Why Don't FPS Games Use This Aiming Mechanic?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 มิ.ย. 2024
- Games played in video: Apex Legends, Insurgency Sandstorm
2nd Channel: / garbajgaming
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Insurgency Sandstorm: www.focus-entmt.com/en
0:00 The Problem
0:47 The Solution? - เกม
If you have a bush in game, the crosshair/weapon placement isn't going to change because the bush isn't solid
However, if someone were to hide in that bush, and you didn't see them, your crosshair would still change because there is an object the crosshair is detecting, effectively giving away the element of surprise
I didn't even think about this. Makes a lot of sense
Nice insight, but this can be resolved and turned in game mechanic. Sorta of a stealth mechanic.
war thunder moment
Big Brain
Instead of fixing this, you can make people invisible in bushes and just using it as a feature
I would think it's to do with map design. If the jump is too far, the gun will shake on screen. If you have bars like a jail map it's gonna go wild. But that's just a theory, a game theory
But then how do you explain games like Insurgency where the gun actually interacts with the world
@@someweeb3650 Idk how that's relevant. He's referring to how the gun would shake when passing your cursor over a surface with many gaps in it
I personally think that shpuldnt be hard to fix though, for example just make guns not interact with the bars since its unlikely ypull ever want to aim specifically at the bars
@@someweeb3650 the angle of the gun doesn’t change in insurgency thus this doesn’t apply. The problem still arises in insurgency of the bullet coming off center if you hip fire at a close range with a weapon
@@benpolt2344 So hours of work over nothing?
This system as actually used in older games. Look at Goldeneye and Timesplitters, where the weapon moves to adjust the aim of the bullet. It makes shooting really hard without significant magnetism of the aiming. I actually remade this style of shooting for my Degree and it was universally less liked that modern shooter mechanics. I think part of that is because people are so used to it and the auto aim style of weapon handling has a noticeable delay when adjusting which can cause shots to miss through no fault of the player.
Thing is with Goldeneye that’s utilized to lock onto nearby enemies, not so much adjusting the weapon to always shoot whatever’s in the center of the screen
I loved playing timesplitters on the PlayStation 2 I wish they would make another one for the ps4/ps5
It's also in part that analog controls always have needed aim assist, whereas mouse aim has been universally superior, in Insurgency I can actually hit targets in hipfire at range with enough practice, so with heavy guns where ADS is horribly slow, you can swing the gun around quicker and get a faster but less precise shot
As someone who's used raycasted crosshairs (crosshair that is casted laser-line from the barrel of the gun) in both garry's mod and vr, i vastly prefer this, as it especially aids with determining depth and distance to target... and i can say there is no delay in such an action unless your raycast system is coded like garbage. There should be no delay in using a raycast to orient your held firearm either. You don't need weird magnetic gun aiming, although in context like halo having magnetic guns would be a lot less silly than curving bullets.
@@V3RTIGO222 i play the original source insurgency a lot, and really it depends on the gun, how you set it up, and the range, as issues like recoil make it very difficult to land more than one shot with any necessary tightness/expediency on most guns (think 35 angry bots coming at you and you have to deal with many of them in rapid succession). laser dots help a lot... but insurgency is different because it uses a float zone for it's non-sighted aiming.
ps: you don't need to deal with the binary of non-sighted look speed and sighted look speed if you set up mouse acceleration correctly. my sighted look speed is usually maxed.
Team Fortress 2 uses this mechanic for the Soldier's rocket launcher.
Problems occur if a moveable object crosses your sight while you shoot at something in the distance. The twitching makes you shoot at where that intercepting target was, but the shot lands off-center in the distance because the target moved away before the projectile hit it. This would however not be an issue with hitscan weapons.
Does TF2 do that?!
This mechanic would also mess with you if you were working at a player farther, and a player cuts right as you shoot. Hitscan weapons would miss anyways, but a projectile would have its aim screwed with
Could also have a case where aiming at the edge the gun could be shifted either way, and one of those is what the player intends and the other isn’t. Then you either add an inherent amount of aim assist, or have some jank. If the edge is between two enemy players, then it’ll be jank no matter what
@@KozelPraiseGOELRO I believe the youtuber Shounic has a video on this
Hitscan weapons also wouldnt care where the bullet originates because the bullet doesnt exist for those type of guns.
@@suntzu9076 Thanks
Insurgency, Red Orchestra etc. have "free aim" where the gun can be moved around the screen in a small zone before the character turns, and it's specifically meant to make it difficult for players to shoot dead center on the screen so as to encourage players to hip fire less, aim down sights more, and generally move slower and more deliberately.
