I’d still like to see a better animation that doesn’t look exactly like you’re pulling a charging handle on a modern day assault rifle, using a handle that doesn’t exist in any picture of a lasgun I can find. It makes playing the Veteran Sharpshooter feel like you’re playing “Warhammer 40k: Call of Darktide”.

What matters most to me is not the lore, it’s that the current animations when reloading (which you do like 100 times per game) feel annoying and jarring, it distracts from the immersion and flow of gameplay.

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11

This. I play game to have great gameplay. I could care less if anything is lore-accurate or “realistic” if the price I pay for it is frustrating mechanic. It supposed to be fun to play, that’s basic of video game.

Currently it’s just not fun.

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12

I think simply delete them is better. In V2 there is less ranged enemies but we have a qiuck sawp, and in DT theey are all ranged, and players will use worse weapons. Maybe it’s for lore but I do not think lore is more important than gane-play.

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13

Whilst I understand the lore/realism aspect not working, I think it does “look cool” and the tension/waiting time to switch I feel is a voluntary design choice.
I could, however, be a different animation.

For the lasguns: I imagine it being a securing mecanism for the power pack, not sliding a new round in the chamber.

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Quite right. I have a thread on the autogun I’ll link below.

The thing is, this is really obviously a way for the devolopers to nerf ranged to give melee some degree of importance. Ranged is superior to melee in almost every way in real life and the reasons it’s superior also exist in the game. The devolopers are actively attempting to put speed bumps in the way of ranged.

That isn’t good, it’s bad, what is almost intolerable is the speed bumps are in every way as obviously wrong for the designs as this car:

cargun
Not only do they fail to conform to the absolutely necessary design elements of the autoguns, it is just plain annoying to set up a weapon, and have to do it again a half second later.

For the lasgun, I took some time to get some photos of one on the previous closed beta, and they have added a switch. It looks like an AK style dust cover pointed the other way, and also there’s a thumb safety. Made me think of the galil so I made up this image.

At least some of the time this large switch is what you are operating, but when just going melee/lasgun/melee/lasgun it’s unclear because the movement ‘feels’ like a hard pull, not a push down.

SpaceGalil1
SpaceGalil11920×959 232 KB

Autogun thread is here, with video.

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15

IIRC there are a number of paterns of lasguns with charging handles so as to stay as close to the terran roots as possible (ie, autoguns) so that guardsmen can, in a pinch, still effectively use those weapons. Lorewise anyway, that makes sense. My bigger issue with lasguns is that they show misleading charge amounts/ammo counts. Instead of that being the total number of shots per mag/in reserve (which would make sense as there’s a reason tougher enemies like orks call them ‘flashlights’) they instead shoot a variable amount (typically 2-3 ammo per shot)

If they are supposed to be ‘hotshot’ lasguns like Kasrkn Storm Troopers use (which have some serious stopping power to them) then they’d need to be accompanied by a backpack power pack (honestly I feel like this would have been a better choice to bolters as typically, unaugment normal humans can only handle bolt pistols, lore wise)

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Lasguns in the lore have variable power setting. The higher setting take more power from the cell and in the TTRPGs that is modled exactly as they have here by taking more than one ammo per shot. Its not misleading its lore correct. A hotshot or Hellgun is a completely different kind of lasgun. The ammo per just needs to be listed on the infographic for the weapon.

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I don’t disagree so much as I find that would require a system other then just “Ammo”

It wouldn’t be hard to program the cogitator to convert ‘percentage of power remaining’ into ‘number of shots remaining’ instead of saying ‘80 ammo, but not really.’

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For the lasgun you can charge up, sure, that’s fine. For the ones that don’t do that though it’s simply misleading as we don’t get the option to change the power per shot. Same with the Heavy Las pistol too iirc as I’m pretty sure it burns 2 ammo pershot, and does this weird diagonal ADS thing too

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This is becoming derailed, there are other threads about numerical ammo representation in the UI; this thread is about the animations that play when equipping guns and reloading them from a partial magazine.

Having played some more, I think most of the lasguns are fine, but the Kantrael has this same ‘slide racking’ animation problem the conventional firearms have (detailed in the OP).

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@Astronomer I feel like you’re not really reading what I’m saying. I addressed pretty much all your critical points already. I’ll just reiterate them.

  1. The important thing to me is there’s nothing inherently wrong about racking the weapon after a reload - you can do that, it wouldn’t break the gun, and while it’s not efficient in terms of what a real person would do, current game mechanics line up with the end results. Therefore I’m not fussed about it, and I’d rather have a complete mechanic rather than one half-baked. Furthermore, trivial though you may deem it, just because you write code for a living doesn’t give you authority to say what’s easy and what isn’t for the studio.

