Are you talking about removing or minimizing the part where your reticle turns red from moving it over a cloaked enemy?

Are you talking about removing or minimizing the part where your reticle turns red from moving it over a cloaked enemy?

...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hitscan

So we know the forge guns and rail guns are both projectiles which are not hitscan weapons and definitely suffer from CQC issues.

The combat rifle is really the only rifle you could make this argument for but the round velocity is still so high it'd have very little effect on anything.

Those weapons being bad in CQC really has nothing to do with hitscan.

This is where game mechanics and game lore dont agree.

Take a look at any weapon that fires a projectile... do those rounds look like they are firing at 2500 m/s? Its more like ~100 m/s or so to me. They really need to fix that... either rewrite the lore or change the mechanic... doesnt matter.

So we know the forge guns and rail guns are both projectiles which are not hitscan weapons and definitely suffer from CQC issues. Hitscan = bullet magnetism from what I understand (I know aim assist is a large contributor to bullet magnetism as well).

If its not expensive, I think Buster has a point. There is a reason they dont have hitscan weapons in BF4 after all.

It would truly make low rof weapons like the rail rifle intrinsically bad in CQC and high RoF weapons (all min bullet hoses) very powerful in CQC.

Monkey, I'm afraid those are some incredibly dubious physics there.
That rail rifle round requires approximately 10000 terajoules to move at that speed.

It doesn't create an energy field as it moves, it's propelled by magnetic fields in the rail rifle. That can take it up to a few times the speed of sound, but it won't take it to ~0.9c.

The plasma round doesn't move at that speed either given that it's just a highly ionised form of matter.

Regardless, even at much lower speeds like 2500m/s (which has already been stated as the speed of a rail shot) it'd cross the effective range so fast it's not worth considering.

A combat rifle round, which might appear the obvious candidate for ballistics, likely moves in excess of Mach 3, given that high powered modern rifles are already capable of attaining such speeds. That's about 1000 m/s.

At that speed, it'd cross the effective range of the combat rifle in about 8 milliseconds, or 0.08 of a second.
That's half the human reaction time. It'd be completely unnoticeable except as a cost to performance.

That is what i'm saying though... the lore says that but you can clearly see in game the rounds do not move that fast.

They either need to change the lore or fix the game mechanics to actually represent these values.

At most I would say the rounds in game are traveling 250 m/s, absolute maximum.

Monkey, I'm afraid those are some incredibly dubious physics there.
That rail rifle round requires approximately 10000 terajoules to move at that speed.

It doesn't create an energy field as it moves, it's propelled by magnetic fields in the rail rifle. That can take it up to a few times the speed of sound, but it won't take it to ~0.9c.

The plasma round doesn't move at that speed either given that it's just a highly ionised form of matter.

Regardless, even at much lower speeds like 2500m/s (which has already been stated as the speed of a rail shot) it'd cross the effective range so fast it's not worth considering.

A combat rifle round, which might appear the obvious candidate for ballistics, likely moves in excess of Mach 3, given that high powered modern rifles are already capable of attaining such speeds. That's about 1000 m/s.

At that speed, it'd cross the effective range of the combat rifle in about 8 milliseconds, or 0.08 of a second.
That's half the human reaction time. It'd be completely unnoticeable except as a cost to performance.

How can you clearly see that hitscan rounds aren't moving that fast?
They hit instantly.

Have someone stand about 50-60m out and fire around your head. You can see the rounds coming at you and zip by your head. They aren't moving that fast. At 2500 m/s you would only see tracers.

This is especially noticeable with the assault rifle.

ZDub are you saying that the current system for weapons like the assault rifle is not hitscan?

I am not. Damage calculation is most definitely done by hitscan.

What I'm saying is that there is a disconnect between in game mechanics and the lore. The lore states that bullets are traveling out of our rifles at thousands of m/s. If that were true, you wouldnt need anything but hitscan for most any of the weapons in the game as the time between firing and damage application at ranges sub-100 meters would be on the order of the network latency between our computer/PS3 and the server (0-40ms for 0-100m). With a system like that, ballistics are mostly pointless, and I would argue the forge gun and both large and small rail turrets should also be hit scan.

However, the in game mechanics show that bullets are actually traveling much much slower than 2500 m/s. I don't know how you could actually measure bullet velocity with any degree of accuracy but I suspect its around 250 m/s or so that bullets actually travel. At that point its 400 ms between round fired and round hit at 100m, which is large enough that I believe ballistics would matter... like they matter for the forge gun and rail turrets.

So what i'm really trying to say here is either:

1: Fix the game mechanics and make those projectiles fire so fast that you could not see a reason to remove hitscan.

2: Fix the lore, remove the fact that these weapon fire rounds that travel as thousands of m/s (cause they dont in game) and then consider removing hitscan like they already have for the forge gun and rail turrets.