I like how you can increase the ‘aiming deadzone’ like what you just described in ArmA 2 and 3, it somehow makes it feel more immersive when the gun isn’t just seemingly plastered in the same spot at all times
Yeah insurgency is a tactical shooter after all
I honestly hate this feature solely because no other game does it, and so it completely ruins your muscle memory for aiming and flicking in close quarters. I have to exclusively play Insurgency: Sandstorm for like a week before I’m returned and adjusted, and my aim is accurate again.
I’d much prefer it not be the case, i really don’t see how it would change the play style of players. In fact, I don’t see how it achieves anything other than giving potentially good players bad aim.
@@ttanfield5616 If you want to play CoD, play CoD. Insurgency Sandstorm is a realistic, tactical shooter that you need to take slowly. Don't rush in. Use the environment and your tools to your advantage. Hell, wallbang people even. You need to be slow and cautious in Insurgency.
Actualy its not to deter shooting from the hip, because in those games you are NEVER shooting from the hip, you are shooting from the shoulder. If you pay attention to your accuracy when shooting unsighted, its not BAD, its actually pretty good. It actually makes shooting without sights EASIER in CQC type environments in those games once you actually get used to it.
As people have already said here, problems start to occur when you want to hit a point in space that isn't a surface, like when leading shots.
Technically wouldn't matter much as the further away the destination is, the straighter the trajectory.
@@chonkusdonkus TF2 rocket launcher. You have to lead shots about every shot.
@@chonkusdonkus I can lead you to systematically missing your target at a certain range. Most games no the market are close quarters.
I think the problem with all of these “solutions” is that they will cause inconsistent and occasionally glitchy aim rather than a reliably “off” aim that humans can account for. In other words, more opportunity for bullshit. OP is right that this would be an issue in all but the most casual games, and for those, you’d likely want to use screen-center aiming anyway just to avoid the issues with shooting around corners.
i dont know about that, your bullet is still going towards the crosshair so it should be pretty easy to lead shots despite that, or you can remove the crosshair altogether and make the game based around ADS
I've seen games with the mechanic you described. As stated, it gives away the element of surprise in camouflage situations. I mainly dabble in realistic shooters, and the reason many bullets travel of center when hip firing, is to penalize the player for not taking time to aim down the sights. That accuracy is greatly increased when the player aims correctly, which results in the bullet going much closer to the center of the screen.
It makes it hard to track targets with non-hitscan projectiles because you have to shoot where your target will be, not where they are, leaving the depth detection without a target. And it makes your bullets spray wildly back and forth as your curser sweeps on and off targets while tracking
This would be a huge problem as soon as you have moving targets, especially with projectile weapons such as the one in your video. The only way to "truly" aim at someone would be to point directly at them, however leading your shots would cause you to actually aim behind the moving target.
how exactly? if someone was flying by and you aim in front of them into the skybox, how would that make you aim behind them? leading shots isnt about what you see, its a math problem of how fast the projectile moves, the speed of the target, distance to the target, and how far ahead of the target you need to aim, as long as there are no objects in front of the target shouldnt you be able to lead targets with this style of aiming? the only problems i could see this causing is if the FOV is too small or large that is may interfere with angles caused by the distance to target
(edit: after asking a friend who is more educated than me on this, traditional target leading WOULD be near impossible unless your crosshair was set to the distance of the target, as the gun isnt in the center of the screen and is off to the right and aiming at the center, causing the line from barrel to target to be a left slanted line and not a straight one ((its like a right angle triangle with the slant to the right)) and because of that, you would need to lead the target by where the barrel is pointing, not the crosshair, which is possible for sure but a pain and much harder to do on the ground because of terrain and structures in the background causing the gun to change angles)
@@nickz3252 It would mess with than angle of the shot making it really difficult to intuitively lead shots. This just is a subset of a much deeper issue in that handling a firearm is a lot more complex then just point and shoot.
@@Hurricayne92 that is half right.
Guns irl really are just "point and shoot" in most cases. The ability to propel a projectile to lethal speeds at the pull of a trigger is all you really need. But to be "efficient" and "a good shot" and to "hit things" you need to factor in more things. Or as you said "being more complex" once you have more niche situations than simply "i want to hurt that person and to do that ill shoot at them"
Video games have some of the most niche and unique representations of guns and warfare. So it would make sense that shooting guns in a game has more factors than an IRL soldier. Especially bringing in factors like how we see the game, latency, angle of fire, animation v. calculation, etc, etc.
I think gaming in a technical and scientific sense (i.e. how we interact with media) is in its infancy and that in a few years we might discover MAJOR things in the way games are coded, or how things like this video where people experiment and discover new methods of design. Maybe even things like how we can use the quirks in our brains to enhance gameplay. Like when you use optical illusions to see moving pictures or make your vision "fish eye" by looking at pattern
As a mwo player, leading shots can be such a pain, especially depending on your loadout.
And when shooting weapons with a wide gap between your mech's arms, it is normally impossible to hit with both while leading.
