xbtf / xten calculating weapon stats

[Cursed Ghost]

Hi all

So one of the things I want to add to my codex is weapon stats however for the earlier games in the series trying to get these values is tricky since it doesn't tell you in game, therefore I have to try and derive this from the figures presented in the xbtf / xten editors however I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how the game calculates weapons stats.

So taking the GHEPT as an example the xbtf editor says the fire delay for the GHEPT is 70 which I'm assuming is milliseconds

Therefore the formula to correctly calculate the rate of fire should be

(1 second / (Fire delay / 1000)) x 60

70 milliseconds / 1000 = 0.07 second fire delay

1 second / 0.07 fire delay = 14.285714285714285714285714285714 rounds per second

14.285714285714285714285714285714 rounds per second x 60 seconds = 857 rounds per minute rounded down to the nearest integer

Now at face value this seems reasonable that is of course until you calculate the DPS

857 rounds per minute x 3000 damage per shot / 60 seconds = 42850 damage per second

that however is just 1 GHEPT and your ship is equipped with 2 which would be 85700 damage per second.

Even taking into account the huge energy drain and recoil that is so enormously overpowered that it can't possibly be right could it ???

Surly not I meant I know that in xbtf you can vaporise a Xenon K in seconds when equipped with 2 GHEPT assuming you have enough engine tunings to keep that is hell I can do that with 2 BHEPT which are less powerful so I supposed it's possible to that you could be inflicting 85mw of damage per second when equipped with 2 GHEPT but still that just doesn't seem right to me ???

Something else I don’t understand is why is the fire delay decreasing as the weapons get more powerful that seems counter intuitive.

I would have expected the weaker weapons to fire more often but do less damage per shot where as for the stronger weapons I would have expected the weapon to fire less often but do more damage per shot.

However this doesn't seem to be what is happening it seems like both the weapon damage per shot and the rate of fire are increasing as the weapons get more powerful, so as I'm sure you can imagine I'm a little confused.

[Cursed Ghost]

Ok so after digging into this some more I've come to the conclusion that its essentially not possible as to why well…

Firstly the weapon damage, recharge rate, and energy drain are not being calculated consistently, which actually makes it pretty hard to determine there values, by simply making observations in game and matching them against the values I see in the editor.

For example I shot an argon mammoth that has 125mw of shields with a single shot from a single GHEPT and I used a screen recorder to record it, I then cycled through the video 1 frame at a time and observed how much the shields went down and the numbers are all over the place.

For example

Shot 1: 125000 - 123043 = 1957 damage
Shot 2: 125000 - 122845 = 2155 damage
Shot 3: 125000 - 123262 = 1738 damage
Shot 4: 125000 - 122490 = 2510 damage

So I have no idea what is going on here because the damage per shot from a single GHEPT is supposed to be 3000 according to the editor

I get similar inconsistent results for the energy drain per shot for example

Shot 1: 8000 - 7626 = 374 energy drained
Shot 2: 8000 - 7989 = 11 energy drained
Shot 3: 8000 - 7824 = 176 energy drained
Shot 4: 8000 - 7765 = 235 energy drained

Now as far as I can tell from the editor the energy drain per shot for the GHEPT should be 400 because when I set the return of shot value to 0 to turn off the recoil the energy drain also dropped to 0 so I'm guessing that’s a bug with the editor.

As for the recharge rate I'm not sure how this one is calculated although again I get similar inconsistent results for example

597 - 187 = 410 energy gained
1019 - 597 = 422 energy gained
1441 - 1019 = 422 energy gained
1850 - 1441 = 409 energy gained

So the question is, are these inconsistent results a bug and if it is a bug is it some how related to the fact that the race reputation modifier in xbtf doesn't work humm… ???

I was however able to confirm that the fire delay for the GHEPT is indeed 70 milliseconds and as such the rate of fire is indeed 14.29 rounds per second rounded to 2 decimal places which is crazy, there is no way GHEPT should be firing 14 to 15 per second not with a damage value of 3000 per shot because even taking into account a hit rate of just 20% to 30% because of ship shake that’s still enormously overpowered, clearly somebody doesn't know the meaning of the word balance.

Additionally I was able to confirm that the time of life for a GHEPT bullet is indeed 6 seconds and its max range is 1.84km which gives a GHEPT bullet a speed of 306.67 meters per second rounded to 2 decimal places.

Although for some reason the editor says the bullet speed is 270 meters per second so again not sure what's going on there perhaps a bug in the way the editor is calculating the speed, or perhaps an indication of another bug in the game because I can't see how you would get a bullet speed of 306.67 meters per second when the speed value in the editor is 60000 because if you are dividing by 222 then the speed value should be around 8000 higher.

Perhaps the game is incorrectly converting units to meters that is to say 1 meter is not 222 units I meter is in fact 250 units which is why the speed calculation is off because the distance calculation is off, if I'm right about that then that would also explain why missiles in both xbtf and xten are slower then they are supposed to be.

In any event since the stats I see in the editor bear no relation to what actually happens in game I'm not sure what I'm trying to do is possible, how annoying.