  2. I feel like you’re being intentionally rude here, because I did in fact say this was just something I came up with. It doesn’t look off to me, it’s just a lever that acts like a safety. You also use lore as a justification, then go on in the very next paragraph saying lore isn’t important. Throwing some mixed signals.

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I read it, I understood it… but you’re downplaying it. It’s not just inefficient, it’s stupid and nonsensical. It’s not something that any person who understood the weapon they are using would do. It comes off as low quality and dated in contrast to the otherwise excellent design standards of the game’s atmosphere and experience.

Also, we don’t have to choose between a complete but bad mechanic, and a half baked one; that’s a false dichotomy.

If you want to take bets on how simple it is to increment an integer by 1 after completing a reload, based on whether the number of rounds in the gun was > 0 when the reload was started, I don’t think you’ll like the outcome. I will win. It’s trivial. I don’t require your recognition of ‘authority’ whatever that means, to recognise obvious facts.

As for the second point about lasguns, I genuinely didn’t mean to be rude, but my point was that your post-hoc justification doesn’t remedy the problem I outlined (which seems specific to the Kantrael), so I don’t really see the relevance.

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22

It’s a setting where being a mechanic means you are part of a religious cast of technophiles that anoint weapons with oil and purity seals to help protect them against the warp. A setting with space magic that literally bends reality by channeling the powers of literal hell (aka The Warp) and where FTL was achieved through jumping through said hell and coming out the other end, hopefully near/when you wanted to go but nothing is guaranteed.

Nonsensical is a given with the setting.

Also: it wouldn’t just be ‘incease by an integer of one’ it would be a series of checks for multiple variables states and statuses to determine if it would need to break the normally coded weapon mag limit by adding 1 additional round.

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This is an old and tired argument. “There are dragons in this setting, so nothing has to make sense!”

Actually no, things do have to make sense, fantasy settings are always grounded in a coherent reality so that they are relatable. These are not magic warp-infused guns. The reason that the animations have you constantly racking guns in a way that makes no sense is not a facet of some internally consistent fantasy rules, it is an oversight.

Not something that ruins the game, but certainly something that detracts from it, and clearly I’m not alone in that assessment.

Also: it wouldn’t just be ‘incease by an integer of one’ it would be a series of checks for multiple variables states and statuses to determine if it would need to break the normally coded weapon mag limit by adding 1 additional round.

This is a convoluted and vague way of saying:

increment an integer by 1 after completing a reload, based on whether the number of rounds in the gun was > 0 when the reload was started

Which is what I said. In addition you are presupposing a hard-coded limit without justification; which wouldn’t be an obstacle worth mentioning anyway. This game does a lot of extremely technical things, very competently, I cannot believe I am having to justify simple conditional integer incrementation as a straight-forward thing to implement.

If you think that’s a difficult technical problem, I recommend against a career in software development.

EDIT - By the way, if you think abusing the flagging feature to censor my posts just because you don’t like my opinion is going to go well - it is not. That will not be looked kindly upon by anyone, and it speaks volumes about your mindset that you would resort to it.

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A given gun has a set magazine ammunition count specific to it. To the best of my knowledge, this is something coded to the gun and there isn’t anything that changes that from a modifier source outside the gun.

The coding you are suggesting would first have to start with an if/than check for the weapon type then an if/than/else for determined behavior, with a flag to remove the extra round, or to cross reference the gun’s specific stats to determine how man rounds it should have available after reload, and also ensure it isn’t still putting all rounds back into reserve as ammo isn’t lost on reload of a partial mag. This would get very, very messy with multi point recursive checks for just reloading a gun, all for a single bullet which is, honestly, not worth the time/effort/potentially game breaking bugs it could spawn.

And it’s statements like these and your inability to see the potential issues that make me think you don’t have a career in software development yourself.

I’ve actually done coding projects as a hobby, I made a fully self automated character sheet for roll 20 and just setting up a thing of ‘is the box checked’ to add a flat amount would sometimes cause serious issues when it’s being pulled and cross referenced in other areas to calculate modifiers to dice rolls.

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Now that my previous post has been uncensored after someone falsely flagged it… Let’s go through your post point by point.

A given gun has a set magazine ammunition count specific to it. To the best of my knowledge, this is something coded to the gun and there isn’t anything that changes that from a modifier source outside the gun.