Forever r.i.p. the rifleman iic
Still an amazing game though.
You need to lead the target if the projectile flies at a finite speed and takes some time to reach the target.
This is used in _some_ games but in my experience they are very rare.
Usually it's used with bazookas and RPGs, but with those precise aiming is very secondary.
I think it starts becoming a problem when you have the crosshairs centered, when the model of the gun makes it look like it's coming from an off angle that doesn't look appealing, when you just want more of the model of the gun to be shown without messing with the fov viewmodel, or when you want to make sure that the worldmodel lines up with the viewmodel as much as possible, like in PUBG.
I think it might be better if this is combined with moving the crosshair lower on the screen, like in halo. Only thinking this cuz garbaj made a vid about it recently.
This is a non-issue.
If the bush is close enough to change the crosshair it's close enough to be see through.
Especially in a fast paced closed quarters game like his.
@@jaggns5774 wrong comment bruv
Jesus loves you alot trust in His death 4 salvation and be saved from eternal hell
Multiple problems: First up in non hit scan games you'll have to lead your shot, meaning you're not pointing at the player you're wanting to hit, but rather whatever will be behind them from your perspective in a moment. If it's really far away, you'll end up with a noticeable difference between where you wanted the shot to go, and where the game thinks you wanted it to go. Next there are multiple transparent or simply not-solid-enough-for-bullets surfaces, where you're going to aim at that material (window, bush, leaves, wooden plank) but want to hit what's behind it. Especially when trying to break a window to hit whoever is out there way in the distance, would at the very least put your first shot way off. It would also just plain look odd in some situations. Imagine trying to aim at a bird for instance, seeing the character make a very noticeable adjustment for the 2 or 3 frames you actually manage to have the cross hair on the bird wouldn't seem right imo. Generally I'd say the "bullet originates from the center of your screen" has more upsides than the more realistic alternatives. In my opinion it really doesn't need to change, because it works well and gives the player the expected results when they play.
I see it as a skill issue, which is a W coz then you'd need actual skill to lead your shots and will increase the skill gap
Sorry, but these are not really valid arguments.
-The shot leading argument doesn't really say anything, nor what's the additional problem with it.
-Transparent surfaces would be ignored from the weapon aim centering collision checks.
But yeah, shooting from the center of the screen is just simpler, more intuitive and also: consistent. These are features most games want.
@@FilippoTarpini I'm sorry if you can't visualize the problem in your head, but there's definitely a disparity between where you will want the shot to go and where the shot will go in the lead your shot scenario. The transparent surfaces problem isn't as trivial as you make it seem either, as with surfaces to consider ranging from see through surfaces like glass, over vision blocking surfaces like leaves and tall grass all the way to mostly solid surfaces like wooden planks, metal sheets or other thin walls there's not exactly a clear line when the surface should be ignored.
@@UberDragon if a weapon is not hitscan, you need to lead your shots whether the projectiles actually come from the weapon or the center of the screen, there is no relevant difference in how that works.
An regarding transparent surfaces, yes, it's simple: anything that doesn't block projectiles (lets them pass through) and is at least partially transparent is ignored for the aim checks (Glass: ignored, Bush: ignored, Thin plank: not ignored).
@@FilippoTarpini Again I'm really sorry if you can't see the issue here, so I'll try to explain it better. If you're trying to shoot at a person that is 10 meters away from you with a hit scan weapon, you will point at that person and the code will properly align your weapon to make sure that your line of sight and the bullets trajectory meet at a distance on 10 meters and hit the target, whether they move or not. If however there isn't a hit-scan method in place, but rather a more realistic simulation of the bullet leaving the muzzle of the gun at great speed, you as the player will know that in order to hit that running person you're going to have to aim at where your target will be, rather than where it is right now. The problem now is that just aiming one pixel to the left or right of that person could mean you're not longer pointing at a spot in 3d space that is 10 meters away, but maybe lets say 350 meters. The system that points your gun for you will now have your line of sight and the bullets trajectory meet at a distance of 350 meters, rather than the 10 meters where your actual intended target is. From your perspective both points in 3d space are on the same exact pixel, but from your guns perspective, they're definitely different enough that there is a discrepancy that could make you miss a shot that you should have hit. The farther away your intended target is, the smaller this discrepancy will become, and the less of an issue it will be but it will never be 0. As for your "simple" solution to the shoot-through stuff: I can think of many examples on how this would cause me to miss my target many times. For instance I could be standing right in front of a vertical wooden plank and know that an enemy is directly across on the opposite side. Without seeing them I look straight at the plank and pull the trigger, but unfortunately my bullets now go fly diagonally up and to the left (right through that point where my line of sight and the bullet trajectory would need to meet to hit the surface of the plank) and then further up into the air instead of mostly fowards, where I wanted to hit the enemy. I hope I did a better job explaining it this time. If it's still unclear I can try my best to explain any questions you might still have about why this is an issue.
If you have an enemy on a open field and a projectile weapon, this mechanic would have you shoot at two different places based on whether or not your crosshair is on the enemy while shooting at the enemy. That makes it especially hard to lead targets and would just make the weapon feel very inconsistent. I'd much rather have a consistent weapon, even if that means it won't be realistic.
In first person games, this would barely ever make any difference. In third person, it can make a difference if the enemy is fairly close, but usually it actually increases your accuracy, "accidentally" (assuming the weapon is not too shifted from the center of the screen, and that it's at the bottom right).
This is because if your reticle is on the enemy, you will hit. If it's slightly to the right of it, you could miss just the same. And if it's slightly to the left, then you are more likely to hit, as the enemy will be in the way between your weapon and the projectile target location.
@@FilippoTarpini it makes a huge difference if your game values accuracy. And it would be frustrating to see a rocket miss just because the gun moved an 15 degrees outside of your control.
I see 2 possible problems with this approach.
1. "Shaky" gun on a map with a lot of small details on a different distances.
2. The period of time while gun changes it position. It would make shooting from the cover less accurate in the first moment.
2nd one seems like a feature tbh. Could help combat peakers advantage too
@@drumman22 Day who knows which of telling people that it's written "peek", not "peak"
1. Solved with delay and smoothing. These are not problems
How about leading a distant moving target, with an even more distant object behind where they will be?
Yep, these would be huge problems. If the target is a bit further away, you're strafing and there's some bushes, trees, branches, fences etc braking the line of sight, your aim tracking would not be steady at all. Not to mention situations when you're going to shoot through a wall or other penetrable object, you wouldn't be shooting straight through it at all.
One problem I can see with that aiming system is if there's anything between the player and the target. The auto aim could align with the object in the middle meaning the bullets will have crossed the crosshair by the time it reaches the intended target.
Aside from that, it seems like it would be fairly limited benefit. In most games, guns aren't accurate enough for this to matter unless you're aiming down sights, where the parallax would be pretty much zero anyway. Games with pinpoint accurate hipfire where it might be worth implementing something like this usually aren't trying to be realistic enough for it to matter.
That's not how that would work, it shoots where you're looking, not the closest thing near you. If there was something in-between then that would be your target because that's what you're aiming at.
@@thegamingcow5072 ok see it this way, 3m infront of you is a bush, 3m behind this bush is a person you want to shoot. IF the system detects the bush, you would have to shoot offcenter to hit the person...then say, ok, let the system ignore the bush (since its not a solid object)...now there is a person hiding in the bush and you imidiatly can tell because the weapon changes angle... i think this system just causes more problems, then it solves
Ye if U were shooting an enemy far behind a window then the gun would aim at the window
But maybe u can fix that by making it so the gun only adjusts to aim at what the player is looking at in the middle of the screen if it’s an enemy (or explosive barrel or whatever), and the gun ignores everything else
@@georgwarhead2801 You could fix that by making it so the gun doesn’t adjust to shoot at things hidden inside objects that can be shot through, so when u aim at a bush it never adjusts even if there’s something inside it, that might still have problems though
@@Cheesepuff8 but the problem with all of that is, it causes just more problems that it solves....if the bullet exits your weapon ( instead of the center of your screen) this means the game is focused on realism, so the weapon is zeroedat a certan distance and doesnt ajust depending on the crosshair...if the game doesnt relay on realism, then it doesnt matter from where the bullet comes...games are already complicated and buggy enough, this would just add more problems
In my limited experience playing fps's, it's my understanding that there is an offset between what the player sees and what other players see the player doing. Many games have the first person body and gun rendered exclusively to the player and use separate body sprites to represent you to other players, (games like DayZ use persistent player models though), so the gun and your body angle is not always aligned between what you see yourself doing and what others see you doing, so this solution would be difficult to implement.
The reason this is implemented in the first place is so that the player view can be consistent regardless of how the animations from a third person perspective look. It's easy to forget that you're not looking out through the eyes of your character a lot of the time, but rather a point near the head that makes the first person perspective look good, forcing the developers to place the gun in the FP view that would look wonky in third person. Just look at Cyberpunk - they failed miserably at taking into account how the player's model will look in first person, something glaringly obvious when looking at the player's shadow in-game.
(and DayZ inherits it as a vestige from ArmA)
I swear there must've been one or two games I've played that have this, or at very least had the gun able to collide with surfaces, meaning the gun's position would adjust to try to keep aiming at the crosshair even though there's, say, a tree up against your arm.
The Metroid Prime Trilogy on the Wii uses this mechanic.
I noticed it recently when I was playing it on dolphin emulator using the primehack mod.
It centres the crosshair at all times so it's comfortable to aim with a mouse.
