Summary[]
Current consensus is that the ammo calculations in the executable for Fallout 1 are bugged, thusly not taking into account the DR and AC modifiers properly. (This has been tested by Sduibek and Wasteland Ghost, likely by many others as well.)
Fallout 2 has similar issues although is not as broken as Fallout in this regard. Various ammo mods exist for Fallout 2 to address this issue such as Cubik's Ammo Mod and YAAM (Yet Another Ammo Mod).
Fixes[]
Unfortunately, the development team did not make Fallout as easy to mod as Fallout 2, and thus Celestial's AP ammo mod is the only that exists for Fallout 1 that is specifically designed to fix the issue.
Possible fixes for this issue consist of:
Item (PRO) changes[]
- Simply changes to the ammo stats via the corresponding Proto files. Whether or not this fixes the issue, or has any effect at all, is disputed.
Code edits[]
- The only way to truly fix the issue is by editing Falloutw.exe directly, either through hex-editing or Assembly (ASM) edits.
Details[]
- Likely what it will need is to replace the current code with a jump to a new location (and possibly NOP of the rest of the original code) and this new code will run proper checks for all ammo stats including AC-Mod, DR-Mod, DT-Mod.
Fallout 2 engine[]
This is presently being worked on. If Fallout 1 can be played in the newer engine for Fallout 2, that should mean that current changes to Fallout 2 code that fix ammo issues (including Sfall's tweaks) should fix the issue entirely.
- Also see here