Hello,

I've noticed that a lot of good suggestions about shooting/bullets have been thrown about the forums but they are generally loose and not noticed. Here, I want to gather any and all suggestions about bullets and shooting and killing in one thread to be discussed.

1. Bullet Kill Chance - It was suggested by OzyTheSage. Rather than having a fixed value of 0.5 for the kill chance, perhaps an increasing value as more bullets hit within a certain time. For instance, the first bullet that hits a target will have 50% chance of killing it. If the target survives, the next bullet that hits it within maybe 5 seconds will have a 60% chance to kill. The hit bullet after that within 5 seconds of the last hit bullet will then have a 70% chance and so on until maybe 90% so that it doesn't ever become an instant kill. If the target does not take hits for more than 5 seconds after the last hit, the next bullet will have a kill chance of 50%. What this does is helps out a player that got the jump on another player without completely taking away the lucky shot (which happens IRL). The more accurate fire you can lay down, the higher a chance that the target will die.

2. Suppression - Suggested by many. The idea is to have the volume of bullets coming at you within a certain time affect the visual/audio feedback you get. Screen shaking/fading/doublevision have all been suggested. This addition will add more of a tactical use to the machine guns and will allow players to be suppressed and make advanced maneuvers possible.

3. Bullet Ricochet - Just a small little factor that makes the game a bit more realistic. At extremely obtuse angles, bullets bounce about. Making bullets ricochet off walls would create very slow and inaccurate but still dangerous (0.2 kill factor?) little projectiles.

4. MP5 Bullets - Simply put, the MP5 should not ever have tracers simply due to the nature of the gun. It would allow for more sneaking even on human players if they can not immediately tell where the incoming fire is coming from.

5. Bullet Penetration - Today's high powered rifle rounds can penetrate light cover such as thin sheets of metal, wood, plaster, and stuff like that. Adding these factors into gameplay would increase realism but I'm not sure how effective or useful it will be. Crates would perhaps only filter a certain percentage of bullets while the ones that make it through have decreased lethality. Later, if and when more props are added, bulet penetration could be a factor in the game.


Feel free to post any and all suggestions about bullets and shooting mechanics below.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

Those are all great ideas, it's good they have been compiled now.

About the tracers, I don't think that every bullet that leaves the barrel has to be a tracer round in the first place. I think a realistic depiction would be one every three bullets or one every five (for machineguns I suppose?). But syncing that could become an issue and it would interfere with the player's ability to determine where he/she can shoot.

I think there is an option in the visual options menu that allows you to decrease the # of tracers? you can also set it to none. Someone confirm?

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

There is.

The bullet trails aren't really meant to be tracers as such, they are just visually letting the players know where the bullets are flying. Try playing with 0% trails and you know what I mean.

It also helps to understand how well you yourself are shooting.

Other than that, 1 and 2 are something that could be experimented with later. I hardly experience 1 at all when playing single player, so I guess this is at least partially related to the off-sync nature of bullets in online, especially your own bullets when you play as client, as the shooting is predicted on the client side before it reaches the server, so the server and client ends up shooting with different random factors, making those particular bullets fly in different direction a little.

Effectively, you sometimes end up seeing you hit somebody with locally seen blood effect, but on the server you missed. I agree this can lead to "WTF I @#!% SHOT THIS GUY 1000 TIMES AND HE DOESN*T DIE!!!111" -moments. There are ways to keep them in sync despite the prediction, they just haven't been implemented yet as it has been good enough. Trying to fix the online bullets with the temporal kill probability increase would''t help at all. My question is, do you guys think the kill probability increase -feature is meant to fix stuff in online or single player?

For 2, a slight camera shake could work I think, it would make your aiming more random for a while.

About suppression, I was thinking that suppression be limited to only bullets fired from the machine guns and maybe the sniper. This will make the mg a squad support weapon and make it worth using in team battles. Slight screen shaking and perhaps automatically shooting at the worst possible accuracy even when at rest would work well.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

Chunks of concrete, spalling, and debris kicking off of nearby walls could also cause injury. I believe marines are trained to stay 3 or 4 feet away from walls because of this, but I'm note entirely sure, just something I heard of once and I can't remember where. Plus, with penetration, spalling from concrete walls and such can cause serious injury. I saw a video of a mock building set up with dummies inside, some wearing bulletproof vests. The outer wall was brick and the inner was plaster or plywood. Sustained M16 fire penetrated the brick and actually caused the bullets and brick to fragment, almost like a grenade going off in one direction. Pretty nasty.


When real tracers are implemented perhaps the trail helpers could be reduced, or make it so other players don't see them as well, while tracers are clearly visible to everybody. Maybe make it so you only see enemy 'bullet trails' if the bullets pass within a few meters to give an idea of where they came from while giving opportunities for stealthy flanking.

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

What if, instead of MP5 bullets having no tracers, the tracer was fainter and harder to see.

In fact, this could also be applied to other weapons, say Machine-guns have the brightest tracers, normal ARs and such have mid-brightness tracers, and MP5 tracers are faintest?



Another thing to add, is increasing the bullet spread (this would work well with suppression) if you walk and shoot at the same time or fire continuously you'll note that that there is a limit in how inaccurate your bullets get, and that the limit still allows for hitting targets somewhat reliably because of how low it is.

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The thing about walking and shooting is that even without pinpoint accuracy, a soldier knows generally where his weapon is pointed so shooting while walking isn't super inaccurate as commonly believed.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

I have fired firearms before, I know that. However, that statement more applies to full-auto fire than walking and firing. Though, to be honest - this is something that would be even more useful for modders. I've toyed around with weapons, and have ran into the same issue that harrified has, which is that maximum spread, which essentially makes certain weapons that we are making overpowered because of inaccuracy being their key balance point, but the inacuracy limit being a bit too low to make the weapon balanced. harrified, for example, had to lower those weapons' kill chance to make them in line with the rest.

My weapons I've made, essentially the LMG variant of both the G36 and AK47, are practically redundant because the accuracy ceiling simply does not allow for too much variation in the performance of the firearms, and the new weapons might as well be the old ones but with larger magazines (which - while logically they ARE that, this was not the intended performance).

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If I post in this color I am posting as a moderator.

Regarding the tracers, I think we should start trying to avoid confusion by distinguishing actual tracers from the currently implemented bullet trails. Making machineguns have somewhat visible bullets trails with every few rounds being a bright colored tracer round would look good IMO, giving the impression of a large volume of fire while giving an authentic effect as well.

Soldiers can be trained to walk with their weapon raised in such a way that they can hit targets with decent accuracy in CQB situations if they need to. Running on the other hand... =p
Naturally, standing still is always going to be more accurate since you're firing from a more stable platform, the more you move around the less stable it will be, thus the harder it is to put bullets where you want them to go.
I'm pretty sure this is already implemented though? I could be wrong, been a while since I played =p

Are you saying that there's a hard coded limit to how high the inaccuracy gets? I.E. how large the crosshairs become? I suppose I can see why that is, it would look silly to have bullets flying out 90 degrees from the muzzle of your gun. Instead perhaps make it so that as the threshold is exceeded simply make the bullets fly up a little higher above where you're intending to aim, giving the impression the recoil is pushing the weapon skyward as seen in some FPS's.

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.