Quote: --- Original message by: Ifafudafi
Battle Rifle Burst

Getting a 3-round burst has been pretty much a "solved" problem for most of HCE's life -- have the weapon overcharge instantly, and discharge a spew for just long enough to get 3 rounds off. However, this has been accompanied with a couple of significant limitations:

-An extra tick of delay happens between pulling the trigger and the first shot, due to having to "charge"
-The burst happens at a rate of 1 bullet per tick, which can feel compressed and awkward
-Rate of fire takes a significant hit

(1 tick is 1/30 of a second, the speed at which HCE updates just about everything)

The first issue is pretty much unavoidable, but further experimentation has finally allowed us to solve the other two.

To separate the burst, each round is set to overheat the weapon instantaneously. The heat decay rate is maxed (1), and the heat recovery threshold is aligned to have the gun recover after 1 tick (0.96). The spew time is increased to where the BR now "fires" the equivalent of 6 shots per burst; but by overheating every other shot, the end result is 3 bullets fired every 2 ticks, a much more tactilely satisfying and practically applicable rate.



Raising the rate of fire tied into a "discovery" (really a years-late realization) about rate of fire, related to the game's 30-ticks-a-second update speed. During any given tick, a weapon can only be "firing" or "not firing," meaning that rates of fire are restricted to divisors of 30, i.e.:

1 bullet every tick (30 rounds/second)
1 bullet every 2 ticks (15 rounds/second)
1 bullet every 3 ticks (10 rounds/second)
1 bullet every 4 ticks (7.5 rounds/second)

…and so on. If an "invalid" RoF value is put into the tag, HCE will round the rate of fire down to the nearest "valid" number; so, if a value of 25 was given to a weapon, it would actually only fire at 15 rounds/sec in-game.

Between the charging and the overheating, the BR's rate of fire is effectively much lower than the inputted value. Previously ignorant of the above restrictions, seeing no net effect to raising the rate of fire had given us the impression that it simply couldn't be raised; however, now that we know, we simply have to up the value much higher (the BR's RoF is set at 7.5, but fires at around a still-comfortable 2.5 bursts/sec).

Here's a video demonstrating the difference. You can also see the color-changing method described above working here. (the display is still pending the same treatment as the AR shown in Monday's pool video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPHzjmnaYU