How to unload your weapons

[shintsu]

Hi i am managing a lot around pickup weapons using them until empty and then use a other gun. I would rather be able to just unload them not having to keep them in my inventory. i was wondering if this is possible and if yes what the keybind is

[Mr. Podunkian]

It's not. It's a weird quirk of the fact that enemies don't actually use up their ammo reserves -- I didn't like that the amount of ammo you could retrieve from an enemy was dependent on the amount of bullets they had in their gun the moment you killed them.

[CoffeeOnTap]

Which is fine, but it IS going to lead to a lot of exactly what he is doing.
You could give the enemies finite ammo, and the amount lootable from their corpses doesn't need to be proportional to what they have. Most games don't even bother trying to give you the ammo in the enemies weapon. Wasteland, Fallout, etc, just kinda give you a random number.

Though if you take that route, you should adjust ammo drop amounts for no longer being able to do the above.

[Mr. Podunkian]

Yes, I am aware that this is what some players choose to do, but I think I've pretty much given a good explanation as to why things work the way they do in the game. The solutions you offered would require changing a lot of the game's systems and would also require the entire game to be rebalanced, which is probably not happening at this point.

While I do honestly appreciate the enthusiasm you have for the game, your constant posts are beginning to err on the side of being a little condescending, as if you're trying to teach me how to make this own game that I've devoted my complete attention for the past year and a half. I've been an avid gamer and game designer for almost 30 years now, so I think I deserve a little bit more credit than that!

If you could please just maybe ease up a little bit, and let the topics here breathe a bit, I would really, really, really appreciate it.

[Hobbes]

Hmmm. You're going to get a lot more interest now it got put in the humble monthly. I've just started getting my teeth into it as well. So. Some thoughts on the whole ammo unloading idea.

A quick and dirty fix is to have the enemies drop empty guns and guarantee the ammo drops seperately when they die. Yes, it's hackity but it would guarantee there's no risk of people trying to unload ammo from the existing weapons and getting annoyed when they can't.

I've a fair few thoughts rattling around in my head concerning the game in general, but I'll need some time to get them in order.

[Mr. Podunkian]

Yeah, that was an idea I had earlier on too, but like I said in my first post, it would add a weird meta strategy of waiting to kill enemies until right after they reload, since that's when you'd be able to maximize the amount of ammo you can retrieve, which I don't think makes a whole lot of sense, especially when guns like the Ratatat have a fairly high capacity, and being able to retrieve a full magazine's worth of ammo is a little bit excessive.

[Hobbes]

Originally posted by Mr. Podunkian:

Yeah, that was an idea I had earlier on too, but like I said in my first post, it would add a weird meta strategy of waiting to kill enemies until right after they reload, since that's when you'd be able to maximize the amount of ammo you can retrieve, which I don't think makes a whole lot of sense, especially when guns like the Ratatat have a fairly high capacity, and being able to retrieve a full magazine's worth of ammo is a little bit excessive.

Not suggesting that, I'd suggest providing an entirely random sum of ammo on death, plus the empty weapon of whatever the enemy was carrying (or melee weapon in the case of a melee foe). Detatch the concept of a "meaningful" link between how much ammo the foe drops from their effective reload and simply RNG it, so some mobs will have a full clip, some will have not very much.

That way it can't be gamed, and people are encouraged not to think about weapons in any other sense aside from "upgrade yes/no ?" and grab the ammo off the corpse as they move along.

[Mr. Podunkian]

Oh, yeah I see, that makes a bit more sense. The enemies already just drop a randomized amount of ammo, but I'm 100% in agreement that swapping an item for another item because it has a full magazine adds an unnecessary wrinkle to the game, especially since looting can already be sort of a cumbersome, time consuming ordeal (though the autolooting system I came up with was sort of intended to counter that as much as possible)

[Hobbes]

*nods* If the weapons drop "empty", then the player is simply looking at them purely as upgrades, and won't be pausing to see if they can scavenge bullets out of them or switching empties or half empties for full ones. That's my thinking behind it. Then players will likely drain out their existing weapons clip, drop it and move on to the new one.

[Mr. Podunkian]

One thing that kind of stinks about this (and I'm aware it completely contradicts what I said before) is that it does make it a lot harder for players to kind of diversify their inventories without potentially having to do a lot of cumbersome item juggling. For instance, if you're at one free item slot, and you find an empty shotgun and a couple rounds of buckshot, instead of being able to just take the gun and leave, you have to waste a precious few seconds swapping an item for the ammo, reloading, and then swapping it back.

It also does kind of make it harder for players who're starting new runs, since their first upgrade from the rusty pistol won't be so useful...