Smoking Barrels RELOADED V1.3

A culmination of a hundred hours of research, testing, ground-up rewriting, more research, learning, bashing my head against proverbial walls, stinging failures, and eventual success…

Every shot you fire, and every shot fired near you, gets the black-powder treatment… or not… depending on the weapon and ammo.

Layered smoke at the muzzle, heat-haze rising off the barrel, sparks, a little puff from the breech, and the right kind of flash for whatever you’re holding.

The game’s own bullet impacts get scaled up too: bigger chips off wood, more dust off stone, sparks off metal, glass that actually shatters… and if you want, every round you put into a wall leaves a hole that stays there.

The most important functions in the mod can be configured via the included ini:

[NPCFire] enables the effect for NPCs, and the scan range at which their smoke is visible.
[CloudDensity] controls the visual thickness of the cloud – preventing the whiteout effect that persisted in WHM’s. The LifetimeSeconds value controls how long smoke from a single shot lingers. 0 returns the lifetime to vanilla.
[Smokeless] applies another density reduction to special ammunitions and weapons that were designed to use smokeless ammunition.
[Weather] provides controls for how weather effects the overall density of smoke.
[Temperature] provides controls for how temperature effects the overall density of smoke.
[Decals] includes an option for session-long persistence, or range based persistence, of bullet holes.
[ImpactEffects] includes options for the scale of bullet impact effects.
Ini changes can be reloaded live in-game by pressing F12.

It’s weather-aware!

The value you use for [CloudDensity] provides the global baseline, but smoke behaves differently in different atmospheric conditions.

Clear, sunny and overcast weather are the [CloudDensity] baseline.
Foggy, fog, mist, haze gives [CloudDensity] a 10% boost.
Snow, light snow, heavy snow, and blizzarding conditions are 15% lighter than the [CloudDensity] baseline.
Rain, light drizzle, thunderstorms, and showers are 40% lighter than the [CloudDensity] baseline.
Smoke is thicker in the cold by a configurable value because moisture from combustion condenses in the cold. ColdThresholdF dictates the low range in Fahrenheit.
Smoke is thinner by a configurable value when it’s warm because the air is partially saturated with moisture. WarmThresholdF dictates the high range in Fahrenheit.
Everything between the ColdThresholdF and WarmThresholdF follows the [CloudDensity] baseline.

Black Powder and Smokeless Weapons:

Each weapon and cartridge is classified by its real-world history. Smokeless powder existed by the late 1800s, but most firearms in RDR2 were still black-powder designs. At the 50% default, smokeless cartridges produce about half the smoke of a black powder shot.

Black powder weapons have the full smoke effects:

Cattleman, Schofield, LeMat, and Navy revolvers.
Volcanic pistol.
Springfield and Rolling Block rifles.
Carbine, Lancaster, Litchfield, and Evans repeaters.
Double-barrel, Sawed-off, Repeating, and Pump-action shotguns.

Smokeless weapons are reduced by percent (default is 50%, configurable in the .ini):

Bolt-action, Carcano, and Varmint rifles.
Double-action revolver.
Mauser, M1899, and semi-auto pistols.
Semi-auto shotgun.

Special ammos are smokeless:

Express and High Velocity are more modern smokeless cartridges.
Split Point ammo is smokeless or black powder, inheriting its type based on the standard ammo.
Explosive ammo generates black powder smoke.

This build also resolves the holstering bug present in WHM’s version and doesn’t require altering any built-in files for effects.

Since this is an asi mod, ScriptHookV2 and an asi loader are required.

Note: To my knowledge, this doesn’t work with Munitions or other mods that add firearms without replacement – however, I haven’t tested it, I’m only inferring based on how WHM’s worked.

On performance: Because the mod employs layered volumetric effects, an FPS hit is to be expected… especially in large engagements. You can tweak the lifetime effect value and NPC smoke values to try and compensate.

Things I’d like to do:

other community suggestions
optimize performance, but this will be a hard target given the nature of the effects

Inspired by WHM’s Smoking Barrels.
Built with some of his assistance, using his work as a reference for the per-shot effect pipeline.

That said… everything in this implementation is written from scratch.

Source code is available for reputable modders by request.

An additional thanks to BobbySopor and dmcjr22 – both of which assisted in testing the earliest builds and survived a bombardment of PMs and rebuilds.

Credits:

oshtwtf and WickedHorseMan