The following is an educated guess based on my current knowledge of game development, I do not represent any game developers and this is the viewpoint of a student. This is me making an honest guess as to why they made the choice they did. I do not represent the game developer nor any professional programmer. Thing is Projectile Physics being applied to rapid firing weapons in video games is very stressful on hardware to do, it can be done, but it's rarely practical because it will slow down the frame rate dramatically, unless they find a way to pull it off using some brilliant new coding techniques. And honestly I think it would make our computers crash with that many players if the minimal system requirements their aiming for would be something around hardware released in 2011 (because I looked at the XboxOne hardware and it's pretty much that) Keep in mind not everyone can afford wizz bang PCs so having the game on the lowest settings meaning it needs a computer such as most of the ones people on a budget own, makes sense. But who knows, computers by 2015 could handle that, 4 years from now, our PCs would be considered below budget... <_<, being an MMO it would need to support a large range of systems so it would be impossible to do without ruining the experience for people with old systems, which it would by 2015, by it's release it would pretty much be supported on most systems anyway if it's minimal requirements would be equivalent to what we currently have with our systems. Using ray casting and object movement with collision detection to direct rapid firing projectiles then applying the effects of physics from a physics engine is in fact believe it or not, a lot easier to code than Hit Scanning. Why don't people do it? Because if done in a multiplayer environment, you can not stop latency impacting on gameplay, because when using these methods you need a base seed (a point of origin) to calculate each projectile as it is created by the game even though the creation is made using a player action, the game still needs to track it. This comes down to memory allocation and vector array phasing (A Database to hold all the projectiles shot which constantly updates itself to show all the objects shot displayed on the screen which then deletes them as they either hit a target or they go past max range, it also shows or not shows an object based on a player's visible range, it gets a little complex to explain if you don't know physics maths or programming). This all adds additional latency to the communication between the server and the client (The client now needs to tell the server that it is spawning X number of projectiles, so then the server needs to spawn X number of projectiles then transmit to the client the travel distance, time, physics effects and other factors to the client, which adds a little lag, with 1000 players on screen, it adds A LOT OF LAG ). Having this for single shot or short burst weapons, such as sniper rifles or rockets is easier to maintain and the latency wouldn't be noticeable. But with fast firing weapons it would be. Also it is much easier to control natural latency with hit scan to set up artificial latency built into the game itself to compensate for it then with object spawning with collision detection or ray cast object directional projection.
Thanks for the answers. Not a coder/ tech guy, but since I have 2 years of waiting ahead of me I might as well learn something .
pretty much how it is and, just FYI, no one has attempted to do this many players together in one battle before, so we are on new grounds ourselves and our approach is: implement it, test it and decide whats best for the game quality and fun!
I'm curious Patrick, can you tell us the range of the bolter? because at 10-20 meters hit scan or not doesn't matter, but if i can shoot people at 150 without need to lead the target it can be a problem.
well thats a question for game design, but i think currently the effective range is between 25 and 50m, but that's more because we have no space of larger size to use it further away - also, please don't be concerned about this this early on, let's have the gameplay decide if this is something we need to spend more time with rather then guessing, we are not going to be a shooter, we are an rpg-shooter if anything, and with our plan to have this many people playing together we are limited in what can be done, so the factors are: make it fun, rather than make it realistic!
