Better Artillery Signal Flares – invisible wall bugfix and more
This mod improves the Minutemen artillery signal flares, including longer throwing range and a proper fix of the infamous “invisible wall” bug. Several options are available including weightless flares and shorter cooldown time.
– Changed the name of the inventory object from “Artillery Smoke Grenade” to “Artillery Signal Flare”, which is more logical.
– Swapped the mesh on the flare projectile to the “ignited” version – it’s more logical to ignite the flare BEFORE throwing it, and it looks great.
– Disabled the unnecessary “Alt Trigger” flag (timed fuse) – this totally eliminates the “invisible wall” glitch.
– Disabled flares from bouncing like a rubber ball – now they won’t bounce too far away from your target.
– Disabled combat aim correction – it doesn’t make sense to have this enabled on the flares.
– Changed the detection sound level on the flares to “silent”. Enemies are less likely to detect you and move away from the firing area.
– Removed the redundant muzzle flash effect which was associated with the invisible wall silent explosion.
– Reduced the impact force value of the flare to 0 in an attempt to fix a vanilla bug where flares hitting cars push the cars away by several feet.
– Set the default weapon on the flare “projectile” form to point to the inventory flare “weapon” (Bethesda neglected to set this correctly).
– Set a proper collision layer and better collision radius of the flare (Bethesda fudged this by using a timed fuse instead).
Vanilla Weight Version: the weight of the flares is still vanilla (0.5).
Zero Weight Version: flares have zero weight.
Vanilla Weight Fast Cooldown Version: the weight of the flares is still vanilla (0.5). The cooldown period is decreased by 75%.
Zero Weight Fast Cooldown Version: flares have zero weight. The cooldown period is decreased by 75%.
Vanilla Range and Weight Version: includes all the fixes but keeps the range of the flares short like in vanilla. The weight and cooldown are also vanilla.
The “invisible wall” bug happened because the flares were on a timed fuse, and after a short delay (0.8s), they would explode silently (you could usually see a small muzzle flash effect when this happened) and a “movable static” copy of the flare (a placeholder for a script) was put in its place. This movable static would simply drop vertically to the ground as if it hit an “invisible wall”. Increasing the fuse duration a little is not a full solution to this problem because the fuse can still expire while the flare is in flight if it is thrown at a very steep angle into the air. Furthermore, increasing the duration of the fuse means it will take longer for the artillery to fire. The “perfect” solution was to completely disable the Alt Trigger flag (timed fuse) so that the flare only “explodes” on collision; add a proper collision layer; and set the fuse duration to a very high number like 999. This last change is necessary because, even if the fuse timer is disabled, this value still affects the calculation of the throwing range (another bug!), and low values like 0.8 cause the throwing trajectory seen using “Demolition Expert 3” Perk to be abnormally short.
There is a vanilla glitch in the “lobbing” type of projectiles (e.g. flares), whereby throwing a flare at a car will cause the car to move several feet as if it were hit with a huge force, even when the force of the projectile (flare) is set to zero. This seems to happen only with throwing weapons and not other types like missiles, bullets (beams) or arrows. Unfortunately I haven’t found a practical solution for this particular vanilla bug.
Fully compatible with “Angry Artillery”. This mod is highly recommended.
Fully compatible with “Artillery Fire and Range Expansion”. Note that if you use one of the fast cooldown options of “Artillery Fire and Range Expansion”, then choose a version of my mod that has vanilla cooldown.
NOT compatible with “Weightless Artillery Smoke Grenades”. Use the “zero weight” option of my mod instead.
NOT compatible with “Artillery (Smoke) Grenades Un-Nerfed” – the invisible wall glitch can still happen at steep throwing angles using that mod.
There are several mod options available for download. Use only one version of this mod at a time. Drop the “Better Artillery Flares” esp file into your Fallout4 “Data” folder, and enable the mod using your favourite mod manager.
Made using FO4EDIT by zilav/ElminsterAU.
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