Hitscan Should Be Removed

[negativenull]

I think there's another way: have the projectile create an invisible line between the last calculated position and the next. If the player/enemy is touching that line it's a hit. The lines could be erased every tick.

That being said, this may not be any better for abilities like Turbulence anyway.

That would be incredibly resource expensive

[BlueThingy]

Honestly one of the issues with this is just allowing the game itself to keep TRACK of all the projectiles.

 

Remember, most games do a "check" every so often to see where the projectiles are and if they hit anything. This works fine for slower moving objects.  But the faster they move the harder it is to keep track of them, they might end up passing through an object before the game registers that they hit something and thus have no effect.

 

Maybe that's good for NPCs but then you have situations where you're using a Vectis and the game only checks once every quarter second to see where your shot is.  But in a quarter second that projectile travels a hundred feet.  You'd end up with huge blindspots where you literally couldn't shoot anything because the game basically wasn't watching where your bullet was when it impacted something.

 

Even assuming they start doing just massive numbers of location/impact checks and get them all running well.  The Grinner fire something like ten times the number of bullets the corpus do.  The game is going to choke trying to manage it all.  Trying to keep track of every bullet the six gunners are firing at you?

 

 

There's a reason games just go with "hitscan" for hyper fast projectiles

[Judgebanks]

WindowsXP couldn't handle the amount of trajectory calculation needed to fire the Kohm, let alone fire the Kohm with Mirage.

 

Moreover WindowsXP needs to go.

[Nagisawa]

I agree.  I would prefer projectiles on both sides of the table, rather than hitscan.

[srlhama]

We fight slow enemies at a max range of 100M if ppl are not able to hit a grinner with a project base gun(like every single good fps) don't know what games they are playing...

And every fire weapon should be project based and all energy weapons as fast as possible, the actual scene makes no sense...

[Naqel]

     I personally think that hitscan weapons should be replaced with weapons with insanely high projectile speed, to simulate hitscan.

 

Perhaps not for the technical reasons you mention, and sans the "simulate hitscan", but I do strongly agree with the notion of severely limiting the number of weapons with instant hit projectiles.

 

To me it's more of a matter of balance:

If projectiles with travel time are the norm, that's another layer of skill that can be applied to their use, and evading them.

It also helps to differentiate weapons that are meant to be deadly accurate(like sniper rifles), from ones that are merely meant to be accurate.

Finally, it introduces the ability for a slew of new mods to appear, by making projectile speed manipulation 'a thing'.

[(PSN)WiiConquered]

That would be incredibly resource expensive

I doubt that honestly. But once again, I'm not sure it would actually solve anything.

[4MostlyHarmless2]

I think the problem is not that enemies have hitscan weapons, but the problem is that those enemies that do have hitscan weapons tend to take the "More Dakka" approach to fighting, which is currently the only combat style for AI in Warframe. 

Think of the situations where you've faced ten non-hitscan enemies (Corpus) and ten hitscan enemies (Grineer). They adopt the same tactics: surround the enemy and fire all the guns at once. With the non-hitscan enemies, it's easy to survive a barrage from ten of them. However with hitscan enemies, you find yourself hard pressed to survive, and take significantly more damage than you would expect. 

 

It's easy to blame hitscan for the problem, but the thing is even if Warframe's engine could implement lightning-fast projectiles, you'd still find it harder to survive in Grineer missions due to the sheer amount of bullets being fired your way in a regular mission. 

What could solve the hitscan problem is that hitscan enemies either need to: 

a.) Spawn in smaller, smarter groups
b.) Stop clumping together so much
c.) Fire from logical ranges rather than illogical ones (Ballistas charging into battle beside Lancers, Bombards firing a rocket into your face point-blank, a trio of Elite Lancers sniping you from across the map, etc.)
 

[Naqel]

a.) Spawn in smaller, smarter groups

b.) Stop clumping together so much

c.) Fire from logical ranges rather than illogical ones (Ballistas charging into battle beside Lancers, Bombards firing a rocket into your face point-blank, a trio of Elite Lancers sniping you from across the map, etc.)

 

Are you willing to have the player's damage output, relative to the health of our enemies, cut by 2-20 times(depending on mods and level)?

I would be, but most people wouldn't.

 

The only way to introduce any balance changes that won't be met with cries of "don't nerf", is to nuke everything from the orbit and start fresh.

