"Ammunition" Slot

[anon24515308]

The Ammunition Slot In Actuality

As of 4.19.1.0, the “Ammunition” slot serves as one of several ways to refill the magazine, as well as being able to empty the magazine It does not, as some (myself included) would suppose, serve to represent the chambered cartridge, though it would be far more worthwhile if it did. All of the current functions of the “Ammunition” slot in the attachment menu should be done in the “Magazine” slot. A separate slot to refill magazines with cartridges is no more necessary than a separate slot to refill tactical lasers with batteries; they both need to be done, but neither of them should get a specific slot. If refilling the magazine through the attachment menu is too slow, then the interactions with the attachment menu as a whole are too slow. Instead of having to bring the cursor over and click on a slot to highlight it before actually being able to do anything with that particular slot, just mousing over a slot should be enough to highlight it, and it should be possible to cycle to highlighting a different attachment slot with a single stroke of a key, press of a button, flick of a joystick, or pull of a trigger. If that still doesn’t offer a fast enough way to refill the magazine, then the “Magazine” slot should be highlighted as soon as you open the attachment menu, making it’s options readily available.

Chamber Slot?

When I first saw the Ammunition slot, I thought it might be a representation of the chambered cartridge. By the time I made the original version of this post, I didn’t understand the true purpose of the Ammunition slot, but could tell that if it were meant to represent the chambered cartridge, it was failing horribly. If it were to represent the chambered cartridge, then the stack of cartridges in it couldn’t be more numerous than the number of chambers a firearm has, it would be empty (or atleast have an empty case) if the action hadn’t been cycled yet, it would remain full or empty, regardless of whether a magazine is being put in or taken out, and selecting a different stack of cartridges would replace the one(s) ready to fire, not get placed as the very last cartridges in the magazine. If an attachment slot for the chambered/indexed/ready-to-fire cartridge(s) were added, it could help simplify the addition of any or all of the following:

• Being able to load ammunition into a weapon, if a compatible magazine isn’t available at the moment.
• Being able to load special purpose ammunition, whithout messing with the magazine.
• Being able to collect empty cases without needing a brass catcher or dropping interactive items after every shot.
• Being able to keep a cartridge in the chamber when the magazine is removed (whether as part of an interruptible reload animation or simply removing the magazine)
• Being able to insert chamber flags to give a visible indicator that a weapon isn’t loaded

Reloading and Interruptible Animations

These really should go without saying, but I’ll mention them here because they somehow became an important part of the conversation before I made this edit. The “Reload” keybind should be used to replace the magazine, not to cycle the action, (although personally I would like if there were also another keybind exclusively for cycling the action, not just the “Primary Attack” keybind.) Both reload and cycling animations should be interruptible, and an interrupted animation should neither be treated like a completed animation or an animation that never happened, but should, depending on how far along it was when interrupted, keep some of its progress.

[Kylie]

I honestly didnt understand the true purpose behind the ammo slot cuz that just negates the use of the mag or just extra work.
However, when it comes to being able to interrupt the reload animation is fine. On the other hand, if you also wanna put 1 bullet during the reload animation that will just be time costing on Nelson’s part. Reload interruption is needed and it’s important. But let’s not go in too much detail on this. Once Nelson has finished reload interruption, then we can think of leaving 1 bullet. Because it’s much harder to make than it sounds.

[GreatHeroJ]

The ammo slot within a weapon represents the chambered round.

That being said none of the limits have been enforced yet, which is why we’re able to cram 500 rounds into the chamber of a PMAW.

As for OP, I agree with everything

[anon24515308]

Apparently we were each wrong about this slot in the attachment menu. Until I saw Kylie’s comment, I had never highlighted this particular attachment slot with loose ammunition in my inventory, (I’ve found a different way of filling magazines, that I’ll explain later,) so I’d only seen it as a window to see the stack of ammunition at the top of the magazine. I had two suggestions: First, that this slot (atleast in the wrong way I understood it at the time) would be more useful if cartridges that are dropped into the magazine would automatically stack together, and second would be even more useful than that if it were instead used to manage the round in the chamber. GreatHeroJ seems to think that the second suggestion is already implemented, but this is most assuredly not the case. If having a stack of 5 cartridges in the Ammunition slot meant that there were 5 rounds chambered, which is just a quirk of this version of the private beta, then you would be able to fire all five of them without needing to cycle the action, and the cartridges in the Ammunition slot probably wouldn’t be removed when removing the item in the magazine slot. The actual purpose of the Ammunition slot is to be able to refill the current magazine through the attachment menu. Why Nelson chose to do this by adding an additional slot to the attachment menu, rather than having it as one of the interactions with the magazine attachment, I could not explain, but it surely has nothing to do with “[negating] the use of the mag”
Magazines work fine, they’re simply replaced without an animation, and there isn’t yet a keybind to replace them without going into the inventory or attachment menu.
Some additional evidence that the Ammunition slot is for filling magazines is that that is exactly what happens when you click to attach a stack of ammunition to this slot, and the stack of ammunition currently shown remains in this slot (I guess the magazine is somehow loaded from the bottom.) And also that the inventory replaces this “attachment slot” with drag and drop functionality.

How I fill magazines.

You probably know that you you can fill magazines by dragging and dropping cartridges into them in the inventory.
You may have also noticed that you can access the magazine in your weapon by inspecting it within your inventory.
I don’t expect you to have thought much about the fact that inspection boxes remain open when you reenter your inventory.
You probably noticed that when the “Nearby” section of the inventory gets full enough, it stretches out, hiding the “Hands” section, the equipped weapon, and the preview of your player model.
You may or may not have noticed that when enough items are nearby, all five rows of the “Nearby” section will be completely full and any excess items beyond this will instantly go into an available slot in the “Nearby” section when a slot opens up there.
If you didn’t know all this, you wouldn’t think to open an inspection window of a magazine or rifle with magazine, before spawning in or getting near to so many cartridges that as soon as one is dropped into the magazine, another will take its place to be dragged into the magazine, which bypasses any limitations of how many cartridges can fit in your inventory.

Oh, also the Ammunition slot can be used to accidentally drop 1700+ cartridges from your magazine into the grass.

[anon24515308]

@Kylie

Once Nelson has finished reload interruption, then we can think of leaving 1 bullet. Because it’s much harder to make than it sounds.

It’s even harder to add retroactively: If all weapons are treated as if they’re open-bolt firing cartridges directly from the magazine, then logic specifically and exclusively for interrupted reloads must be added to allow a cartridge to be left when reloading, and to determine when one should or shouldn’t be left. If however, the currently chambered cartridge were treated as something separate from the ammunition in the magazine, (which was I was actually suggesting, not ) then it would easily allow for a round to be left in the chamber when removing the magazine, and/or allow for specialty ammunition to be singlely loaded without removing the entire magazine, and/or allow spent cases to be collected without having all those ejected cartridges as interactible items on the map.

[Kylie]

When it comes to bolt-action rifles, it’s fine as it is now. Because you have to manually press R with each round. However, when it comes to actual magazine detachment, then we definitely we need reload animations that can be interrupted. Cuz in 3.0, no matter how long or short the animation is, you have to go through it before you can do anything.

[TheDutchPotato]

Mabe it would be cool to introduce the ability to load 1 bullet directly in the chamber if for example you don’t have a magazine for that specific gun but you have the ammo
this function is also possible in Dayz