Hitscan Needs To Go

[JerichoFayne]

So last night I'm in a Grineer mission, working my space ninja groove.  Grineer Seekers show up with flame throwers, and of course I roll sideways to move perpendicular to their line of fire so that I can avoid the flames.  Nope.  Thanks to hitscan, even though I'm no longer in the line of fire when the flames leave the barrel, I'm still tagged with burning DOT.

 

BOTTOM LINE:  There is simply no way to avoid a shot from a hitscan weapon other than cover, and even that is unreliable.  Rolling, sliding, dodging, and staying mobile - those things that you would expect a space ninja to do in order to avoid harm - are ineffective.

 

I don't know about the rest of you Tenno, but I find this to be an unacceptable situation, given that one of our main weapons against our adversaries is supposed to be our agility & mad crazy ninja skilz.

 

SOLUTION:  

 

1) Set all guns to have projectile velocities.  It's already implemented in the game for select weapons.  Finish the job & apply this mechanic to all weapons.

 

EDIT ON THIS POINT:  It would also make sense to keep weapons that have extreme velocity (e.g. sniper weapons) hitscan.

 

 

2)  Re-balance projectile velocities so that energy weapons are faster than bullets, bullets are faster than bolts, bolts are faster than arrows / throwers, and arrows / throwers are faster than flames & gas clouds.

 

EDIT ON THIS POINT:   There has been some good discussion, and it would also make sense to have the "plasma" weapons have slower velocity than bullets.

 

 

The first benefit this will have is that weapon speeds will actually make sense.  That's always nice.  The second benefit is that a projectile that has a travel velocity can be avoided.  Enemies will still have excellent aim, but their bullets will no longer magically glue themselves to you once you have been targeted.

Edited August 22, 2013 by JerichoFayne

[Pekku]

Grineer Seekers with flamethrowers? Wat. Scorch maybe?

 

Also you were within a flamethrower's range. Think about that for a bit.

[Ezard]

The flamethrower takes a certain amount of time to reach full length

It also doesn't inflict DoT

 

Also, modern projectile weapons fire their bullets at over 300m/s - in the short range combat that most of Warframe is based around, this is basically the same as hitscan (especially seeing as Warframe is futuristic, so the projectiles will probably travel even faster)

[Tsukinoki]

@JerichoFayne

Please explain your reasoning on why the energy weapons should be faster than bullets. I can understand wanting to make the grineer weapons into non-hitscan (though I think that some weapons would be fast enough that it doesn't matter if their non-hitscan or not, such as the railgun moas simply because of how fast railguns bullets actually travel), but wanting ot make the corpus have the fastest traveling weapons in the game?

Or is this to make the clan energy weapons the best weapons in the game because you dont have to deal with travel time as much as you would for any of the bullet based weaponry?

I can see making it non-hitscan, but I think that the bullet weapony should be the fastest in the game. Why? Because we aren't shooting laser beams (even though the damage is laser) and are firing much closer to plasma projectiles which would be slower than bullets.

Further, what were you doing in the scorches range? And I have successfully dodge-rolled the flames before in both single and multiplayer (though its easier in single). Maybe you had a tiny amount of lag so the flames hit you before you saw them reach you, which does happen fairly commonly even with barely noticeable lag.

@Ezard

You do bring up a very good point. And what exactly would be the point of calculating the full bullet path and travel time and all that when it would still hit in at most 1/6th of a second, and usually around 1/15th of a second.

Really, the only thing that this would do is make snipers have a harder time using sniper weaponry, because they are the ones that would have any sort of noticeable travel time.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Tsukinoki

[IcarusNine]

Scorches (the grineer with flamethrowers) don't have hitscan, but, due to either lag or the possibility that the actual projectile is invisible and travels further than the graphics suggest, dodging their flamethrower mostly means running to the side until you're well out of range... If you try anything fancy, you'll just run into an invisible wall of flames.

[Kahruvel]

Make me invincible when I'm moving, this game is too hard.

 

FTFY.

[Symbiont71]

The OP is addressing the "roll/ dodge not doing their job" issue and tried to find a way around that.

 

I strongly believe something must be done with evasion moves because in the present form, they're nothing but show-off moves adding nothing to gameplay.

 

Edit: also, i don't see it as a bad idea.

    In the end, bullets are bullets, no matter what, they should have travel time. Having a grineer 10 meters away shooting at me AND hitting me is ok. Having some more grineer at sniping range WHITHOUT sniper and still hitting me accurately while i dodge, no thanks.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Symbiont71

[Ezard]

In the end, bullets are bullets, no matter what, they should have travel time. Having a grineer 10 meters away shooting at me AND hitting me is ok. Having some more grineer at sniping range WHITHOUT sniper and still hitting me accurately while i dodge, no thanks.

You're presuming that the Grineer is aiming directly at you when he pulls the trigger - what's to say that he isn't leading his target (AKA aiming ahead of you so that you essentially run into his bullets)?

[Hixlysss]

From a coding point, hitscan is used because it is easier to code and to manage. But considering we have the other projectile weapons it is possible for them to copy that code, tweak it heavily, and we now have bullets. The bullets can still move fast enough to be as fast as hitscan, but they could do much more to provide a realistic experience, such as bullet drop and ect. Except that would be weird because warframe is mostly CqC combat.

[Symbiont71]

You're presuming that the Grineer is aiming directly at you when he pulls the trigger - what's to say that he isn't leading his target (AKA aiming ahead of you so that you essentially run into his bullets)?

 

Fair point, i give you that.

 

But that's what dodge is: moving away from the targeted location. Yes, eventually they re-target you, but i wasn't talking about running. I was talking about dodge, evasion, roll - unpredictable movement. That, you can't lead.

[Wiegraf]

You're presuming that the Grineer is aiming directly at you when he pulls the trigger - what's to say that he isn't leading his target (AKA aiming ahead of you so that you essentially run into his bullets)?

 

It's best seen with the Corpus; they don't aim directly at you with their energy weapons but ahead so that their shots reach you. The AI basically calculates your currently velocity and direction and aims at the expected place you'll be when their shots arrive.

 

It's why running in a straight line perpendicular does little to keep Corpus to hit you with their energy weapons but zig-zagging and changing speed throws their aim right off.

 

I'm willing to bet that since we can hit Grineers at long range with their own weapons, they could pull it off as well.

 

 

Fair point, i give you that.

 

But that's what dodge is: moving away from the targeted location. Yes, eventually they re-target you, but i wasn't talking about running. I was talking about dodge, evasion, roll - unpredictable movement. That, you can't lead.

 

 

You can't lead the change of direction but you can lead once you've started moving the other way; it's the same way a player sometime misses a few shots with their weapon when the enemy decides to move in another direction. You miss a few shots but you quickly reacquire your target.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Wiegraf

[Ezard]

In the end, it's more efficient from a programming point of view to use raycasting (to make the weapon hitscan) than to dynamically create a load of bullets at runtime

Even if you use an object pool, all of the objects still have to be stored in memory

 

As such, you should be happy that DE is using hitscan for a fair few weapons, as it means that the game will run better on older machines :-)

[CheeseHasLeafs]

Has anyone noticed that within the cloud of flames from the Ignis there's a beam that's visually identical to the Flux Rifle's? I've seen it several times while trying to melee them (bad idea, I know). 

[Tsukinoki]

@CheeseHasLeafs

That is actually the *only* part of the 'flames' that can deal damage. Just like with the ignis. Sure you'll still light on fire if that beam doesnt hit you, but you wont suffer any damage at all as that is just a graphical effect.

The weapons look like they have cone based AOEs, but in actuallity they don't which makes the flamethrowers a re-skinned laser.

[neKroMancer]

I think the lack of actual benefit from wallrun/slide/side dodge/block is the problem.

While they look cool on the screen, thee movement don't bring any benefit to the table. AI still shoot you with great accuracy even when you perform thee moves during the gameplay.

In stead of turning AI's weapons into projectile, adding small defensive/offensive bonus during the acrobatic animation duration will be a better, less resource demanding way to make the game more skill-based.

[CubedOobleck]

Yeah I overall agree, hitscan needs to go away from both enemies and players (and puncture needs to work with non-hitscan weapons).

[Symbiont71]

You can't lead the change of direction but you can lead once you've started moving the other way; it's the same way a player sometime misses a few shots with their weapon when the enemy decides to move in another direction. You miss a few shots but you quickly reacquire your target.

 

Those few shots can be deadly if i'm getting shot at from everywhere and dodging them could give my shields the chance to reload a little. Otherwise, i wouldn't need to dodge.

 

I think the lack of actual benefit from wallrun/slide/side dodge/block is the problem.

While they look cool on the screen, thee movement don't bring any benefit to the table. AI still shoot you with great accuracy even when you perform thee moves during the gameplay.