Unlike having the crosshair move around the screen with a traditional wii remote.
As a result, Samus' weapon move's slightly depending on how close an object being aimed at is.
that's very interesting, and I guess it makes sense especially for that kind of game. I never noticed it myself, but I played with the IR pointer so it probably just blended in with the way the arm cannon moves to follow the cross-hair when it travels within its dead-zone. I wonder if other games that use the wii IR pointer act similarly, such as The Conduit 2 or even the CoD games on wii
@@DallinBackstrom Red Steel also does it too. So I'm willing to bet most Wii shooters do. That's pretty awesome to think about
@@DavidNwokoye That actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. They had to develop a system for pointing the gun around the screen anyway, might as well incorporate distance to the target you're pointing at. You've also got a lot more justification for aim assist to alleviate some other issues as well than you would have on something like a competitive MP shooter on PC.
@@AdmiralTails Yeah, Prime required aim assist as it did not have a second analog stick available for aiming. This is the reason for "shoulder locking" as I've heard it called since "Z Targeting" is not applicable to the Gamecube controller, even though it has a Z "trigger".
Edit: not "available for aiming" I'm sure they tried using the C stick, but it wasn't comfortable.
to be fair, most, if not all Wii fps games did that.
I used to play COD 3 on the Wii, and to a certain point the gun was pretty much pointed at whatever you aimed at. although it did have a point when it went from slight gun tilt to full camera movement, but that's most likely up to the controls
I believe TF2 has a soft version of this aiming mechanic for its rockets, where it alters your aim to the object you're aiming at as long as the target isn't too close, or too far away, at which point you instead just shoot straight.
yup you are right
fuckin spaghetti code
TF2 also makes Heavy's minigun shoot from Heavy's face
And the Needles in the Medic's Syringe Guns are different between your POV and the enemy's POV
Not excluding the Rockets actually firing from where the rocket launcher is
@@regalblade8171 A bunch of the TF2's {everything} has some weirdness associated with it. Like stairs you can't fire the pompson while standing on, or rockets that originate from the soldier's crotch, or being able to headshot the scout six inches above his actual head, or...
shounic's done a bunch of videos about it.
@@draco18s Pomson/Dragon Fury/Bison/Wrap assassin projectiles vanishing was fixed a few years ago
@@regalblade8171 It may have been fixed, but the fact that it happened at all is what's weird.
I’ve made a variant of this mechanic in my game: instead of moving the entire gun I just angle the bullet towards whatever the camera is pointing at. I’ve found that typically the change is minor at best so any angled movement of the bullet doesn’t look out of place
Hi, where can I see a preview of this?
He was referring to that before he talked about the gun thing.
This video was short and right to the point while asking what I've been asking for years, I love you
FPS dev hobbyist here! I've been doing something similar for a couple years now, but I rotate the bullet angle instead of the gun. I aim at the center of the screen and have the code do some adjustments to the bullet angle depending on distance. You do run into those close geometry issues every so often, but I work on fast paced movement shooters, so it's not something that sticks out that much unless you really go looking for it.
Thats what he said at 0:33
That's what I do too, unless it's hitscan.
@@chonkusdonkus Yep, I'm reinforcing that in my practice, it works fine for the majority of cases.
What movement shooters? Theres any?
How about instead of having 2 view points, let's step up the skill level with 3 view points.
1 will be when you gun is of center, you can shoot but it won't be very effective.
2 will be when you're firing the gun with hip fire accuracy, you hold a nearby button like you do with shift for sprint to activate hip fire accuracy, your character will put their gun on their hip to hold the gun steady and will follow the crosshairs like in the video.
3 will be ADS, it's like hip fire but your view gets better and aim better while 2 will be the opposite but it's much faster to balance it out, 1 IDK what you would call it.
Okay massive point I'd like to make about Sandstorm. What you said isn't perfectly accurate. Insurgency essentially has an invisible free-floating crosshair that tracks with the animation and angle of the gun to a minimal degree around a cone. It's essentially the same system used in Arma 2 but with an invisible crosshair. You can make a visible crosshair by equipping the laser sight attachment and see it in action yourself.
I think they should use a combination of both. Always make the bullet go to the center of the screen, and use some interpolation on the gun model to compensate for extreme changes. After like 20 meters you would barely notice it, just for up close it would be a pretty cool feature so they could cap it at a certain distance.
The problems most people are mentioning like inaccuracies and such are kind of nitpicky as this is way better than the bullet flying off center and if you want to be accurate then just ADS lol.
Maybe with how you currently implemented it it could be a bit problematic for accuracy when hip firing certain guns in combination with bullet travel when aiming at someone. If your target is running across your screen you would try to aim a bit ahead of them, making you point at the far away thing in the background instead of aiming a few decimeters in front of them. Then when aiming directly at them the bullet would go to their position but won't hit them because they are moving.
