I've only recently begun playing Battlefront II, and have enjoyed it more than I expected. However, there's one thing that somewhat spoils that enjoyment: the "award" sniper rifle. I've taken a particular liking to playing as a sniper class, but whenever I achieve the Marksman medal and get awarded the "upgraded" weapon it causes considerable frustration. It doesn't feel like an upgrade at all. I'd like to be able to modify that one game asset to behave more like one might expect.

I've installed the official LucasArts modding tool, but it appears to take a pretty monolithic approach to modding and I really don't want to create an entire mod just for this one thing. Are there other more surgical tools or a means to use the LucasArts tool to do this that I haven't noticed?

Regarding the award sniper rifle, I poked around in the asset files included with the modding tool, and discovered this three-line snippet in one .odf file that seems to control one of the unexpected behaviors of this weapon: This exists in a file for the award version of the weapon, but not at all in the standard one, leaving me to presume that default zoom values are defined somewhere else and these three statements in this file are overriding the defaults. At first glance and with only my limited modding skills, then, it looks like the limited zoom of this weapon could be cured simply by removing these three statements.

But how do I update the game with such a simple change without going through an overwrought process for creating an entire mod?

I'm somewhat new myself so I might not be a ton of help, or I could be completely wrong and if that's the case then someone else can correct me.

I'm assuming this .odf is in sides/rep? I wouldn't think deleting the values would be a good idea as that would probably instead strip the rifle of it's zoom capabilities , instead I would tweak the values until you find something you like. Or find the original rifle .odf and simply match values. If you don't like the limited zoom, change
to
or something like that. I would actually suggest you DO set up a full mod because you might have more tweaks you want to perform later on. You'll be able to just add them in with the mod you create here. If you follow the documentation, it shouldn't take but 10 minutes tops to create the basic mod structure.


To the vets, if I'm wrong then please correct me.

Steps I would take:

-Create new mod project
-Make custom side w/ desired change
-Munge
-Back up original .lvl and replace with my edited one

Regarding the zoom: By limited do you mean that it doesn't zoom in as much as the other rifle? If so, CreatorOfThings is right. However, if you want to give it a two-stage zoom change the values for ZoomMin (First zoom) and ZoomMax (Second zoom) to be different.

Well, 2 things:
1. The stock sniper rifles all reference the same file: com_weap_inf_sniper_rifle, found in the Common side, and it does indeed have this line: I belive the ZoomMin is the first zoom and the ZoomMax is the second zoom.
2. I agree with CreatorofThings for the reasons stated above, and after just looking around Gametoast (faq/everything you need thread at the top of this forum) you will undoubtably be able to do a full scale mod after a bit of trial and error and it will be easier to make other changes to the sides you don't like and maybe decide to do a full sides mod

EDIT:

CressAlbane beat me to it

Cleb wrote:Well, 2 things:
1. The stock sniper rifles all reference the same file: com_weap_inf_sniper_rifle, found in the Common side, and it does indeed have this line:

Code: Select all

ZoomMin             = "2.0"
ZoomMax             = "8.0"
ZoomRate            = "0.0"

I belive the ZoomMin is the first zoom and the ZoomMax is the second zoom.

Thanks in particular for pointing this out, as I hadn't gotten far enough along in my dissection of everything to notice that. Thanks to everyone else for the suggestions as well. I guess I'll have to start a mod, and as you've all said just let it be a lint collector for any other annoyances I wind up wanting to tweak. It does seem to happen with every game I've ever played, at least since Master of Orion....