M60 in more Campaigns

[JuggerLeft]

Suggestion

I made a mod for this, so in case you have any concerns in relation to balance with what i'm about to suggest you can experiment with it in the game: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3033703007

The M60 for many years has only be avaliable in 6 out of the 14 Campaigns that we have in the game resulting in a weapon that's rarely ever seen during gameplay, but what if we changed that and made it avaliable in more Campaigns?

It currently can only be found on The Passing, Cold Stream, Sacrifice, No Mercy, Death Toll and The Last Stand unlike the other Special Weapons that are avaliable in all Campaigns.

It should be avaliable in levels where both the Grenade Launcher and Chainsaw can be found, this way adding yet another level of variety to the weapons we can find during gameplay! The levels where that would happen are: Chapters 2 and 3 of Dead Center, Chapter 2 of Dark Carnival, all Chapters of Swamp Fever and Hard Rain(Final Level of Hard Rain reuses the entirety of Map 4 even though it's not acessible meaning that Special Weapons are spawning).

Implementation

About the implementation it's actually surprisingly simple since most of the Chapters where the M60 is absent use item pools to determine the spawns of Chainsaw and Grenade Launcher, meaning that all that needs to be don is include the M60 in those item pools as well! The weapon_item_spawn uses Keyvalues for each item, being the one for the Chainsaw item16, the Grenade Launcher item17 and for the M60 is item18 so to allow the M60 in those spawns where the other Special Weapons can it's only required to add "item18" "1".

The exceptions to that method are the Third Chapter of the Parish, and all Chapters of Crash Course since those use a separate method to spawn Tier 3 weapons that is separate spawns for each one instead of using item pools... So for those ones it would be either required to add new spawns for the M60, replace some existing spawns or change them to item pools all of them requiring just some minor angle adjustments so part of the M60 doesn't go through walls... Which are all things that i already tested out and adjusted accordingly in the files, so i just wanted to start the discussion to later make a Pull Request with all the changes.

[JuggerLeft]

When i make pull request about that i will probably only submit the ones that use Item Pools, i will experiment further with these ones and submit eventually

[Tsuey]

Appreciate the thought! Seeing as your mod uses lump files, just a heads up that posting the lump data into this issue would be great. Anything that touches balance is a very hard sell to Valve so it'd be best to avoid having a PR sit in limbo, since high priority fixes might surface that require the same lump files sooner.

[JuggerLeft]

Appreciate the thought! Seeing as your mod uses lump files, just a heads up that posting the lump data into this issue would be great. Anything that touches balance is a very hard sell to Valve so it'd be best to avoid having a PR sit in limbo, since high priority fixes might surface that require the same lump files sooner.

Do you mean the VPK file with all the Lumps that i changed? Yea, i can do that! I will just remove the ones that have separate spawns since it would require much more testing in relation to it's placement.

I will wait to make a commit in a later date then, better get some feedback in this issue before that.

[JuggerLeft]

Here are all the edited lump files:

m60inmorecampaigns.zip

Also the one level in the Parish that uses the separate method of spawning is the third one, but i'm not including it like i mentioned since further testing would be required. So i only included the Lumps for Chapters 2 and 3 of Dead Center, Chapter 2 of Dark and all the Swamp Fever and Hard Rain ones.

[Tsuey]

Do you mean the VPK file with all the Lumps that i changed?

Right now your Workshop item is a pretty sufficient proof of concept, so that, or copy/paste specific mapname / entity data into this issue, or drag and drop a VPK with the separate spawns removed as you have. Whatever works -- just when it comes to lump file Pull Requests, they are prone to merge conflicts since sometimes we update lumps but don't submit our own updates until later on, or something higher priority comes up that needs a lump.

With regard to how we sell balance changes to Valve, the Last Stand Refresh changelog is a good indicator of fixes that are pretty easy to get in (Valve Time permitting), where the knife and Last Stand finale changes were all that required some convincing. The knife change sold itself given how often it was complained about, but the Last Stand finale tweaks required some intro and explanation. Valve does like to wonder why things can't just be Workshop addons, so we're obligated to convince otherwise, where balance stuff requires some dialog and depends on Valve Time.

[JuggerLeft]

Do you mean the VPK file with all the Lumps that i changed?

Right now your Workshop item is a pretty sufficient proof of concept, so that, or copy/paste specific mapname / entity data into this issue, or drag and drop a VPK with the separate spawns removed as you have. Whatever works -- just when it comes to lump file Pull Requests, they are prone to merge conflicts since sometimes we update lumps but don't submit our own updates until later on, or something higher priority comes up that needs a lump.

With regard to how we sell balance changes to Valve, the Last Stand Refresh changelog is a good indicator of fixes that are pretty easy to get in (Valve Time permitting), where the knife and Last Stand finale changes were all that required some convincing. The knife change sold itself given how often it was complained about, but the Last Stand finale tweaks required some intro and explanation. Valve does like to wonder why things can't just be Workshop addons, so we're obligated to convince otherwise, where balance stuff requires some dialog and depends on Valve Time.

I just sent in a comment a .zip with all the edited .lmp files, in relation to density the density value used for all Tier 3 weapons in the ChainsawDensity which is a value that i increased to see if the M60 was actually spawning during testing! The .zip file that i sent uses the default values so no need to worry about that, just some clarification.

I also added .zips with the edited .lmps to other issues that i created before.

[JuggerLeft]

Here are all the edited lump files:

m60inmorecampaigns.zip

Also the one level in the Parish that uses the separate method of spawning is the third one, but i'm not including it like i mentioned since further testing would be required. So i only included the Lumps for Chapters 2 and 3 of Dead Center, Chapter 2 of Dark and all the Swamp Fever and Hard Rain ones.

Oh i forgot to mention but there's one single angle change to a weapon_item_spawn with hammerid:1637084 in the Second Chapter of Dead Center! I changed it from "0 0 0" to "0 40 0" so part of the M60 wouldn't go through the wall.