I think it wouldn't be too bad to implement it in a game as a visual trick with some interpolation, but I can see why developers are opting to not go for that route to reduce complexity.
This was an absolutely amazing video. No bullshit solid testing and a solid ask. Like subscribed
I think the original Half-Life incorporates a similar mechanic when you go in third person
This is how I usually set up my third person weapons, works well enough for that.
what???? the original HL has a third person mode??
@@Ruinemacil yeah, using the console command “thirdperson”, and you can go back to first person with the “firstperson” command
Same for older 3rd person games like CnC Renegade.
Pretty sure the third person model is just a somewhat gordon shaped mass of about 9 black polygons
I think one of the more interesting compromises I've seen is Arma's adaptive crosshair system. Instead of altering the weapon or projectile angle, it just moves the crosshair to wherever the weapon is pointing, more like a laser aiming device than a static point on screen. This way you can tell when close terrain is blocking your muzzle, and there's no weird offset either.
This is the common solution and i think this is also the best solution. Adjusting the weapon itself is unrealistic because noone with a real gun does that
Command & Conquer Renegade did something like this. There was a crosshair in the center of the screen and a dot that showed where the gun was actually pointed. Those two lined up most of the time. It was just when aiming around/over objects that the dot and crosshair didn't line up.
Arma handles it very well, some of the earlier devs from operation flashpoint and arma 2 had some intense development skills
makes me sad they got rid of it in arma 3 id die for the arma 2 crosshair to be in it
@@Perfektionist isn't "adjusting the weapon towards where you wanna shoot" the definition of aiming, real life or otherwise?
well i can think of a couple reasons, though i am not sure if either of them is valid
first one would be that developers of realistic games want them to be... realistic or that they want zeroing distance to be something the player keeps in mind
(to quickly explain zeroing distance, an example would be setting your zeroing distance to 100m -> if a target is 100m away, the bullet will hit it where the crosshair is pointing, not below or above)
the second reason would be that if you're trying to shoot an opponent farther away, you would probably have to account for bullet travel time and shoot ahead of your opponent, unless the guns are hitscan (so lazers detecting for player collisions instead of actual projectiles). this would mess up the automatic zeroing system and lock onto whatever is behind your opponent
*as a side note, if the game is realistic to have the bullet come out of the barrel of the gun instead of the player camera, its probably not using hitscan
love your vids man short and good
Hey Garbaj! Thank you for making these videos! Really enjoying the insights in game design and the challenges that devs have to overcome when making games.
you're welcome, thanks for watching the videos!
The main issues of a "Reactive Pointing" are basically 2:
-Its a tricky to handle where the gun should look at: take for example vegetation or other kid of objects that obstruct vision but not bullets
-They players will probably wouldnt like this kind of behaviour where an external factor constantly tweak where their weapon is pointed at
well, it's always pointed at the center, right? so that isn't really "changing" where it's pointed at. just aim with your crosshair
@@TheAntiGravityMaster it always aim to the center but the depht can be different depending on the enviroment
If you would make the wepon long enough so it's end wouldnt be visible on screen, would it be possible mask the wepon movement as a random idle animation to solve the second problem? Or better yet, make the Fun stationary and change only where the bullet is comming from. If you line it up well so the bullet goes through the barrel of the gun, would it be so bad?
That last one is a non-issue because the gun will never not point at the player's target. This isn't a VR game; you aim with your mouse and your crosshair, not the barrel of your gun.
i have to disagree with you here. you can adjust an objects layer mask, which basically makes it so you wont collide with a bush with your character controller, but it will be solid for your ray checks to see where to point the gun
Always interesting content! 🤙
This video sat in my watch later for 4 months and I wish I'd watched it sooner, *genius*!
The close range thing is easily resolved since a classic problem of FPSs was the gun appearing smaller than the door handle you're crouched in front of. Newer games often raise the gun at close range as though you're pressed up against it, and thus can't even fire.
"Aiming" how it is now feels more like looking.
The aiming you way you showed with the red wall actually looks like you're actively aiming your weapon. I like It a lot!
Couple of thoughts:
1. When you hold a gun and don’t aim down sight, you actually won’t know exactly where the gun is firing and it probably won’t be dead-center exactly where you are looking, but slightly lower or higher. Ultimately this could be used to reinforce the mechanic that you should ADS for a more accurate shot and you could set this point to a random area on the screen around the center.
2. If you add weapon sway to the gun, that center point needs to move anyway to follow the weapons natural movement.
3. It would look better if the aiming point took time to re-adjust to targets at different distances. If slow enough, this would also fix the “player in bush snap effect” noted by others.
1. Insurgency Sandstorm already does it that way, but if you wanted you could always offset the muzzle a bit upwards for ADS.