DE literally can't do anything about the balance issues(assuming they even want to do anything), without invoking changes on a scale that simply escapes the comprehension of their average consumer(and selling that as the second coming of Jesus).

Edited June 6, 2015 by Naqel

[RealPandemonium]

They should just revert enemy accuracy to what it was like pre-U15.  Enemies were just accurate enough to punish you for playing unsafely but not accurate enough to DPS you down whenever you remotely entered line of sight.  The increase of enermy accuracy along with the arbitrarily growing levels of enemies in endgame missions (a symptom of player powercreep) has contributed to the current gameplay trend of "radial nuke or perma-CC everything" that's cutting the heart out of Warframe.

[taiiat]

Ray Trace Weapons certainly make for fairly poor Challenge.

there aren't any Rendering problems with having exclusively Projectile Weapons - simplistic Projectiles do not Kill performance.

this also means that Gunfire would have Tracers. massively multiplying Telegraphing.

Supressor Mods would presumably remove Tracers or make them much harder to see.

Weapons that are currently Ray Trace having a Projectile speed of 4000-5000m/s would have projectiles arriving in the blink of an eye. therefore no loss of functionality is experienced. at longer Ranges you may need to lead just a hair - but honestly, if you've used Firearms, you'd know that this is something that you do when at Range.

and a little bit of leading in larger rooms is not awful. it asks the Player to learn trajectories and get better at getting it right on the first shot.

everybody wins, really. Players have Telegraphing and the Chance to dodge incoming gunfire. yes, if we're currently doing Parkour we can reduce their Accuracy, but you're still taking RNG Damage.

being able to dodge, is non RNG Damage. you dodge the shots, you don't get hit. you don't dodge, you get hit. Skill based avoidance of Damage.

it's plausible that if everything was Projectile based that there could be a bit of a performance hit in busy situations.

i think it's worth trying atleast in a closed environment to see how it performs. if it still performs well, then it can go all the way.

Edit:

I think there's another way: have the projectile create an invisible line between the last calculated position and the next.

that just might work.

doesn't help Players dodge Gunfire in a Skill based manner rather than an RNG one, but that certainly helps.

That would be incredibly resource expensive

no it wouldn't be.

Ray Trace Projectiles do this to calculate their Trajectory. all it would be like is having more Ray Trace Projectiles.

Ray Tracing Projectiles is effectively performance free. load is nominal, even with thousands of them.

Edited June 6, 2015 by taiiat

[ProfessorZero]

I think making them just projectiles (maybe faster then corpus, idk) would actually encourage more of the run-and-gun style gameplay that warframe seems built for. As it is, people hop from cover to cover before engaging, and once they do they generally stay in the place until the group(s) of enemies are dead. Don't get me wrong, WF is plenty Run and Gun already, its just at higher levels the "if they can see you, you are hit" is a little silly. I should be able to open a door and not immediately lose all my shields. 

[Holeypaladin]

I wouldn't mind if most weapons had dera-speed projectiles, except for the snipers.

 

Provided grineer weapons used projectiles too, of course.

[Divinehero]

tbh i.. actually agree w/ this but for every1 not just the enemies.. it'd level the playing field some between the current hitscan weapons (anything using bullets really) and plasma/laser weapons like the supra or tetra.. could give every other gun travel time w/ bullets or something.. considering the fact that laser/plasma weapons not being hitscan is 1 of the biggest reasons ppl don't like em i'm aware it's likely not the only reason but it's definately one of them

[TaylorsContraction]

Keep in mind that a fast projectile does not have a velocity of 4000m/s.

A sniper rifle would be 800m/s -or are kept hitscan

Regular rifles would be 500m/s

Bows ~ 120m/s

We have bow already with some velocity scaled to the game. Guns just need 5 times the projectile speed, I honestly would like to see how this would work.

Khom didn't just have projectiles, they also bounced of walls which is a much bigger load on resources because each pellet had to calculate bouncing path.

Edit: right now while using twin gremlins with flight speed mod they are practically hitscan. If hitscan weapons were given twin gremlin projectile speed + (double of the speed mod bonus), no one would complain. You only have to lead very distant targets and for me personally that makes landing a hit more gratifying.

Edited June 6, 2015 by TaylorsContraction