I'm hesitant to post this as I worry it might be considered poor taste or else "cheating," but I was wondering if anyone knows of a simple way to tweak weapon stats for someone who's not really knowledgeable about modding in general. The reason I asked is I tried the DMCWO mod and - while I'm not a huge fan of most of what it does - I did enjoy some of the changes to some of the weapons, specifically some of the ones I don't really use. I was wondering if I can make my own MUUUCH simpler mod to tweak just one or two stats on just one or two weapons. Not for multiplayer, obviously - I have a number of mods that I keep either for personal use or for private lobbies.
However, it occurs to me that it's useful to mod guns and try them out for real if I'm going to make actual suggestions on the official forums. Last one I suggested was an 80-damage, 180-RPM machinegun with a 50-round mag and 150 total ammo. Underpowered? Overpowered? Just plain stupid? I think it's pretty cool, but I'm guessing. Being able to test this out on my own and see just how far out of whack it is would be awesome, but I'd need to pick and existing gun and mod it to those stats to see. Is there a simple way to do that? I can kind of tell how DMCWO is doing it - messing with tweak_data - but I'm sure there's more to it than just making a lua file with tweak_data.gun.stat = new_stat, right?
So... Am I out of line asking for this?
Persist scripts seem to be a bit over my head, though, as I'm not entirely sure how they work. I could try and copy the way DMCWO does it, which... Appears to include announcing a "global" which I don't know what that does and a lua script which has absolute references to specific values to tweak without needing to override entire functions. That brings in the following question, then: When do persist-scripts run? I think lua hook scripts attempt to inject themselves within the game's own lua structures and run when the functions they override are called, but... When do persist scripts run? Or are they running constantly? Putting in a logical check in there to ensure the change only happens one seems reasonable, but wouldn't that also have the game constantly do the logical check? Or is that not considered to have a meaningful impact on processor load (seems reasonable). When do persist scripts run?
I'll try and do it the way you have it set up, see what happens.
edit
Aha! It worked! The Minigun runs pretty well now! :) So... What was I doing wrong before? I'd love to know so I don't repeat the same error.