2. If you apply the sway first (offsetting position and not rotation) and then adjust where it's pointing, it works fine. Otherwise, you can freely roll the gun clockwise or counterclockwise and ignore that axis when adjusting the aim.
I can see a bullet hitting a wall if your gun just happens to be on max right position and you're holding the crosshair 1 pixel to the left of the wall, but it doesn't seem like much of an issue.
3. You have to do this, or the gun goes haywire. It needs a sort of "speed limit" to keep it from jumping, especially if the limits of where the gun can move on the screen are large.
Arma does that too, if you play with crosshair ofc kek
3. Would you look at that, deus ex made in 2000 did just that 22 years ago
@@r2d2fromstartrek Bloodlines to.
I tend to assume the fps "camera" is supposed to be one or both of the character's eyes. This is basically explicit in Tom Clancy's Advanced Warfighter (the fps one), because your viewpoint is an eyepiece he's wearing. That being the case, you absolutely ARE NOT hip-firing most guns when you're not ADSing, if the models are correct, you're holding them at shoulder level. Yes this is less precise, but with training it can be pretty damn precise.
Very nice and interesting video. Keep it up :)
Saved for my future games 😄👌
I think it's because it would mess up compensating for projectiles. If the gun is hitscan, sure, it makes no difference, but most games that make bullets originate from the gun also make them actual projectiles, so you have to lead them and compensate for bullet drop.
Except if you're having to lead a target, it shouldn't matter that much because geometry past or next to a target shouldn't affect the bullet's trajectory in a meaningful way. In close, it should be point and shoot. Out far, the aim is already moving towards infinity, so slight variance of terrain should have a negligable effect. You could also code it that if it's a far enough range, the gun no longer changes its position.
@@AliceDerg or you could drop all that code out the window and just adjust your hipfire to compensate.
@@The-lr4zo Not arguing for the style of aiming the video suggests, just commenting on what leading would be like.
Also sweeping across geometry and shooting would lead to an adjustment time if you interpolate the guns aim angle, which is something the player is already doing when moving the crosshair.
Having the gun have to spend a quarter of a second animating from aiming at something close to you to something far away may mean that a bullet or two misses which could be annoying for gameplay.
Cause in the shooters in question, you have the ability to ads. If the target is far enough away to force you to lead your target, why tf are you hipfiring?!
If the bullet has a travel time, you sometimes need to anticipate your target's movements. Having this system would make this very wonky because the game would try to aim towards the wall your cursor is pointing out, throwing the bullet at an angle which makes it harder, and in some extreme cases impossible, to hit your target depending on their movement and the speed of the bullet.
To make a more realistic mechanic you'd almost need a more robust way to aim than just with a mouse. Wearing VR goggles you could easily have a gun controller that took into account the angle you were holding the gun at by analyzing where the front and back of the gun is. I haven't kept up on cutting edge gaming mice for a few years. My mouse basically moves in 2D across the mouse pad. The orientation of the mouse, aside from the slight movement of where the laser is pointing, is pretty negligible. It wouldn't be hard though to design a mouse that had two lasers that detected the rotation of the mouse.
Edit- it does look like there are some rotational mice on the market, although they use moving parts rather than two measure points.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_mouse#:~:text=The%20Orbita%20mouse%20is%20the,which%20plagued%20earlier%20rotating%20mechanisms.
@@nacoran this is the best answer
If a bullet has travel time and you aren't aiming down sights, isn't the inaccuracy going to be a bigger issue at that range? Either they are close enough for travel time to not matter, or they are far enough where you would need to aim in order to be accurate, making the gun centered on the screen again and not utilizing this mechanic...
So esentially this system would fit well in games like valorant and csgo, but not apex or something?
a lot of shooter games which dont use this system has no projectile weapons. the most famous being CSGO
the gun model moving to realign with the crosshair reminds me so much of the old pre-halo FPS games where your gun would lock on to an enemy and the model would reflect that or where you could unlock your crosshairs and start moving it around the screen with your gun pointing straight at it all the while
I actually did this in my game. It takes quite a bit of work to polish, but it looks OK in the end. It's mostly a cosmetic effect and I use an animation curve to smoothly enable/disable this as you play different animations, since I don't want the gun to aim while reloading for example.
I was able to use the transform of the barrel as the thing that aims and offset the hand transform such that the barrel points at what you aim. There are things to fix like if you walk super close to a wall, suddenly the gun aims in your face, but you can just make the trace distance from the eyes to the crosshair have a minimum distance so the gun can't aim backwards into you.
I'm actually thinking about changing this though so the aim distance is super far away so to help the gun procedurally point forward correctly rather than going exactly where your crosshair points. It gets weird if you have moving objects and they keep moving back and forth across your crosshair, and your gun just randomly keeps moving. It feels unnatural because a person wouldn't keep moving their hand to aim at some moving platform in front of them and then moving back to aiming far away when it's not in front of their nose. It also can be weird if some really tiny object is in front of you suddenly and the character decides to move their arms just to aim at some random solid tiny peice of geometry when it's more natural to be aiming at the background.
