VATS is broken. Shots consistently fire off-center from certain guns. This is very easy to demonstrate: start a new game, forceav guns to 100, give yourself a brush gun (121148), a .357 revolver (8f216), their respective ammos (140a9e, 13e43e), and go to Easy Pete. Back out to the nearby road, then open fire with the brush gun. You can very clearly see the bullet strikes on the window behind him, and they will consistently strike above his head. Backing further away will not solve the problem; the pattern remains high. Setting fvatsrangespreadmax to a high number (say, 10000) will give you 95% accuracy, and you can thereby verify that this pattern of high shots is not just a statistical anomaly. But repeat the experiment with the .357 revolver and notice that it does not suffer the same problem!

Some less thorough testing leads me to believe that the problem is on a gun-by-gun basis, and not an issue with (for instance) rifles but not pistols. The 9mm pistol does not seem to have the problem; the .44 mag revolver does; the .357 lever action rifle does...more, I haven't tested.

Either way, the problem is quite real, very obnoxious, not present in Fallout 3, and desperately in need of a patch. VATS is almost useless with certain guns until this is patched.

IIRC in FO3 shooting a gun let it fire from your head but in VATS the startpoint of projectiles was your torso, it totally ignored the gunmodels. This also meant that outside VATS you shoot over cover but in VATS you hit the cover... >_>

Maybe this is related, that or the spread calculation has a bug in it's script, not something that would surprise me at all.

P.S> Wasn't there a related error to the FO3 sniperrifle shooting left off center everytime?

Yes, well, they apparently took a not-quite-right-but-still-usable system and totally broke it. I don't think the problem is in the spread calculation, since reducing spreads to 0 just pinpoints the wrong aim. I can't fathom why they cannot do the simple, obvious thing, and draw one very simple line from the muzzle to the target for VATS purposes - i.e. do basically what autoaim does outside of VATS. Some parts of game design are up there with rocket science. This part is not.

I don't remember the FO3 sniper rifle shooting off center within autoaim range, but it would shoot off center outside of that range, or if a mod disabled autoaim entirely. That's in realtime, of course; it, like all other weapons, worked more-or-less correctly in VATS: 'more or less' because, while the projectile starting point was wrong, the trajectory algorithm was correct.

Do developers even read this forum? Where do I go to post a bug report that will get their attention? This is absolutely intolerable.

Not only that but sometimes when i go into vats i can't fire my gun at all! and it has happend a couple of times with different weapons.
(yes it does have ammo etc)

and i have to run around like crazy.
The cinematic view is broken too, sometimes i get stuck in it but i can get out by firing my gun again (waste of ammo).