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?
Oh, absolutely. My primary goal here is to test guns for suggestions made on the official forums, not to play the game with them in public games. If I make a claim that a gun with "such and such" stats would be a good addition and not overpowered, I'd like to have actual hands-on experience with it to back up my data. Or, as it turns out, refute said data since the design I was trying to create turned out to be a complete mess.
Moreover, I'm not looking to create overpowered weapons, far from it. I'm trying to use stats-modding to prove that specific weapon designs are expressly NOT overpowered. And it's a good thing I tried it, because several of the designs I thought would work ended up far more powerful than they should have been. I've been working on a model machinegun and nearly everything I've done to it is nerf it in every iteration - worse recoil, less ammo pick-up, then even less ammo pick-up, ETC.
But that doesn't change your point. What I'm doing is cheating and I would not use those weapons in a public game. There there for me to experiment so I can speak about weapon design from experience. Nothing more. Not that I could get away with doing that in a public game anyway - the guns are VERY obviously modded. This is strictly for private experimentation.