Yeah, sure, that’s the logical assumption. It’ll be an int value stored somewhere, maybe against a class, depends how they do stuff in their engine.

The coding you are suggesting would first have to start with an if/than check for the weapon type then an if/than/else for determined behavior, with a flag to remove the extra round, or to cross reference the gun’s specific stats to determine how man rounds it should have available after reload, and also ensure it isn’t still putting all rounds back into reserve as ammo isn’t lost on reload of a partial mag.

This is not how a competent developer would achieve this result. Some of this doesn’t even make sense.

flag to remove the extra round

I genuinely don’t even know what you think this means.

cross reference the gun’s specific stats to determine how man rounds it should have available after reload

‘Reference the weapon and get its internal ammo max value’ is all you had to say, and it’s a basic operation with basically zero associated compute cost. Using strange flowery language and adding random vaguely technical sounding words is not adding credibility to your posts… It just makes it sound like you’re clutching at straws at the edge of your understanding.

Now, the weapon should have already been referenced, this should all already be in scope, because this information would be needed when reloading the weapon anyway. You are making this sound like some kind of mad, twisty turny sorcery, when it is rudimentary.

and also ensure it isn’t still putting all rounds back into reserve as ammo isn’t lost on reload of a partial mag.

Wow, what a strange and almost unintelligible way of saying “keep 1 round in the weapon when reloading and not empty”. Also, not necessary to do this. Though modelling keeping a round in the weapon on a non-empty reload would be another way of achieving the same result, and only a little more complicated. It’d be pointless though really.

Fundamentally what you have to do, is:

  1. Check for the weapon type (perhaps the weapon class has boolean flag for it being conventional and magazine-fed, for example).
  2. Trigger a check on reload to see if the current ammo in the gun was > 0.
  3. If both the above are valid, add one additional shot to the ammo count in the gun from the reserve, if sufficient rounds are present.

There may be some small other considerations along the way depending on their implementation thus far, but that’s the shape of it.

It really is that simple. This is about the most basic kind of mechanical change you could make. There are monumentally complicated aspects to this game, how you model the trajectories of hundreds of projectiles and melee attacks and handle hit detection simultanously while keeping everything syncronised between 4 clients over a network. It is amazing to me that we are having this conversation.

multi point recursive checks

This is actual gibberish? Multi point? What about this is recursive? Do you think recursive just means ‘doing one thing after another’? There is no recursion involved here. Unless you wrote shockingly bad code and somehow managed to use nested for loops to do this.

potentially game breaking bugs

I begin to doubt you’re even serious at this point.

And it’s statements like these and your inability to see the potential issues that make me think you don’t have a career in software development yourself.

Ok, I’ve worked 7 years of web dev and I’m now working in indie game dev in unreal engine. Given the way you’ve spuriously used coding terminlogy so far, I’m unconcerned by this. Believe as you wish my friend.

I’ve actually done coding projects as a hobby

… have you now! :clown_face:

I made a fully self automated character sheet for roll 20 and just setting up a thing of ‘is the box checked’ to add a flat amount would sometimes cause serious issues when it’s being pulled and cross referenced in other areas to calculate modifiers to dice rolls.

If the level of knowledge you are basing your assessment of what is feasible technical design in Darktide on is that you found it hard to make a tickbox checker in roll20, I really don’t know what to say. I think that speaks for itself.

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26

wait till you get a boltor and part of switching to the weapon is this long painful animation…charging the bolt to the rear even if the weapon is already loaded and been fired a few times. It’s really powerful but I chucked that in my inventory after one match and regretted spending 15k for it.

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27

I vociferously disagree. The delay with switching from melee to ranged isn’t tense, it’s frustrating.

VT2 didn’t have this delay, and nobody seemed to care. The concern that the Devs seem to have about the game just being ranged combat is entirely ill-founded, mainly because no ranged weapon in the game is a fix-all.

The lasguns are great all-rounders, but can’t hurt carapace and (with the exception of the Recon variant) can’t keep a horde at bay by themselves. The Helbore can charge up and punch through carapace, but is even worse against hordes because of the low firerate.

And that’s just talking about lasguns. Every weapon has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and taking a well-rounded melle/ranged combo is already important, so why the need to gimp ranged weapons like this?

On the subject of the +1 round from tactical reloads; I don’t mind that it’s not there, plenty of other games don’t model it, but plenty of other games also have shorter tactical reload animations.

And if someone calls CoD realistic I’m going to reach through the warp and slap you.

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28

Just make readying up slower then. The animations are dumb.

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