Hello, everyone! Allow me to introduce myself: on Steam I'm known as "MeatShield", and I'm an avid fan and long-time Miner for Deep Rock Galactic. I have a passion for mathematical modeling, and I've spent the last 6 months putting that to use creating a desktop program to model every weapon in DRG. For every weapon and mods/overclock combination, this program automatically calculates 15 different metrics including five different types of Damage per Second (DPS), the max damage that a weapon can do without resupplying, estimated accuracy, how long it takes to spend all of the ammo, average overkill, and more!

This originally started out as just personal curiosity about how the game works, but when I realized how much work I was going to put into making this program I decided to make it a publicly available tool for everyone to use. Since then I've been watching this subreddit and noting all the various weapon discussion threads that have popped up. I've seen 26 such threads in the past two months, counting the 16 discussion threads by u/ShroudedInLight as well as these ten other threads. There are a lot of discussions and opinions happening on this subreddit, but a lot of them lack the concrete numbers needed to demonstrate their position. I'm hopeful that this program will be a tool that can be used to constructively discuss and compare different builds, provide as accurate information as possible, and answer almost every question about how weapons work.

During these past six months, I have spent dozens of hours in-game testing the weapons. Most of that has been testing certain mods' and overclocks' functionality, but some of it has been figuring out game mechanics like the probability to break Light Armor or the details of the Temperature system. Additionally, I've received a ton of data from Elythnwaen and the community Wiki, and several of the GSG developers have been willing to answer questions about things I wasn't able to figure out from testing alone. This program is the synthesis of those four sources of information, and I'm hopeful that a lot of people can benefit from having all of this knowledge in one place.

What can the program do?

Once you have the program running on your computer, it has a wide variety of features:

1. It has an interactive GUI that imitates DRG's User Interface, making it a very intuitive layout for anyone that has played DRG.
2. Every weapon in the game has its own tab in the GUI, and for all weapons you can click on Mods and Overclocks to enable/disable them and customize your build. As the build fills out, the 15 metrics in the bottom panel will automatically update with the new values.
3. You can toggle certain Status Effects on and off, and see how they interact with the weapons. In particular: Burning, Frozen, Electrocuted, and Scout's IFG are the four that I currently have implemented.
4. Hovering over a Mod, Overclock, or Status Effect button for a couple seconds will bring up a Tooltip that provides a textual description of what enabling that button will do to the model.
5. Driller's EPC and Scout's M1000 Classic both get two models to represent how they have two firing modes. Similarly, Gunner's Revolver has a second model that models a slow rate of fire for sniping, and the projectile fired by the Breach Cutter gets its own model because there's so much information to convey about how the Breach Cutter works. In total, there are 5 models per class for 20 total models.
6. In the top-left menu, "Best Combinations (All)", you can select a particular metric that you want to optimize for the currently selected weapon and the program will find the best combination for you automatically.
7. To the right of that menu, "Best Combinations (Subset)" lets you pre-select a "partial" build and find the optimal build for a particular metric that uses all the mods and overclock from the partial build. This allows you to pick your favorite mods and overclock for a weapon, and then have the program optimize the rest of the build based on what metric you want.
8. By default, it starts the Difficulty Scaling at Hazard 4/4 Players, but there's a menu to change the Difficulty Scaling to any combination to match the missions that you play.
9. It has a variety of ways to export the weapons' combination and metrics outputs. It can export each weapon as a .csv file that lists all mod/overclock combinations and their metrics as a row, or it can export all of the weapon/combination/metric rows as one large MySQL table.
10. If you want to save a favorite build's metrics or share it with someone, the top-right menu, "Misc. Actions", has an option to have the program take a screenshot of itself and save it to a folder of your choosing. Here's an Imgur album with 8 example screenshots that I took while writing this post.
11. If there's something that you find that looks like it was modeled incorrectly, or you have a feature or change you want to suggest, that same Misc. Actions menu has an option which will automatically open up this project's GitHub issue creation page and I'll be automatically notified when the issue gets created.

How to install the program

This program is a freeware, open-source fan project, so it's completely free to download and use. Here's a GitHub link to the latest release. If you use Windows as your OS, you can download the installer.exe attached to the release, and that will run a Windows Install Wizard that will install and configure it on your computer automatically. There will be a couple of security warnings since I'm not a verified publisher, but otherwise it should be a pretty smooth process.

If you use Mac or Linux, then you would have to install Java 8 or higher on your computer, and download the runnable JAR file from the release. I've been investigating how to make a .pkg installer for Macs, but I haven't had any success yet, sorry.

Will this be made into a website?

The short answer is: no. Right now it's almost 17,000 lines of Java code, so it would take me another 6 months to convert it into a website. Additionally, I don't want to pay for domain registration and server hosting since this is a free project. On top of all that, some of the calculations that are run are pretty CPU-intensive (like Autocannon), so they wouldn't work very well in a JavaScript environment.

There is some hope, though: I'm currently working with the creator of the KARL website, the creator of the DRG Builds website, and several other volunteers from the community to make a new, improved KARL website. It's not done yet, but we're hoping to launch the new site Soon^TM. Once that site is launched, we're planning to add a feature to display the metrics calculated by my program alongside the weapon builds, so the output of this program will eventually be available online, even if the functionality to live-calculate things isn't.

What's the future of the program?

There are a few features that I'm still planning to add to this program, and I'm planning to publish a new release every time that GSG releases a weapon balance patch. In an ideal world, I would hope to update my program and get a new release pushed out within 2-3 business days of the new balance patches, but I can't make that a promise. For now, I'm planning to maintain this program until DRG stops receiving balance updates. Since DRG was just released in May, I'm sure that will be for quite some time.

TL;DR

I spent 6 months writing a desktop program that models all 16 weapons' DPS and other metrics automatically, and now I'm sharing it with the rest of the community to help share the knowledge I've learned and provide a tool to enable discussions and weapon build optimization.

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Edit: fixed some typos

Edit 2: updated Features #6, #7, #10, and #11 to include the menu names

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