Why can't we manually press a reload button for weapons with half-depleted magazines?

[smintili]

It really sometimes is annoying to fly around with like 3 bullets left in your 90 bullets clip and having to shoot these three either randomly into space or fire that three shots at an enemy and then instantly need to wait for it to reload itself.

And on a sidenote: Please, Frontier, put the different categories of the controls menu into different pages through which to go. This immensely long list of scrollabe categories has/will become rather monstrous with the addition of the driving and SRV turret key (or controller or HOTAS or whatever) binds.

 

[Veldryn]

I guess the ammo is pre-stored in clips, and the only thing that is automated is ejecting/switching clips

It might still be interesting to eject a clip before it is empty (Wasting the ammo it still contains), but I suspect that careless players would quickly complain about this waste of ammos...

I like this anyway. I'm not a huge fan of these magical ammo clips that can be merged together (Which you can see in almost every game).

 

[smintili]

Yeah, the magic ammo clip is annoying in some way - convenient in most games, but still weird. But in times where it is too much to ask players to look for medi-kits in shooters, what kind of trouble would it be to actually make the players look for ammo clips.

Anyway, to get back on topic, it would really be great to eject the clip manually. I don't care if I waste three shots, if I can just skip these few seconds. These can decide between life and death in some cases.

 

[MottiKhan]

It really sometimes is annoying to fly around with like 3 bullets left in your 90 bullets clip and having to shoot these three either randomly into space or fire that three shots at an enemy and then instantly need to wait for it to reload itself.

+1. When I was sporting a C4 cannon, I would sometimes just fire the last shot into space so I could have a fresh clip on my next engagement. One cannon shot isn't really worth having. It would be nice to reload the clip between engagements for the PA as well. The NPCs seem to be able to do that, even with Rails.

 

[tawittle]

Well I'd be against the "magic ammo".

If there was a way to eject your current mag (losing the remaining rounds in the process), so you don't have to fire those rounds into space, I would support that. Doing that should spawn an "ejected magazine" sort of like the ejected heat sinks.

 

[Vandaahl]

Actually, the whole reload thing is a bit weird. Why not make one big crate, instead of 20 small ones + an expensive reload mechanism..?

 

[smintili]

Funny what ideas you guys come up with, not all in my taste but definitely I'm not alone with my wish of a reload function. I mean, come on, it's the year 3301 up there. Manual reload should definitely be possible. Or is my ship's computer run by Skynet making all the decisions for me?

 

[bitstorm]

I think it would be pretty easy for Frontier to sort it so the reload happens when you retract weapons. No keybinds, nothing else needed, just on retract (or deploy) the ship ensures the current clip is refilled.

 

[X-Terminator]

I totally hate and deplore the method of ammo and magazines for both ammo AND Heat Sinks, Chaff, SCB, etc. Plus Missiles, Torpedoes and Mines are perfetic really!

 

[Captain w00t]

It really sometimes is annoying to fly around with like 3 bullets left in your 90 bullets clip and having to shoot these three either randomly into space or fire that three shots at an enemy and then instantly need to wait for it to reload itself.

And on a sidenote: Please, Frontier, put the different categories of the controls menu into different pages through which to go. This immensely long list of scrollabe categories has/will become rather monstrous with the addition of the driving and SRV turret key (or controller or HOTAS or whatever) binds.

Completely agree, If weapons' ammo is loaded in blocks (think Space Marine Heavy Bolter clips for example) then you should be able to reload (and lose the remaining obviously). This makes sense, like some other posters I dont like the magic clip technique that most shooters/weapon systems use in other games. Makes sense really, tactics wise.

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Actually, the whole reload thing is a bit weird. Why not make one big crate, instead of 20 small ones + an expensive reload mechanism..?

Imagine trying to load 4 mutlicannons worth of ammo into a Asp at once. That's why

 

[AnthonyHJ]

My guess would be that storing the values of multiple clips would require too much memory (currently, ammunition is probably stored as X bullets and Y clips; this has the lowest memory requirement) and so the only solution that wouldn't require reworking the database is discarding unused bullets. As discussed though, that's not so different from firing off the last couple of shots into space (which, as Mass Effect 2 pointed out, will end up "ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime") and so not something worth removing coders from important tasks (such as fixing bugs) for.

