NTW has pretty good physics for a RTS warfare game. However, it definitely has some short-comings, some of which totally bewilder me, as they seem intentional. One of these is the fact that all of the small arms fire (i.e., musketballs) fly like laser beams and eventually fade away and disappear from the game world as they zoom off into outer space. This is a bit silly... To fix this problem, in this mod I have enabled the NTW physics system (i.e., gravity) on all small-arms fire, artillery projectiles that had no gravity, shrapnel, many particles and various other types of projectiles and particles. Basically, physics is now enabled on
everything that flies in NTW with a few exceptions (I did not fool with arrows, throwing weapons or anything which I wasn't sure what it was -- just a few things). I left these few things alone because I haven't had the time to test them,
can't test them or they are "hard-coded" to fly in a specific fashion outside the scope of the physics system.
This has a notable effect on gameplay. Musketballs and other projectiles don't fly on and on forever; they drop. This looks
far more realistic and makes the volleys of line infantry and peppering, selective fire of light infantry, skirmishers and snipers
behave realistically. You will see musketballs and other flying objects travel with life-like, arcing trajectories, hit the ground, skip and ricochet and act like real bullets, shrapnel, etc. Shrapnel, burning debris and embers and several types of effects are much better and more life-like. Cool things begin to happen... for instance, you will sometimes see bullets fall short of their target only to bounce off the dirt and miraculously strike another guy right between the eyes and kill him (and it doesn't happen too much to spoil it or make it cheap and unrealistic). Without this mod, bullets that ricochet just fly off on a deflected vector (direction) and zoom off into space. With the mod, you will see bullets hit the ground, bounce up and fall back to the ground again like real bullets. They sometimes "skip" like rocks on water, and occasionally find targets you never expected them to hit -- especially when fighting is raging in rocky hills or around other structures with lots of surfaces!
This gets rid of the "dead-eye" accuracy that infantry units in game have. It adds a new dimension to marksmanship you don't get with the "vanilla" projectiles. The vanilla projectiles fly in perfectly straight lines and the accuracy of gunfire is effected only by the accuracy modifier values for the unit and weapon, which add a slight offset to the linear vector in which the bullet travels. No longer! Like in the real world, an infantryman will often be aiming for a man's chest and hit him in the leg or stomach. It really makes things look and feel much cooler! What makes this part of the mod all the better, I think, is that implementing this feature was so incredibly simple that it literally took me all but a few minutes -- and the mod is very small in size!
ATC Small Arms Mod
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Originally Posted by Chosen Man Lt. Richard Sharpe
What do you mean?
