Build and Shoot

...What would it be? Post your ideas and dreams below. I have no experience in coding but I have about 8 different ideas that I'm making concept art for whenever I get the chance.

I wanted to make a voxel-based Just Cause 2 inspired game where you build your own forts and vehicles. Instead of military police after you, it's robots who have taken over the world. I have a few models of the robots already out, and I have to say, they look pretty good. I hope to one day actually create it when I have some more knowledge of Java

So what are your ideas?

A medium-paced (BF: BC2) sci-fi shooter with the following features:

1. All weapons are projectile based, even the energy weapons. No hitscan! (Standard for modern FPS games).

2. All weapons are tracers.

3. Fully customizable weapons, as in you can change almost every component to your liking.

4. Everything is a side-grade.

5. No classes. Everyone start out with statistically identical players and modifies from there.

6. Variable-gravity boots. This needs a tiny bit of explaining.

Basically, you can walk on certain surfaces that aren't "down," kind of like Spider-Man. This takes place selectively. This makes for otherwise impossible tactics, such as an infiltrator-like player prone on the ceiling while the enemy rushes by underneath, or a squad literally getting the drop on some enemies. Oh, and everyone has them, to keep things balanced.

What do you think?

Sounds good, except for one thing:

Mrmath130 wrote:

No hitscan!

Fuck that.

Lol I just don't like it all that much. Sometimes it's OK (TF2), but IMHO it's usually just too simple. Not too easy, too simple.

If it's that big of an issue to a lot of people though, I might change things to have, say, shotguns and a couple energy weapons as hitscan. That way, everyone gets to pick how they want to play while still having an equal chance.

Mrmath130 wrote:

Lol I just don't like it all that much. Sometimes it's OK (TF2), but IMHO it's usually just too simple. Not too easy, too simple.

If it's that big of an issue to a lot of people though, I might change things to have, say, shotguns and a couple energy weapons as hitscan. That way, everyone gets to pick how they want to play while still having an equal chance.

That's what I'd go for.

Make it so snipers aren't hitscan, they just move at incredibly fast speeds so that hitting a moving target from across the map is a pro-mlg-only thing.

I'm not the best at technical details like that. But what stops developers from just making a hitscan act like a real bullet simulator? As in, hitscan with curve + delay.

Pokefan: don't worry! HItscan snipers are not on my list of things to do.

As for the question about hitscan mechanics:

See Rakiru's post. XD

He knows more than I do, because he's a BAWS!

TB_ wrote:

I'm not the best at technical details like that. But what stops developers from just making a hitscan act like a real bullet simulator? As in, hitscan with curve + delay.

Hitscan is a simple function to check if a line goes through a player. Adding drop makes this slightly harder, as it's a lot harder to check if a non-straight line goes through a player. You can add bullet speed in two ways:

1) Do hitscan, but guess where the player will be at the time the bullet reaches it (based on distance to get the time ahead to guess, and the position and velocity to guess the future position. This is easier than method 2, but not accurate, and with a slow enough bullet or long enough distance, this will become very noticeable.

2) Every tick (each loop of the game code), move the bullet's position forward and do a hitscan along the line between those two position. This is method is more accurate than the previous, as it actually does the check as the bullet goes forward. This is harder though, as you have to keep track of each bullet, and can also be more intensive on the server.

The reason hitscan is done is because it's cheap and easy and pretty well simulates a gun firing a bullet.

You see now why I like projectiles

So much easier (and more fun!) to work with in realistic ways.

Mrmath130 wrote:

You see now why I like projectiles

So much easier (and more fun!) to work with in realistic ways.

I find it pretty unrealistic when you shoot a sniper at a guys head from about 100 feet away only to have it miss because the bullet is to slow >_>

Really, bullet speed is only noticeable at greater than 200 meters. Far larger than any map you will have in your game.

I originally thought of it as a dream book I would read non-stop for all eternity and that would be buried with me, but I guess I imagine it as a game, so let's give it a try.

