How to sight in a weapon?

[sakura_chan 9]

Is there a particular mission/script that is popular for ranging in a weapon? I made a port of the M32 grenade launcher from A2 and added the cool new animated tilting sights that are new for A3 but I don't have a way of checking its accuracy.

[warlord554 2065]

As far as I know it all starts with the model, correct memory points, config values, and field testing on the range before released to the community. What I do anyways

[sakura_chan 9]

I guess just grabbing a rangefinder and some pop-up targets will suffice. I did find that mission that traces the flight path of the shell.

[warlord554 2065]

I guess just grabbing a rangefinder and some pop-up targets will suffice. I did find that mission that traces the flight path of the shell.

That's what I do, 100yds, and then ill double check out to effective range, takes some time but worth it

[x3kj 1247]

I mashed together Hypnotics Bullet tracer script mission with "Proving Ground" mission by conKORD, enabled splendid cam and for penetration testing placed some armor plates from my addon in multiple distances on altis airport. Proving ground is really usefull, as you can do a lot of things without going back to mission editor (grabbing another weapon, getting more magazines, infinite ammo, etc). With splendid cam you can follow the bullet in slowmo if you desire / check out the bullet tracer pattern on a distant target without having to drive there yourself.

A good idea is to disable bullet spread/dispersion for sighting in the weapon config

Edited May 24, 2014 by Fennek

[da12thMonkey 1943]

I have a setup with radio triggers that moves a popup target to distances 100, 200, 300... 900 meters away from a small object like a can or something (using a bit of trigonometry to account for the angle of the flat airfield I use as a target range). Radio trigger alpha will setpos my playable unit to the same can (so that I'm 0 meters from the position that the targets move relative to), while beta, charlie etc. control the target ranges.

I use it in conjuction with Hypnomatic's tracing script and VanZant's SteadyShot addon, with the Master sway and Master recoil controllers set to zero in the userconfig.

Using steadyshot means I can line up my reticule against the distant targets without having to counteract the effects of sway and recoil between shots. The reticle remains on the same spot unless I move the mouse.

Taking screenshots and analysing the images to work out how far the reticule marks need to be adjusted is helpful. You can roughly calculate the ratio of screenshot pixel resolution to the texel resolution of your .paa reticlule (or grid coords in O2 if you're making the reticule out of polygons) and use that ratio to move and scale things until they line up ingame. Remember you can also scale how the reticule texture appears ingame by adjusting the scale of the optics model in UV space. I assume there's a way to adjust scale in UI/dialog-based optics too.

As Fennek said, making a custom weapon that has zero dispersion could also be beneficial (just inherit from one of the BIS rifles with and change that single parameter). If you do make a custom dispersion-less rifle, it might also be useful to make it able to use all of the available magazines in the game so that you can use the same rifle to calibrate reticules for different calibres without having to switch out for another one.

If I could actually script, I might think about modifying Hypnomatic's tracer script so that the line colour changes every hundred meters, or creates a horizontal line or something to give some visual indication of how far the bullet drop is over hundred meter intervals (or however far apart the BDC lines on the optic you're calibrating are). Unfortunately any proper scripting is waaaaay over my head. :D

Modifying the actual reticule is still a bit of trial and error though I guess.

Edited May 24, 2014 by da12thMonkey