In stead of turning AI's weapons into projectile, adding small defensive/offensive bonus during the acrobatic animation duration will be a better, less resource demanding way to make the game more skill-based.

 

This. I always thought this should be done. Getting a fair amount of damage reduction while dodging seems fair to me. 50-60%, even make a mod to upgrade that. 

 

+1.

I see it as the best solution - provided people don't just roll around all mission long..in that case, i don't know.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Symbiont71

[Frunzer]

The problem of hitscan weapons in games is over a decade old. The solution was pionered by the first halo (thats at least the first game i know that dealt with it like that). Solution is a shield, which recharges over time. The idea is, that having some damage dealt to the player is not that bad, because the shield will regenerate. Only if the player messes up really bad, i.e. the shield is depleted, he will start taking permanent damage to his healt. This exact system is implemented into warframe. So hitscan weapons (or weapons with really fast projectiles) are no problems for a skilled and not totally underleveled player.

[Azure_Kytia]

Or you know. Implement a degree of randomness to the Enemy's aim when wallrunning/doingninjastuff. If you were to implement a random XYZ manipulation to the Enemies when you're doing stuff, then the misses would occur more frequently, and thus, would give benefit to the actions. Even better, when you do consecutive ninja-moves at a time, it increases the randomness of their fire whilst you're doing ninjastuff.

 

By feeding their aim into something like

 

if(Player.InitiateNinjaAction){

    if(Player.InitiateWallrun)

        Variation += 0.5;

    if(Player.InitiateDodge)

        Variation += 0.25;

    if(Player.InitiateJump)

        Variation += 0.1;

    if(Player.InitiateSlide)

        Variation += 0.15;

    timer.sinceLastAction = 0;

}

 

if(timer.sinceLastAction >= limit && Variation >= 0.01)

    Variation -= Variation / 100;

 

 

vector3 fireDirection(Object Target, float Variation){

 

direction = new Vector3 (Target.position.x + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation),

    Target.position.y + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation), Target.position.z + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation));

 

return direction;

}

Edited August 23, 2013 by Azure_Kyte

[Tsukinoki]

@Azure_Kyte

That is probable the most balanced and least problematic way to go about dealing with this as well as making the parkour more useful. +1

[Ezard]

if(Player.InitiateNinjaAction){

    if(Player.InitiateWallrun)

        Variation += 0.5;

    if(Player.InitiateDodge)

        Variation += 0.25;

    if(Player.InitiateJump)

        Variation += 0.1;

    if(Player.InitiateSlide)

        Variation += 0.15;

    timer.sinceLastAction = 0;

}

 

if(timer.sinceLastAction >= limit)

    Variation -= Variation / 100;

 

 

vector3 fireDirection(Object Target, float Variation){

 

direction = new Vector3 (Target.position.x + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation),

    Target.position.y + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation), Target.position.z + Random.Range(Variation * -1, Variation));

 

return direction;

}

 

Something tells me you have experience using the Unity game engine? :-)

[OblivionNecroninja]

Wait, I thought everything in Warframe has a projectile velocity (except the Beam Weapons, but come on)
I mean, the Lanka does, so it would make sense that everything else does too...
 

 

@JerichoFayne
Please explain your reasoning on why the energy weapons should be faster than bullets

Realism. Because, you know, lasers travel faster than bullets.

Edited August 22, 2013 by OblivionNecroninja

[JerichoFayne]

Grineer Seekers with flamethrowers? Wat. Scorch maybe?

 

Also you were within a flamethrower's range. Think about that for a bit.

 

I didn't take the time to read their name while I was running around, but they had the same NPC model as the seekers & were holding a flame thrower.  Any difference between the two is irrelevant to the point of the thread.

 

With regard to range, the point is that a jet of fluid doesn't instantaneously traverse the distance between 2 objects moving through space.  Think about THAT.

[JerichoFayne]

@JerichoFayne

Please explain your reasoning on why the energy weapons should be faster than bullets. 

 

Do you even physics?  Light travels faster than bullets.  I would have thought this would be common sense, but evidently I was mistaken.

[JerichoFayne]

You're presuming that the Grineer is aiming directly at you when he pulls the trigger - what's to say that he isn't leading his target (AKA aiming ahead of you so that you essentially run into his bullets)?

 

This is a fair & valid point.  I'm totally okay with the AI leading their targets with a shot & hitting me while on the move.  I'm not suggesting that rolling & dodging suddenly make you invulnerable.  I'm simply saying that it would be nice for the game mechanics we've been given to actually do something other than look cool.