🚀 go-pugleaf

Spent part of the afternoon dinking around with the various mod downloads
from happypuppy.com, including one that fixes the shotgun, and also the
'VariLights' one that adds a flashlight beam to the pistol/shotgun/machinegun.
Both had good points, but after dinking around with them seperately, I decided
to combine and improve them (IMO, of course :).

I hadn't realized that the single-barrel shotgun in Doom3 was operating the
same as the double-barrelled shotgun from Doom2- it was firing a wide-angled
blunderbuss-like spray of pellets, and had a ridiculous 22-degree dispersal cone
right out of the barrel. It has the friggin' shot-dispersal of a claymore mine!  ;-)
Here's a screenie (109Kb) of the default pattern, after firing all 8 shells at the
same spot in the exact center of a door, from 15' away (best guess):

http://tinyurl.com/6ro69

No wonder you can't hit jack with that thing unless you stick it right up their nose!
So I twinked the VariLights .def file for the shotgun so that it had the same Doom1
style shotgun settings as the shotgun mod had, and ended up with this pattern, after
8 shots at the same door from 15' away:

http://tinyurl.com/6drag

Now we're talkin'. That's a 7-degree dispersal cone. Much more like real life, and
you can actually hit things and do damage out to 20 feet or more, instead of only 8
feet or less. It's still not as good out at longer ranges as the machineguns are, which
is as it should be. But at least now it isn't utterly useless out past 10 feet.

The shotgun mod reduced the number of pellets fired from 13 to 7, due to the
tighter shot-pattern... I edited it back up to 9, to my taste. Feels about right,
IMO.

The VariLights mod added lights to the shotgun and machinegun (not the chaingun or
other heavier weapons), but they were too bright for my taste, so I turned down the
brightness on their .tga files a fair bit, until they were a comfortable, non-glaring light.

And the pistol had a bogus, red-tinted light-cone with a big laser dot in the center of
it- but the light and laser beam are anchored to the bobbing weapon, not to the cross-
hair- the bullets go where your crosshair aims, not where the laser dot goes... so the
laser was also utterly useless. So I edited it to have the same type and color of light as
the machinegun, with no laserdot.

If you'd like to try this combined mod that I cobbled together, you can download
my edited version of the VariLights.pk4 zip file (50Kb) from here:

http://tinyurl.com/44jtg

After downloading, just place the VariLights.pk4 file in your ~\Doom3\base folder,
and run the game.

I take no credit for this mod, it is based entirely on these two publicly available ones,
which I've only combined parts of, and made some minor edits to:

Varilight v1.1 Mod
Classic Shotgun Mod

The originals can be found at www.happypuppy.com.
     -Marshall