Will bullets be real objects????

Hello all,

As per the interview at gamespy, it was mentioned about bullets hitting boxes and possible eachother.

Was that an example, or has it been mentioned that the bullets will be real objects?

What I mean by this is..so far Max Payne is the only game where each bullet was modelled and created within the engine, so after a long distance, the bullets did slow down and fall.

Other fps games use a hitscan and hitseek model.

Hitscan weapons are the bullet guns....you fire, then in a straight line, the "bullets" just hit the other side. Hitseek are stuff like rockets where the rocket must actually hit a target to do anything.

In the hitscan method though, none of the bullets are actually modelled in the engine. THey are simulated.

Imagine a player and enemy (or 2 players in DM or CTF) with miniguns (a chaingun btw, is NOT the same as a minigun... a chaingun is any large machine gun with a chain feed of bullets...miniguns are gatling guns like the one in Predator) firing at each other...whereas most of the ammo would be going down the hall, deflected bullets would be bouncing off the walls and cielings.

I'm sure this doesn't happen often, but it is quite possible.

What do ya think?

Thanks.

Sanjay
ICQ: 3081429

Dunno. To me it seems a bit ridiculous to use modelled bullets as they'll finish their flight in less than one frame. You could use hitscan and perhaps just spawn a bouncing bullet on impact if necessary.

I think what they mean is that bullets have a virtual bounding box in memory, that they need to do the collisions with other objects in the world. But I'm sure they're not actually modelling bullets in the world, unless they've got some sort of slo-mo mode they use in cut-scenes etc.

Fredrik said:

Dunno. To me it seems a bit ridiculous to use modelled bullets as they'll finish their flight in less than one frame. You could use hitscan and perhaps just spawn a bouncing bullet on impact if necessary.

Not really. If you have the physics system already going on, it's useless to code hitscans. Your method just overcomplicates it.

Zaldron said:

Not really. If you have the physics system already going on, it's useless to code hitscans. Your method just overcomplicates it.

OK.............

Fredrik said:

OK.............

Really, even in Doom3, how big would a bullet model be? 100K or so, completely skinned? No big deal. I think it would be best to do bullets as individual projectiles.

Yeah I'm sure the bullet will have 3,000,000 polygons, dynamic curvature mapping, reflection & bump mapping, displacement mapping, a 32 Mpixel skin and a down-to-the atom definition in the physics engine...

I'm gonna have so much fun with that chaingun in DM. Couple that ROF with ricocheting bullets and you have the ultimate camper-destroyer.

Zaldron said:

Couple that ROF with ricocheting bullets and you have the ultimate camper-destroyer.

I think DOOM 3 shadows will make camping less of a retard/lamer playing style. If not camping, then at least cowardly hiding. Yeah, I wanna sit down in the shadow and suddenly jump up to scare the shit out of my opponent, mwahah :P

Lüt said:

Really, even in Doom3, how big would a bullet model be? 100K or so, completely skinned? No big deal. I think it would be best to do bullets as individual projectiles.

I dont think you even need skins for them. Like zaldron said, if you have it in there already it just complicates things to add hitscans. So you're just using the collision detection already in the engine, you dont need models for it because it wont be seen.

This is assuming you dont have bullets that drop out of the air and then sit on the floor afterwards, of course :)

Tell me, o wise fraggle, which method do you use in Sopwith? :)

No One Lives Forever used the hitseek model for all of its weapons. This became painfully obvious in multiplayer games that bugged out. The players could move and shoot, and the bullets made whistling noises and could damage anything that moved into them, but the bullets were frozen in one point. You could actually walk into a floating bullet and die, which would probably crash the server. :)

IMJack said:

No One Lives Forever used the hitseek model for all of its weapons. This became painfully obvious in multiplayer games that bugged out. The players could move and shoot, and the bullets made whistling noises and could damage anything that moved into them, but the bullets were frozen in one point. You could actually walk into a floating bullet and die, which would probably crash the server. :)

That would be a disadvantage, but DOOM 3 would probably not have that kind of bugs anyway because of Carmack's 1337 skillz... :P And if it had, there would be patches...

You wouldn't need to actually create a texture for the bullet unless you needed to see it propagate. You would only need to 'ray trace' (unless you were to model it with a finite cross sectional area and could shatter etc)it within the level confines with your physics engine for velocity/penetration/ricochet etc. You would have to take into account various bullet properties such as mass/hardness as well as local value of g or mars etc. It would get complex so it would have to be dumbed down with many approximations.

Still, it would be nice if it was included. I liked the way MP did it, though the bullets travelled at the speed of smell in order that bullet time could work at all. If its all over before it starts, id may not feel its worth the extra computation.