I cannot wait for the new mod compatible with sidearms. How's it going?

The updated ones that are currently in development will only auto-equip your forced or policy assigned weapon if the pawn is unarmed. It's getting developed, along with the sidearm mod, from the ground up to work seamlessly with Simple Sidearms.

is there a possibility of a toggle on the auto equip?

@RojoMuerte I'm currently working off the mod Simple Sidearms for the next release (https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927155256) . I was hoping to have the next release of this mod, and the first release of Manage Sidearm Policies finished, but they're still in development.

Sounds great,
Do you mean not this one? https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2652962609

@Kot-sornyak I have an update and a new mod called 'Manage Sidearm Policies' that's nearly complete. The revision and new mod are designed to work with Simple Sidearms (ONLY, not with the other policy manager that often gets installed with Simple Sidearms). I'm currently working on a few minor issues and optimizing performance.

This mod freaks out with simple sidearms unfortunately.

@Delta.Pizza It's an AI image that's been modified for a transparent background and border and then reduced in size. I think it turned out pretty good. It's easy for AI to do things, but not always easy to wrangle AI to do what you want.

Neat thumbnail illustration, wonder where it's from.

This mod adds a concept of a forced weapon as well as a designated weapon. Force equip requires player interaction. Designated weapon is when the policy assigns a weapon. These are both used to track whether a pawn is effectively armed. This is important for mods like Simple Sidearms which can move the pawn's weapon into their inventory. Also important for the Manage Sidearm Policies I'm currently working on which also has to keep track of which sidearm policies are fulfilled and which are not.

This is great, except that, like the vanilla apparel policies, this should probably not override forced equipment by default IMO.

I am currently in the process of developing the sister mod for Manage Sidearm Policies. This mod will be usable by itself or in conjunction with this one. They will both be compatible with Simple Sidearms.

Looking forward to that! If you manage to get it working well, it's basically black magic haha. I think people have been trying to make a weapon manager mod that actually works with Simple Sidearms for years now, since Simple Sidearms came out. While not everybody plays with Simple Sidearms, the use cases and effectiveness for players like me are too good for me to just drop it from my load order. So if another mod can do something similar, i.e., let pawns use tools in their inventory for work and/or switch between different ranged weapons in combat, I'd be all for using that instead.

@Michiko Yeah, there's really no way to have this mod work with another other sidearm policy manager. I did get it to work with Simple Sidearms only. You have to manually equip a melee sidearm. Once I get this mod nailed down and stable I'll look into creating Manage Sidearm Policies.

Well it seems to work in that the pawns will properly update their equipment now. However, they now no longer update their sidearms automatically, and they seem to drop previously equipped sidearms. Simple Sidearms will only work now if you manually tell them to equip specific sidearms rather than things allowed in their policy. Which kinda defeats the purpose of getting a mod that auto-manages things based on policies heheh. Like I don't wanna click each pawn and right click on specific items in my big storage piles to tell them to use that as a tool sidearm.

It's the same issue all of these weapon manager mods have tbh tho. I think the hard part is telling the pawns to pick up things and just keep them in inventory, only switching to them when needed, either in combat or if it's a tool for a job. Actually the core functionality of Simple Sidearms. Since most weapon management mods typically deal with weapons to actually equip rather than just pick up and keep in inventory.

@Michiko Give this another try with Simple Sidearms (only, don't use the other equipment manager). This mod now keeps track of "designated weapons" and will equip the pawns designated weapon when entering combat. It also now uses a custom method "isEffectivelyArmed" which checks the pawns inventory for their designated weapon. From my tests my pawns switched to their melee sidearm and then re-equipped their designed weapon after combat. Let me know how it works for you.

@Michiko What happens with my mod is that it responds to the pawn either not having a weapon at all (which it then schedules an emergency task to find the nearest suitable weapon), or if they have a non-forced incompatible weapon then it will schedule a task to replace it. Otherwise it will occasionally have the pawn see if there are any good upgrades worth getting. Using this system with another mod that also does weapon policy is pretty much guaranteed to cause conflicts. I haven't thought about a worker type system though. That sounds different than a weapon or sidearm policy. I could add a change which prevents the pawn from looking for a suitable weapon if the one they equipped is in their inventory. This may allow you to use these other mods.

Yeah that sounds like a good idea. The concept of sidearms is important to me personally, not necessarily even just for combat. A lot of the time I have my "sidearms" actually things like tools that help with work, like hammers and hatchets, which help with construction or plant work or something. They tend to pick the best ones available, so they're still decent as sidearms anyway, but that's the real reason I care about sidearms personally. I don't usually build military or combat focused colonies so I don't have like a sniper for long range, an assault rifle for medium then a pistol or shotgun for short range on a single pawn like some kind of elite soldier. It's just a bunch of survivalists who might use guns to survive for me. I have one gun, then some tools.

Anyway yeah in testing with Simple Sidearms now I'm not seeing people equip things properly. I think the two systems are fighting each other.

I guess I'll wait for that sister mod then.

I've given that system some thought and I'd probably just create a second sister mod. That mod would be "Manage Sidearm Policies" and add a column next to this one for selecting, and storing a sidearm in the pawns inventory. That mod would likely have a dependency on this one and would enable a pawn to switch to their sidearm when the current target is engaged at a distance where it made sense. That said, I haven't looked into doing that yet. Given enough support for this mod I could be convinced.

@Michiko I would say that neither are compatible? Simple Sidearms has its own dependency on a weapon policy system. The main reason I made this mod is because Simple Sidearms just didn't work for me. I also didn't want to deal with multiple weapons per pawn. This is my take a vanilla like solution that has nearly no overhead, is unobtrusive, and (hopefully) issue free.

I think the question now is how compatible is it with Simple Sidearms? Because there's already a bunch of other mods that do something like this but the issue with most of them is weird compatibility with Simple Sidearms. Either they're outright incompatible, meaning they don't interact with each other at all, or it bugs out like a pawn will pick up way too many weapons.

I'll give it a try and report back!

I see. Thanks for the reply!

I added a features section to distinguish this from the other mod that dropped at the same-ish time.

@VitaKaninen That mod didn't exist when I started this one so they may accomplish the same thing.

Is this mod different from Weapon Policies?

make sense. im no modder tho, why the question.. but hey even if you missed some edge, don't worry about it you've already done a lot loll

@FFS Not terribly difficult since the Rimworld source code can be decompiled. Certainly not trivial either though. There's quite a few edge cases (and some I have probably missed).

kinda agree that should have been in the main game lolll.. thanks mate x)

Just out of curiosity, was it hard to implement?

awesome