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

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Yeah, there could be other animations than pulling a lever that doesn’t make sense on 60% of the guns.

Lasguns - press an on button or release the safety as you pull it out
Bolter - just slowing down the switch animation would convey well how heavy it is.
Autoguns - release a safety
Shotgun - Pumping the action on pulling out/readying is so ingrained into pop culture, not sure what you could replace it with.

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Actually it was flagged due to other things you, conveniently, seem to have edited out as you seem to do quite often.

Writing things that are intentionally inflammatory and/or inappropriate, then editing them after when people have had a chance to read/respond to what you posted.

So, instead of baseless accusations of ‘censoring’ and attempting to incite witch hunts, you could refrain from intentionally derogatory and inflammatory remarks, intentionally disparaging others for no other reason than to disparage them, and act like a civil human being.

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In any fiction there are two aspects that the author must keep in mind: Suspension of disbelief and verisimilitude. Essentially, how much the viewer is willing to set aside the rules of the real world, and how much the work resembles the real world if only superficially.

These are not contradictory.

Warhammer 40k has a high degree of verisimilitude. For all the over-the-top details that it has, things act and react in the way you’d expect them to. Shooting someone in the head in W40k doesn’t produce a spray of rainbows and bubbles (warp-induced fever dreams notwithstanding). And it is because of this verisimilitude that we’re willing to suspend our disbelief with the more fantastical things in the story, like psykers, lasguns, eight-foot tall space marines in power armour, etc.

Warhammer 40k is not a nonsensical setting, it’s a high-octane fantasy-in-space setting. Alice in Wonderland is a nonsensical setting.

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I was more pointing out that some nonsensical weapon ‘features’ would easily exist in the setting with the fact that even being decently skilled in mechanics or computech results in being cult indoctrination and such. It’s also a setting with an entire faction that is magic space soul dust in power armor and has a race that feeds on and requires suffering of some sort to exist, and where there are, essentially, space elves that use special flutes to grow bone buildings and space ships, and humans recruit giants (ogryn) and hobbits (rattlings) to serve in the military.

I also wouldn’t say it’s ‘high octane fantasy’ more ‘violent space goth drama’ for most everything, but that’s more personal feel of the setting and would be subjective.

Oh, and don’t forget, if you convince enough orks that shooting some one in the head causes it to explode into birthday confeti with a cheerful yaaaay ala a certain Halo skull, it would legitimately happen.

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Actually it was flagged due to other things you, conveniently, seem to have edited out as you seem to do quite often.

I have edited out nothing since it being hidden, the only edit I made after was to add my note about it being hidden at the bottom.

Writing things that are intentionally inflammatory and/or inappropriate, then editing them after when people have had a chance to read/respond to what you posted.

I edit frequently because I’m dyslexic and I read back my posts afterwards to check for errors or clarify wordings, or fix mistakes.

I haven’t removed anything inflammatory or inappropriate, because there was no such material to remove. But I suppose you consider people disagreeing with your totally unjustified wild speculations to be ‘inflammatory’. Get a grip.

act like a civil human being

I have been nothing but civil with you, if you think this is uncivil, you need to go out in the big bad world because you don’t know nothing yet.

Now can we please get back on karking topic.

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I was more pointing out that some nonsensical weapon ‘features’ would easily exist in the setting with the fact that even being decently skilled in mechanics or computech results in being cult indoctrination and such.

Nothing to do with reload animations or the justification for their current state. The charging handles on the firearms are not magic. If they are it’s crap magic because they work worse.

It’s also a setting with an entire faction that is magic space soul dust in power armor and has a race that feeds on and requires suffering of some sort to exist, and where there are, essentially, space elves that use special flutes to grow bone buildings and space ships, and humans recruit giants (ogryn) and hobbits (rattlings) to serve in the military.

Totally irrelevant, and this is justified and internally consistent lore. You are once again making the “Magic exists so nothing has to make sense!” argument. Already I’ve dispelled this in a previous post.

Oh, and don’t forget, if you convince enough orks that shooting some one in the head causes it to explode into birthday confeti with a cheerful yaaaay ala a certain Halo skull, it would legitimately happen.

