Half-Life Alyx: Weapon Handling

[@sticks_stuff]

ima be honest, didn't even know that putting another hand on the gun even affects anything. great video, hope you make more!

[@Marcharound]

I only knew you could put 2 hands on the pistol, and I didn’t think that did anything. Neat.

[@atlev]

I find it often helps recoil and stability to grip the front end of the smg

[@hamster6426]

Just like in real life putting the left hands under the magazine will help controlling recoil.

[@leegofilms]

The Smg’s barrel also expands when shot. So would that mean putting your left hand under the gun also helps cool the barrel?

[@BlobfishMaster]

Almost 3 years of playing Alyx. Over 1 year of modding, and I had no clue about two hand accuracy thing, I was shooting them guns just like we do in da hood.

[@GunnarKafel]

WOW !

[@dk1480]

Do you know how does ammo balancing work exactly? It seems like enemies start taking less damage and game despawns ammo, but how many shots can combine troops take in total in the worst case scenario? It also seems like smg always kills headcrabs in 4 hits, even though it deals 4 damage and headcrabs have 20-28 hp. No one has done a video on that yet

[@leegofilms]

I plan on making one soon! It’s a really cool system. The smg does have “reverse damage fall-off”, which won’t be covered in the video. Within optimum shotgun range the smg’s damage approaches 4. Otherwise it does 8 damage. I still need to do some experiments to see if this interacts with the ammo system.
I did the math earlier, and there’s some others interesting stuff I found:
Grunt (on hard if only shot in the head) takes 7-14 pistol shots, to the body it is 10-15. (Notice how the minimum is the exact pistol mag size?)
Burst shots (on hard) are 2-4 trigger pulls to the head, and 3-5 to the body. Keep in mind, this isn’t the ammo cost, and that you have to keep tracking the combine when shooting a burst.
As far as I can tell, only the pistol’s damage output is affected by ammo balancing

[@dk1480]

@@leegofilms skill_hlvr in cfg folder contains sk_combine_max_additional_ammo_shots "16", so that must mean combine grunts can tank 16 rounds at most, right? The same for headcrabs: sk_headcrab_max_additional_ammo_shots "4" and they die in 4 smg shots too. Zombies though... sk_zombie_max_additional_ammo_shots "18"

[@dk1480]

@@leegofilms also, rip headshots with too much ammo...

[@leegofilms]

@@dk1480 Mathematically, no. The damage is halved BEFORE headshots and other multipliers are taken into account. And it only applies to the pistol, NOT the smg. You can actually see where those values are set in the skil.cfg. The shotgun and smg have the exact same damage values, the pistol's is changed to 4. This also applies to the burst fire, which does normally does 10 damage, but still requires a burst and one extra shot when over max.
On top of that, the chances of additional shots needed changes depending on the amount over max ammo. It's semi-random. It's likely the headcrabs consistently take 4 is more due to the system requiring at least one extra shot. Hence why I provided a range. That's also why zombies are set to 18 shots max, but you never see that in actual gameplay. That value is so high to give them the most randomness in health, but their actual max possible shots is 15 (12 to the head)

[@dk1480]

@@leegofilms I mean, shouldn't smg kill headcrabs in 7 shots on hard then? Also (8/2)*1.75 and (8*1.75)/2 is the same, 7. Shouldn't zombies die in 9 headshots at most? 60/7 is 9... Unless there are other damage modifiers at play.
For grunts, 14 max headshots sounds about righ since 80/6 is 14.
And does smg kill grunts in 20 shots at close range or 16, in line with max additional shots?