The "Bobby Ray" settings

At the start of a new game you can choose a setting for Bobby Ray's gun shop.  There are four possible choices:  normal, great, excellent, and awesome. Your choice will influence Bobby Ray's entire inventory, including the quality of the items they stock, as well as the quantity.

Internally the BR settings have the following values:

• normal = 1
• great = 2
• excellent = 4
• awesome = 10

What these numbers mean is a little more complicated, as they are used in several different ways to determine the inventory.

Maximum "Coolness"

Bobby Ray's will only stock items up to a maximum "coolness" rating. Items with low coolness include such things as pistols, non-armor clothes, 9mm ammunition, and so forth. Items with high coolness include the best guns, heavy armor, rare ammunition and so forth.

Bobby Ray's is programmed to have better equipment as the game progresses. This is done by comparing the current "Progress" value (visible when pressing "F" in-game) to the item's Coolness value. If the item's coolness is too high for the current game progress, Bobby Ray's will not sell it.

The normal *maximum* coolness of new items that BR will have in stock is 1 + (current progress value / 10). For used items it is one step higher (2+ 1/10 progress), so used items of higher quality will be available sooner than new items.

If the BR setting is set higher than normal, we use the formula X + 1/10 of the current progress to determine the maximum possible coolness of items in BR's inventory. X, in this equation, is equal to the values shown in the table at the top of this article.

For used items, add 1 to the value of X.

Note that the maximum coolness can never go higher than 10. No items have a coolness level of more than 10 anyway.

So that works out to:

Please note that allowing "cool" weapons to become available earlier can make the game considerably easier. Many people think it makes the late-middle to end game less interesting.

Minimum "Coolness"

The BR setting is also used when figuring out whether BR bothers to stock some "low coolness" items. When your progress is far enough along, the low-coolness items (like crappy pistols and such) are supposed to stop being stocked.

The BR setting you choose will reduce this affect. Note that ammo and some of the kits ignore this and will not stop being stocked.

Or at least it is supposed to work that way. Someone changed this at one crucial point in the code so none of the above matters, and BR will always carry every crappy old thing.

Quantity

The BR setting is used to figure out how much of any item will be on sale at Bobby Ray's, assuming that item is available for sale at all (see Maximum Coolness, above).

To figure this out, the game looks at the basic quantity it's supposed to stock, as is defined in the Items.XML file. If the Bobby Ray's Setting is above "normal", the game MULTIPLIES the quantity by the value shown in the table at the top of this article.

So if, in normal mode, Bobby Ray's is supposed to stock 10 units of an item. then  it would try to get 20 when the GREAT setting is used (10*2), 40 at EXCELLENT (10*4), and 100 at AWESOME (10*10).

Please note that this doesn't mean that Bobby Ray's will always have that many items in stock! It simply means that Bobby Ray's will TRY to keep that many items in stock, but since there's a simulated buy/sell process being run for BR's, the actual stock will usually be somewhat lower than the value calculated above.

Speed of buying new items

As mentioned above, the game tries to simulate Bobby Ray's website as though it was a real store, buying and selling and ordering items from suppliers. Therefore, even if your current progress level allows a current item to appear in Bobby Ray's, it may be a few days before BR's can buy that item and put it up for sale.

This effect remains constant in all BR settings, except AWESOME. If that setting is used, Bobby Ray's will IMMEDIATELY stock any item as it becomes "allowed".