Weapon Experience: comes from gun or from player?

[Zcool31]

Are the experience bonuses you get from leveling weapons tied to the particular gun you spawn with or to your player in general?

Let's say that I spawn as a German rifleman. I have my karbiner level fairly high, so I enjoy reduced sway, recoil, and bolting time. My gun is also a fair bit cleaner and in better condition than when I started. Now lets say for whatever reason I swap my clean carbiner for my dead buddy's crappy dirty level 0 k98 rifle. How much of my benefits do I retain? Do I still get to keep the reduced sway, recoil, etc because it is simply a reflection of my soldier being more trained and experienced? Or do I turn into a level 0 rifleman because all the stats come from the gun and not the player?

Another question is whether these boosts carry across class and team. Let's say I level my Mg34 really high. Now assume I spawn as a rifleman or assault class, and I choose to use an Mg34 I find on the ground. Assuming that skill comes from the player and not the gun, will I be able to retain my Mg34 bonuses even though I spawned as a rifleman?

Alternatively, lets say I level my k98 rifle very high, but my russian bolt action is low level. If I spawn as a Russian rifleman and pick up a karbiner (again, assume stats come from the player, not the gun), will I see my high karbiner level come into play, or will I see the same performance as my nagant rifle, or will I revert to a level 0 rifleman as a russian soldier would have no training using german rifles?

This is all.

 

[Nenjin]

Yeah. It's quite unclear. My gut says it's tied to your use of that weapon type. So when you pick up a Kar98 that you didn't spawn with, and your Kar98 is Level 50, you enjoy the same benefits on that rifle. Same story with enemy weapons. (For some reason my Russian Rifleman can spawn with a Kar98, and vicea versa.)

What weapons you pick up don't have though (or do) is the unlocks. Those are specific to the weapon you're carrying.

On the other hand, maybe all bonuses are carried by the weapon you spawn with. So when you're dropping your level 50 Kar98, you're leaving a level 50 Kar98 for someone else to pick up. Since it has its own texture and everything.

Would be nice to hear from someone at TWI who could clear this up.

 

[Josef Nader]

I'm curious about this myself. It'd be nice to know.

 

[Zcool31]

Physical unlocks are a simple matter. If you rank up enough to get a drum mag for your PPSh, then that is what you spawn with. If you pick up a PPSh with a box magazine, no amount of rank will magically turn that magazine into a drum.

However, for experience stats boosts, I might expect a realistic distribution between player properties and gun properties. For example, if you know how to handle a karbiner, you will see reduced sway and recoil regardless of the gun's condition. However, a dirty gun might have different bullet ballistics than a clean one, so you might expect to see slightly lower accuracy (from the bullet, not from the sway) and damage (dirty barrel?).

At the same time, using the above logic makes it seem reasonable that certain stats should apply to different guns. Let's say I know how to rifle butt someone very hard when using a karbiner. Shouldn't these skills apply equally when I'm using the German semi-auto rifle, or the russian bold action rifle?

Once you introduce RPG-like stat boosts to a game, this becomes a slippery slope.

 

[skullman86]

I haven't seen any high level weapons on the ground AFAIK, but I assumed weapon stats were tied to the player. It's your skill level with a particular weapon that is improving, not the weapon itself (just cosmetics).

That way you would be able to pick up a level 1 k98 and still shoot it the same way you shot your level 50...you just wouldn't get the attachments.

 

[Nenjin]

Yeah, I think the experience is probably stored on your character, while the unlocks and textures are stored on the weapon. The fact it looks nicer and sounds like it's a better version of the same rifle is probably just eye candy, and is leading to some confusion as to what represents what.

That logically makes far more sense to me than a well maintained weapon hitting people harder, aiming down sights faster and have as much as 10 to 20% less recoil.

And just from a data perspective it makes sense, considering the hundreds of weapons that end up on the ground. If each one of them was tracking all that extra data, it'd be pretty messy.

 

[Zcool31]

And just from a data perspective it makes sense, considering the hundreds of weapons that end up on the ground. If each one of them was tracking all that extra data, it'd be pretty messy.

I disagree with the above statement. Consider that at most 64 players can be on any server. Each player spawns with a primary, a secondary, and a grenade. It is also possible to pick up one additional primary and secondary from the ground. This makes for 5 weapons per player.
Now lets assume that everybody on the server dies simultaneously and drops their weapons (how likely is this?). This makes for at most 320 weapons being tracked at any given moment.
Now lets assume that each stat for a weapon is stored as a 32 bit integer or floating point. Each gun has 6 or 7 stats like recoil, deploy speed, etc. I'll assume that there are 20 such fields in a gun data structure to account for overhead. 20*32/8 = 80 bytes per weapon.
320*80=25600=25kB.

Remember that I made a few unlikely assumptions such as everyone carrying 5 weapons and everyone dying all at once. Despite this, we need at most 25kB of memory to store all the data for weapons lying on the ground. Now recall that dropped weapons disappear after a while, the vast majority of people will not pick up guns from the ground, and only a little over half the players are likely to be dead at any given moment. Furthermore, we don't actually need to inform all clients about the complete stats of all dropped weapons: only position, orientation, and some indicator of which texture to use.

The point I want to make is that keeping track of such details is like a drop in the ocean when compared to other thing servers must do.

 

[Zcool31]

*bump*

Back on topic:

So all gun stat boosts that you earn as you level up guns will stay with your character no matter on which team you spawn or which class you are?

When you pick up a gun, it will get all the % recoil reduction, sway reduction, deploy speed, melee strength that it says in your account stats? regardless of what you spawned as?

 

[AmazingMilto]

I think only Riflemen have the reduced sway etc for rifles, Machine Gunners for Machine Guns so on so forth.


It makes sense, but I dont want to say anything about Realism, because I know some Wikipedia Juggernaut will come and whine saying "well actually these guys did this!".