Either way, its not the presence of hit scan that matters imo, its the lore/mechanic disconnect. The game feels like it shouldn't have hitscan because the rounds aren't traveling all that fast to begin with. So either remove hitscan or make the game actually feel like it should have it.

So rail rifles, an electromagnetic round doesn't get ballistics, yet a light beam does? Do not delude yourself, it's not abojt immersion you just want a single weapon to have bitscan while everyone else flails around.

Gallante Plasma Rounds: Have such little mass at such high velocity, the rounds would be more likely to fall up
Minmatar Projectile Rounds: The only ammo that could possibly have any ballistics, except for the fact it travels faster than the speed of sound, you wouldn't see any bullet drop before it left the map.
Amarr Photon Rounds: It's light, pure light, uneffected by gravity and the fastest travelling projectile in game.

None of them have ballistics, it's the future.

As I'm sure you know, even with a pretty minor delay due to projectile travel a quickly moving, unpredictable target would be hit less than under the same circumstances with hitscan. This is partly why I think hitscan is generally bad - because it removes nuances and tactics from the game.

I don't think that's very likely, actually.
With a strafing target the problem is generally much more tied to the reaction time. Nobody can track a target perfectly, and so while some of the fight comes down to tracking ability a fair bit of it is down to luck. The difference non-hitscan weapons would make at the ranges in a strafe fight would be irrelevant. You're looking at a couple of milliseconds, if that. That's a fraction of the human reaction time - it's going to make no difference.

If you wanted ballistics to matter and for that to be noticeable in a strafe fight you'd have to cut the speed by a huge amount, to the point where fighting at range would become practically impossible.

If you want an example of this, look at planetside 2. That has weapon ballistics. In a strafe fight, does it -really- make much of a difference? At range it most certainly does, but these weapons don't operate at nearly those ranges.

You make good points. Please keep in mind, that I'm expecting engagement ranges for Legion to be significantly longer than in Dust. This won't be true for all weapons, and maybe for none, but it's certainly a possibility that didn't exist on the PS3. Also, as an example using the long range sniper role - with hitscan you can just wait for a target to move under your crosshair and then fire - 100% guaranteed hit. Even with fast projectiles and relatively short range, a randomly moving target is no longer a guaranteed hit. Obviously the longer range the more true this becomes as travel time increase, and as the silhouette size decreases.

I don't really see engagement ranges in Legion becoming drastically longer - and they'd have to, if they were to warrant ballistics for most weapons. At its core I don't think the game will be drastically different. I mean, look at the demo - it's all the same base. There's not much justification to change the engagement ranges so hugely.

I would like to see it a little more, though, on weapons where it makes sense. It actually does make sense on sniper rifles - having ballistics allows it to be a more interesting affair than direct point and click from a distance and rewards skill shots. It also paves the way for sniper rifles to actually be powerful (but require some ability) rather than redline hiding snorefest tools. As I recall there was an 'Experimental sniper rifle' in closed beta which functioned a bit like this.

You may be right. I still say that hitscan is something that we don't need. It's a crutch that hasn't been computationally necessary in a long time - more than a decade on PC.

Sure, it might not be something that's directly noticed in shorter range engagements, but it adds depth and subtlety. Imagine, as an esoteric example, an LAV exploding nearby as you train your weapon on a target. just as you fire, pieces of the destroyed LAV fly out and actually intercept a projectile as it travels from you to your target. Now, you clearly would miss in this case, and that possibility isn't available using hitscan. Now, you could go further and have that projectile ricochet off the flying piece of debris and hit something else. This type of mechanics exists in PC games that do not resort to hitscan, but are simply not possible when hitscan is used.


This is why I have asked for CCP to minimize hitscan, not necessarily eliminate it altogether. Legion would be better for it.

Again, though - is it really a crutch if it makes very little practical difference? You're really not going to see the difference from having a non-hitscan weapon except in a handful of cases.



The chances of a piece of an exploding LAV actually intercepting a projectile are minimal.
Let's go with this hypothetical situation, though.

We can assume that an exploding LAV will throw out a certain amount of shrapnel and debris (assuming we have a destruction and physics system for LAVs like this, which is unlikely). As the distance from the LAV increases, the amount of shrapnel in the area decreases, and the chances of the debris intercepting a shot drops pretty much exponentially.

So, we have to be very close to the exploding LAV. When you're so close, the travel time of a projectile is going to be minimal.
To the point where if the debris would intercept the projectile even if it were hitscan instead of travel time based.

This is obviously an edge case. Even if by some minor miracle CCP managed a physics and destruction engine for LAVs sophisticated enough to have shrapnel with hitboxes, the chances of this scenario occurring are tiny.

So for most weapons, what benefits does a non-hitscan weapon system bring? Why would Legion be better off for it?

The "superior FPS killz" part of you might think that hit scan is for "scrubs" and stuff, but there's no point to put physics where it's not needed.

I say keep non hit scan to the minimum, to keep server load down to allow for larger battles.