Joneau and I did to some testing today, him using some voxel-models he made on clientside, replacing various weapons, and I running my Realism Rebalanced Mod and starting a server.

A few cool things we noted.

Client side visual modifications work, at least for the time being. Want That G36 of yours to be a FAMAS or M4? You've got it. Feeling a bit more modern than an AK-47 today? Try an AK-74M, etc. Of course, this is only visual for the model, the name, sound, etc. All are normal. I assume this may work for weapon sounds too, but I haven't tried joining a server with thunder-shot enabled for example, next time maybe.

Server-side mods DO work if they're just stat changes. A client didn't need any files to join my server, which (as I said) was running my Realism Rebalanced mod, I hadn't added in the new weapons though - so it was only stat-changes on existing weapons already in the game. We didn't test to see what would happen if I made a new weapon, though one could assume it would likely crash if the client tried to access content that didn't exist on their computer.

We did experience an interesting bug, weapon's for client will only load up to the value the weapon has in vanilla. IE: My Machineguns had higher magazine capacities, 200 for M240, and 150 for PKM respectively. Client could only load up to 100 on M240, and 80 on PKM.


Happy hunting.

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You can use new weapons and create server with it, but only those who have your mod can connect your server and play normally.

That was my assumption.

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What's happening there is that the client sees and hears things happening as if his unmatched mod would be (mostly) working, but in reality, on the server computer the client is playing the server's game with its mods.

This can lead to plenty of misinformation delivered to client, e.g. client could have a shotgun at weapon index 0, but server has a semi-auto rifle there; the client will see himself shooting one shell at a time, while on the server he's shooting continuous spray of bullets as long as the shoot button is down.

This happens because clients do that client side prediction which counters lag. Playing with mods is fairly safe / truthful as long you don't touch the specs but only visual and audible side of weapons, and keep the weapons list ordering matched with the server's. Clients can have more weapons in the list, but having less will cause a crash sooner or later.

I assumed that could happen as well, though Joneau did notice that the game was letting him zoom further with the sniper rifle than in vanilla. (I buffed it's zoom range from 1.4 to 3.0). And no one did ever complain about the MP5 being weak, so I assume no one ever used the MP5 - as the thing about the MP5 in my mod is the volume of fire it puts out of weak and inaccurate bullets, being very effective at close range but not so much at longer ranges.

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