Talk:Hitscan

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This article needs a lotta work. it's includes a section on games which include non-hitscan weapons is now useless, because it's standard to use projectiles now.--Kitten 13:19, 25 October 2007 (UTC)



Sniper rifles can take up to 2 seconds to reach the target in real world situations (depending on distance)

  • You are correct. Problem fixed. Yvh11a 03:26, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Wow. Ended up here from the Devil May Cry 3 article. I've never heard this term before, and while I can guess from the article that the term is used in FPS, it's not stated where it came from, or why it means what it means... And googling the term doesn't produce anything useful either. So, has the origin of the term been lost in the (relatively short) antiquity of FPS gaming, or is it just some elitist you-know-it-or-you-don't sort of thing? -- Rablari Dash 02:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

  • Everything that follows is speculation, not fact. My guess is that it's a programmer's term. In the early days of first person shooters, some programmer probably wrote a function called hitscan() that would be run every time the player fired a gun, and which would scan the area within the player's crosshairs to see if any valid targets existed. If so, they were hit, if not, nothing happened. The term probably caught on and spread from there, which would explain it's relative obscurity; by the time you knew the term, you already knew what it meant. Speculation ends here. Yvh11a 18:00, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
  • There are numerous functions in different games with similar names. The Unreal engine (or at least UE1 and UE2) uses the TraceHit function. I think Hitscan comes from either the Build3d or the DooM engine. Of course, if you look that up and put it on the page, it'll probably get deleted for containing original research. :-P Like Rablari Dash I tried finding articles on it with google, but it's such a common term most pages you find just use the word in some context, as opposed to explaining what it is and where it comes from. 213.10.112.111 17:44, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Does Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 deserves a mention under "Games entirely without hitscan weapons"? It's a good example of a game with proper ballistics. The ballistics simulation in it is pretty sophisticated. --MattyDienhoff 18:42, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikified

Well, I divided the article in sections and added an image of the Shock Rifle's artwork in UT2007. I hope that's good enough to take out the Wikify request. (Now I'm really thinking about registering =P)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:UT3 2007-01 trailer Shock Rifle.jpg

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BetacommandBot 19:58, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Games entirely without hitscan weapons?

If it's true that hitscan is in fact an obsolete concept, then I agree with Kitten that the growing list of games that don't use it should be culled. However, if it's removed, it should be replaced with a section describing in general why and how hitscan weapons have become antiquated.

I understand why using only projectiles is desirable, but what I don't understand is how it's feasible. In theory, the original Quake could have supported projectiles for everything without skipping a beat. The problem is that netplay would have ground to a halt. Hitscan is useful because the server doesn't need to send all these projectile entities to clients every server frame.

What I'd like to know is how modern games overcome the bandwidth difficulties inherent in using so many entities. I suppose it's possible they don't even worry about it. If that's the case, though, am I to conclude that modern games simply expect a broadband connection to be even marginally playable online?

--99.241.97.241 (talk) 13:54, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

  • There are some games without hitscan weapons, but obsolete is a bit of a stretch. Unless you're going for the slow motion effect or not trying to be realistic, hitscan is just fine for anything that doesn't move slow (rocket launcher) or very long range (sniper rifle). as for bandwidth, I'm guessing the client just passes a vector to the server which passes it to all the other clients, and the visuals are calculated client-side and hits server-side. Unless you're shooting thousands of bullets per second it probably isn't a problem. also, some games with automatic weapons only send start and stop signals and the server calculates the individual bullets. that's why semi-auto is usually better because there's less chance that lag will mess up your aim. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.112.99.5 (talk) 03:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)