A singleplayer set in a fictional WWII universe where the war does not end in '45, but goes well into the 50s. Hitler gets assassinated in 1943 and Goering rules in his place. The USSR is not as much "communist" as in the real world, so it has closer ties to the US, which doesn't develops the atomic bomb as soon as in RL, but eventually does in a joing research program with Soviet scientists. Japan attacks the USSR during the war so the Soviets have limited military capability in Europe, having to defend it's ass in the East, so the Nazi advance is not completely cut in Stalingrad, but later, in Moscow, but it is also not as fast as in RL. There is a whole lot of stuff I imagined about the universe, but I can't remember every single piece of it(if anyone tells me that it is not realistic, I'm going to rape you with a spoon. It is an alternate universe, it ain't supposed to be realistic).
Anyway, getting to the actual game story: It would be set in 45~47, following a three-man squad of Soviet soldiers that was cut off from the main Soviet army, and is trying to regroup. In the way they find a German desertor, that becomes part of the group. The game would be much more focused on stealth and coordinating the squad(possibily in a Co-Op environment) than on actually fighting the nazis. You would have to hide and conserve ammunition, try and disguise using enemy equipment(good luck stealing anything with no blood stains), anything to re-unite with the main Army. It would be pretty much open-world-ish, with certain set-points that need to be reached to advance, where the characters rest for a couple of days hidden, telling old stories(that you would protagonize, like the two WWII Reznov missions from BO) with their life experience and deep philosophical thinking, mainly about war ethics, when does killing the enemy to protect your country becomes just mindless murder, what is a "fair" weapon, things like that. Well, in the original book idea in the end, after they reunite with the main forces it would be revealed that it was the German desertor that was narrating everything the entire time, in '63, and telling that two of the Soviet soldiers died in a nuke detonation near the end of the war, while the other died of radiation sickness, and the German is dying of it too, so he decides to put his memories and experiences in the book, telling how horrible was the war, but I don't know how to put that in the game.

I imagine the graphics as something "Battlefield 5"-ish, to get maximum realism. I can't think of the actual technicalities because 1: I have no knowledge on the subject and 2: It was originally a book I kept daydreaming about so I didn't have the time to actually sort how it would work as a game.

well not that I look at the text I think I might have went a little overboard

rakiru wrote:

TB_ wrote:

I'm not the best at technical details like that. But what stops developers from just making a hitscan act like a real bullet simulator? As in, hitscan with curve + delay.

Hitscan is a simple function to check if a line goes through a player. Adding drop makes this slightly harder, as it's a lot harder to check if a non-straight line goes through a player. You can add bullet speed in two ways:

1) Do hitscan, but guess where the player will be at the time the bullet reaches it (based on distance to get the time ahead to guess, and the position and velocity to guess the future position. This is easier than method 2, but not accurate, and with a slow enough bullet or long enough distance, this will become very noticeable.

2) Every tick (each loop of the game code), move the bullet's position forward and do a hitscan along the line between those two position. This is method is more accurate than the previous, as it actually does the check as the bullet goes forward. This is harder though, as you have to keep track of each bullet, and can also be more intensive on the server.

The reason hitscan is done is because it's cheap and easy and pretty well simulates a gun firing a bullet.

So I'm guessing hitscan will be increasingly less used as people get better computers?

Mrmath130 wrote:

You see now why I like projectiles

So much easier (and more fun!) to work with in realistic ways.

The second method I mentioned before is how projectiles work (basically) - that's what I was describing.

TB_ wrote:

So I'm guessing hitscan will be increasingly less used as people get better computers?

Not necessarily, but as computers no longer really have such limited processing power, games can afford to use other, more epensive methods if they so choose. I'm personally a fan of hitscan, as it provides instant feedback, which tends to be more rewarding to the player - point at enemy, click on head, head goes boom, rather than point at enemy, click slightly above head, slightly in front of the position they are moving, wait a split second, head goes boom.

HoboHob wrote:

I find it pretty unrealistic when you shoot a sniper at a guys head from about 100 feet away only to have it miss because the bullet is to slow >_>

Really, bullet speed is only noticeable at greater than 200 meters. Far larger than any map you will have in your game.

For the kind of game I have in mind, almost all the maps will be large, but indoors, and with a lot of rooms and objects, kind of like Blacklight: Retribution. Lots of corners and terrain for the modifiable-gravity mechanic to work with. There's no point in having a massive, flat map with only a couple of hills if the game is built around stealth and surprise.

Thinking about it now, hitscan might be best for everything except obvious projectiles (RPGs and the like). It would simplify things greatly and, considering the map design, would allow for more rewarding gameplay.

So yeah, I'll do that. When I get a chance, of course. I'm still a noob at Blender, and as for coding... we won't go there.