We are not playing Orks. This has nothing to do with anything.

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The slide on the Lasgun could be a safety, rather than something meant to cycle rounds.

I admire the thought put into all of this, but for a creatively written post, you lack a lost of creative interpretation.

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The slide on the Lasgun could be a safety, rather than something meant to cycle rounds.

For lasguns, seems only the Kantrael has this problem. It’s a slide, not a safety switch. It’s very obvious. We don’t need to perform mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise to try to make it make sense.

And if it were a bizarre safety switch, why would you rack that slide every time you reload… it still wouldn’t make sense.

but for a creatively written post

It’s not intended to be a creative post? It’s just simple observations about believable 40k guns that feel good when used. The only people giving their imaginations a good workout here are all the people trying to come up with increasingly silly ideas to justify why a Kantrael lasgun would pull back a charging handle as if chambering a new round every time it is reloaded.

you lack a lost of creative interpretation

I’m not trying to make up nonsense to justify animations that look weird, I Ieave that to you. I’m actually trying to do the opposite and make the game better.

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It’s a purely gameplay feature meant to “balance” the heavier weapons towards the lighter ones.
Which even from a gameplay standpoint makes no sense given the special and enemy ranged fire timings because only weapons that are able to be pulled out without the animations(laspistol, combat shotgun, autopistol etc.) can react to special and their attack timings with the close quarter parts of the map(so 70% of them) and the door spawn system. At this point on the higher difficulties I’ve had over 100 instances where a special spawned, the audio cue for it played, I pressed Q, the door opened, it shot/pounced before my lasgun animation even finished. It’s tragically hilarious that for most weapons you can hear a trapper, try to switch and even when you dodged the net you can’t shoot at it because it already ran away while the animation played.
It also highlights an already present problem of input delay and lost input with a lot of things, just further emphasizing it because you’re never quite sure if the game didn’t read your input, if it was delayed or did your animation just didn’t finish happening. Gives the game a feeling of overall unresponsivnes.
It feels very much like the combat loop, special enemies and timings were made and the animations were added after that because they feel incredibly tacked on and unfitting for this game, especially on Heresy and Damnation.
As for the immersion break it’s very much apparent, the racking and reracking, fiddling with the weapon just looks silly and goofy
Weapons should be balanced on their power, ammo, precision, finesse and combat use, not on the length of pullout animation which actively makes the game feel worse to play and clashes with the overall combat design. People won’t decide to take a lighter weapon just because they can pull it out faster, they will just have less fun playing the game shackled with the animations on the weapons they like.
Do the right thing and remove them, they were obviously not properly tested with the game’s combat loop.
EDIT: forgot to mention that these goes for traitor guard/dreg ranged enemies when close to medium ranges, even for a lot of lighter weapons the enemies go from unaware, aware, visual/audio cue, firing before you pulled out your lasgun and you started switching as soon as you saw them

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Agreed. I hate this argument and I wish people who make it would just go watch car crashes on youtube or play candy crush. All fiction is inherently a reality simulation. If you don’t want a reality simulation, even if a reality with some differences, go do geometry, there is nothing for you in ficton.

Reality has rules. Time, weight, strength. In 1599 George Silver said “All arts have length and measure.” Distance and time.

As combat takes place under pressure of time and distance, efficient use of time is of paramount importance, and there will never be human beings who are fighting for their lives who do not recognize the importance of economy of motion to save time.

These illogical speed bumps in our animations are being put here to encourage melee. These speed bumps are bad, but they are made much worse by the fact they make no logical sense. Even with the issue of machine spritis the engineering must be sound, and we can see how the auto guns work … AND THE ANIMATIONS DO NOT MATCH THE DESIGN.

The animations are literally impossible for the design.

A speed bump is bad. A speed bump that is irritating is worse, and a speed bump that is totally impossible is worst of all.

This is all of them.

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Additionally, there is every reason to think the average guardsman has at least a 1950s understanding of engineering. The ‘lost tech’ and ‘very guarded tech’ are things like the interface between human mind and God machine.

My source for this are the books of Dan Abnett, who also is a head writer for Darktide.

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this is absolutely correct, hope this is fixed in the future because it is incredibly annoying

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