Ion Fury Beyond The Cheat: Console Work and GameVars

Looking under the hood is an interesting time. Maybe the Loverboy didn’t have enough kick and the Disperser took to long to reload for your liking. Perhaps gravity felt like it was weighing down on you. Using the console, symbol list, and dump, there are a heap of gamevars and other options that could be tweaked.

Invoering: Scraping Around

From time to time there’s a need to poke around a bit further. Old Build Engine junkies have configured, tweaked, and modded just for the sake of doing so. Being able to change certain aspects of the game could be considered cheating, but so much of it is doing it for its own sake.

By opening the console, running list symbols, and looking at fury.log after a game dump, it can be seen that there are a pile of variables that can be changed. This guide is just going to start looking around.

It most certainly could be construed that these changes might be considered /CHEATING/ by many, but Ion Fury doesn’t seem to mind too much.

Because some folks won’t want to dive in all the way, here’s an appetizer:

1. Open your console in game with “shift + ~”
2. Type “setvar graviationalconstant 10” and hit enter
3. Type “WEAPON1_SHOTSPERBURST 20” and hit enter
4. Type “maxhealth 400” and hit enter
5. Go test a low gravity environment with a shotgun-like revolver and a serious boost of health.

The List of Symbols

The list of “symbols” that are accessible from the console are reached by typing “listsymbol”. This pulls the entire list of available commands accessible. There are some 248, so listing them here is not ideal.

Some of the most interesting ones are: addlogvar, setvar and setvarvar, maxhealth, and give. Other guides online do go into more detail about the cheat use cases for give, god, and activatecheat, so I hope to expand upon how to use a small subset of the available tools.

Opening the console with “shift + ~” opens the console. Typing in one of the listed above without arguments will pull the consoles default help options for each. One thing that I did find helpful was using the dump cheat to gather the list of symbols once you’ve typed it in, and gathering a very large list of game variables.

GameVars and Basic Changes

eDuke32’s wiki does a great job at explaining how commands, scripts, and gamevars work under the hood in the CON files, but much is applicable in-game. The best bet is to look there for a more in-depth look at how things go. This guide is just going to poke around to help those interested in messing around to do so.

Super basic understanding:
“addlogvar” en “setvar” are the two commands in the console that are most relevant here.
addlogvar will display the current value of the variable.
Ex. addlogvar p_armor_type
This will return the current armor type 0-2 that the player is wearing. By changing it with “setvar” (ex. setvar p_armor_type 2) the user can change the armor to heavy armor (2) assuming they have any armor values (if the player does not have any armor the armor will not take).

Gravity:
Gravity is set with the gravity constant. By manipulating this variable the game’s floating mechanics can be altered.

Voorbeeld: Wapens

Wapen 1 is the Loverboy. A number of variables define its operation. A look below shows a handful.

WEAPON1_CLIP 0
WEAPON1_RELOAD 60
WEAPON1_FIREDELAY 2
WEAPON1_TOTALTIME 8
WEAPON1_HOLDDELAY 0
WEAPON1_FLAGS 0
WEAPON1_SHOOTS 6912
WEAPON1_SPAWNTIME 0
WEAPON1_SPAWN -1
WEAPON1_SHOTSPERBURST 3
WEAPON1_WORKSLIKE 1
WEAPON1_INITIALSOUND 0
WEAPON1_FIRESOUND 5
WEAPON1_SOUND2TIME 54
WEAPON1_SOUND2SOUND 43
WEAPON1_RELOADSOUND1 1
WEAPON1_RELOADSOUND2 69
WEAPON1_SELECTSOUND 43
WEAPON1_FLASHCOLOR 0

Each variable represents a different attribute of the weapon. The wiki defines them in the pre-defined attributes list.

In het spel, if one wanted a Loverboy that had half the reload time and blasted away like a shotgun one could open the console and do the following:

• setvar WEAPON1_RELOAD 30
• setvar WEAPON1_SHOTSPERBURST 15

This setup cuts the number of frames in half for the reload and increases the number of “schoten”, as defined by the weapons mechanics, naar 15.

Other fun variables include maxhealth, gravityconstant, and p_armor_type.