v0.2-rc2: plate carriers, plates, modular chest rigs

[Hyperseeker]

This is a release candidate. As such, it is not meant to be a complete release and may contain bugs. Player discretion is advised.

This release overhauls plate carriers and ballistic plates, and makes chest rigs modular. As is expected of Armory, each item has been modelled after a real counterpart.

Note that this version is now aiming to support the upcoming 0.H stable release, and will not work on 0.G. Make sure to also use the latest version of Core for 0.H.

Also note that due to the significant restructuring of the mod's contents, as well as the fact that the base game's migration system is limited, this release introduces breaking changes and will not be compatible with saves made while using Armory v0.1.

Highlights of this release candidate:

• Spawns have been adjusted:
  • rare MOLLE pouches have had their spawn frequency reduced
  • plate carriers now spawn with cummerbunds by default
  • chest rigs consistently spawn with harnesses
• All chest rigs have been rebalanced. Their encumbrances have been significantly reduced, and now rest over a more-adequate median point relative to other similar base-game items. Embedded pockets (those which are sewn into the rig by default, such as magazine pockets) provide much less encumbrance compared to detachable pouches, which should encourage players to use them when they're available. Additionally, chassis are now considered ablative: they can take damage when worn inside a harness, and they show up among worn items in the inventory, making reviewing and managing your item placement easier.
• Additional balancing:
  • tactical gear added by Armory now has adequate warmth values
  • plate carriers' volume encumbrance modifier have been adjusted towards realistic values
  • hard ballistic plates have had their encumbrance values reduced slightly, making them more-viable
  • harnesses have been further adjusted in their performance, removing remnant encumbrance penalties while differentiating the existing harnesses' stats, making chest rigs in different combinations viable

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If you like Armory and/or any other Frontier mods, you could donate to support their development. I don't ask this idly: I've been out of work over the last year, and while I'm able to scrounge up the resources each month, this comes at a cost of a lot of time and energy due to stress and ADHD.

As such, I would appreciate any donation you can make. I need to make €679 for the rent, and I'd also like to make another €200 for food until the next rent payment. You can donate one-time via popular services (Ko-Fi, Buy Me a Coffee) or cryptocurrency (BTC, ETH). The links are all in DONATE.md in the Core repo.

To make it a little more exciting for you, I've introducer the Ladder of Benefits™: a set of donation tiers, where you can add something to any of the mods under the Frontier Mods umbrella if you donate a certain amount. This, too, is well-described in the donation document.

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I hope you enjoy this release of Armory! Feel free to contact me, leave an issue, or post to the release's discussion page if you have bug reports, suggestions, or notes about the contents of v0.2.

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This discussion was created from the release v0.2-rc2: plate carriers, plates, modular chest rigs.