 

[CMDR Rison]

One way that you could have reloads without waste and without magic:
When you press reload the current clip is moved to the back of the rotation and the next clip (presumably filled) will slide into place. It would act similarly to magic ammo until you reach the end where you have a bunch of clips with a few bullets each. Better than being completely out of ammo I guess.

Or while all the other clips were being used up a congregator was taking all of the ammo from any partially filled clips at the end and, well, congregating them. And we're back to magic ammo.

 

[Laste]

So you want hollywood guns. They way they are now you can't just contiinually spray until you run out. It gives opposing people a chance to either counterattack or get away. I have had people jump as i waited on cannon and lasers. imagine a conda with cannons that never stop spraying at you.

 

[Volthorne]

So you want hollywood guns. They way they are now you can't just contiinually spray until you run out. It gives opposing people a chance to either counterattack or get away. I have had people jump as i waited on cannon and lasers. imagine a conda with cannons that never stop spraying at you.

Hollywood guns? No, that's how real-world engineers would build something. The less moving parts there are, the less chance there is for failure. If you have one big belt of ammo as opposed to multiple boxes of ammo and an automated reloading system, you've gone from two points of failure (firing system and ammo feed) to five at the very least (firing, ammo feed, ejecting, reloading, container feed - not to be confused with ammo feed, this is how you get the next box of ammo to the reloading system). On top of being more prone to failure, your weapon is now both heavier and occupies more volume, both of which are going to already be at a premium on a spacecraft.

 

[smintili]

I'm very much pro discarding unused bullets. Since it's in my opinion only useful in multi-cannons (keeping balancing in mind for stuff like Cannons), it would only be useful when the 90-bullet-clip has only like 5 bullets left, so not much waste there.

One way that you could have reloads without waste and without magic:
When you press reload the current clip is moved to the back of the rotation and the next clip (presumably filled) will slide into place. It would act similarly to magic ammo until you reach the end where you have a bunch of clips with a few bullets each. Better than being completely out of ammo I guess.

Or while all the other clips were being used up a congregator was taking all of the ammo from any partially filled clips at the end and, well, congregating them. And we're back to magic ammo.

I have no way of knowing how much programming work this would require, but it sound's kind of ... complicated?

 

[Zephyriel]

I remember making this exact suggestion back in original beta... I still think it would be cool to have the possibility to reload.

 

[igor37]

Yes, it would be cool to be able to eject the current clip. But it's not that important to me, if there are few bullets left I just shoot them into the exploding target.

And on a sidenote: Please, Frontier, put the different categories of the controls menu into different pages through which to go. This immensely long list of scrollabe categories has/will become rather monstrous with the addition of the driving and SRV turret key (or controller or HOTAS or whatever) binds.

+1
The control options have always been pretty cluttered, just put them into categories, like "General", "Ship", "SRV", "Map" etc.

 

[Unfluffydave]

So you want hollywood guns. They way they are now you can't just contiinually spray until you run out. It gives opposing people a chance to either counterattack or get away. I have had people jump as i waited on cannon and lasers. imagine a conda with cannons that never stop spraying at you.

We are not talking about a personal weapon here, we are talking about a ship mounted weapon. I can only assume that the designers of weapons in ED forgot about the concept of being belt-fed.

 

[Arioch]

One way that you could have reloads without waste and without magic:
When you press reload the current clip is moved to the back of the rotation and the next clip (presumably filled) will slide into place. It would act similarly to magic ammo until you reach the end where you have a bunch of clips with a few bullets each. Better than being completely out of ammo I guess.

That's how the ammo magazines work in ArmA3, you can reload at any time and you automatically get the magazine with the most amount of bullets in it. The partially depleted mag goes back into the pouches to await its turn as the most full mag. Everything is hunky-dory for the first 8 reloads or so It's interesting from a game-play perspective because you only know how many bullets you have currently loaded and how many (not empty) magazines you hold. I suppose this bit of spice of uncertainty would be missing in Elite as you always know how many rounds you have remaining.

 

[Drink!]

I detected someone inputting real life logic into a game.
A huge belt fed run would be better in many ways, but you have to remember its a game and there is this thing call balancing. I'm sure they have a reason to not allow players to shoot 2100 rounds when using the multi-cannon.

I'm all for the reload button tho.