Also aim was never an issue since this entire thing is purely cosmetic in my game and I still force bullets to go where you're aiming as if it's coming from your eyes.
I would be even more realistic, because you as the character will point a gun towards a target, instead of holding it still
As far as I understand in Insurgency you have to do it yourself.
Yeah you have to point the gun at the target, not at the center of your vision. It's quite obvious that moving the gun and fov together will never be 100% realistic.
@@unarmed_civilian I've seen games do that and it's actually a good solution.
@@unarmed_civilian That's the better solution, if the game has a crosshair.
Also, IRL if you're holding a rifle, you just move like 5cm with your eye when you ADS vs shouldering. It's only a problem IRL when you've got an obstruction near the barrel anyways.
@@unarmed_civilian moving the crosshair to where the gun is aiming isn't a bad idea at first thought and it's what you're sort of forced to do when building a VR shooter.
It works ok in that context because your point of aim is never attached to the camera but in a normal FPS you'd be faced with a constantly shifting crosshair.
The tarkov system is pretty much the best compromise for me. Bullet travel from muzzle to screen centre at a defined distance is consistent and can be compensated for by skill
I usually watch your videos when I'm on lunch, so now, when I hear your voice, I think of my sandwich. Anyway, have a nice day
What the fuck is this commeny
@Tactical Kitten thank you very much
Hi! Profesional game dev here!
To answer your question in a quick way. The player most often shoots in a direction and not at a point. So moving where the gun is aiming based on where a raycast from the crosshair is hitting might not always be the best thing. It would also create jerkiness in the animation of the gun since it would need to move a lot as things passes before the cross-hair quickly. If you change the "aim" of the gun then it might be hard to get consistent, reliable results from the aiming. A thing very important to players.
For a longer answer, I think there are many misconception about how game works. Also there is many different way FPS mechanics can work.
A thing that you must now is that the presentation of a mechanic might differ from how the mechanic actually works in the game. For example in an FPS game the particle effects of the muzzle flash, the trail of the bullet etc might be only visual and have nothing to do with how the logic of the game works. So what you see in the game might not be how it works. Hence it can be very hard to "see" how a mechanic works since it might just be animation, particle effects or something else that the game developers have added to make it feel better, but not a actual part of how the mechanic works.
The mechanics you choose how the shooting might work might be dependent on a number of game design and/or technical reasons. What genre are the game? What types of weapons are the game? What engine are you using? Is it single or multiplayer? Is it networked? What kind of network model or network code are you using? Is it competitive or co-op?
In the game I'm working on we use ray cast from the centre of the screen when the player shoots. We now the start and the end position of the bullet in that frame so we spawn particle effects in that direction so it from the player perspective looks like a bullet came out of the gun. The reason we use raycast is that its a multiplayer game and raycasts are usually cheaper to network then projectile based bullets. (at least for us)
If you would fire it out of the actual gun object in the game it could also cause trouble since the position of that gun is most often animated. As we use a server authoritative model the server and the client might not be 100% synced on the animation and it will probably differ so we cant use position and rotation from the animation for game logic code. That is our use case but for some other tech solution it might differ.
So too sum up. It very much depends on the type of game you are making, what chooses have been made a long the way and what sort och technical solution your game needs, or currently have.
It's because of the instant right side preference for holding corners. To combat this the game would need to implement live side swapping system on the fly (like in 3rd person games) to compensate or deal with problematic and unnatural level design. This in turn lengthens the development as animations are essentially doubled for every gun increasing production costs or makes the game even more weird that by using the cheap trick.
This happens in tf2 with soldier's rockets. The rocket launcher doesn't move but where the rocket goes changes depending on what you are looking at. The demonstration of the gun moving reminded me of that. Shounic has a more detailed video on his yt channel.
I love your videos
But to be fair the soldiers rockets are fairly large projectiles, TF2s projectile hitboxes are much more forgiving and the games maps (and the rocket speed) make the deviation in trajectory not that noticable on the ranges you will fight at.
yes but the gun model doesnt change depending on the distance of the object youre aiming at
i once implemented a system like this, and there were two issues. Firstly it became slightly inconsistent to hit projectile weapons. but more importantly, if your weapon has spread, it becomes really annoying to hit your enemy if your crosshair misses the enemy slightly. this is why i wouldnt recommend this system if your weapons have spread or are projectile based
right, but isn't ads supposed to mitigate most of those issues? assuming this mechanic would be used in fps games with ads as the primary firing factor?
spread : u mean the recoil
@@nerdonspeed3493 spread is not recoil
What I'd do is make it so characters have a larger hitbox for this purpose. If you're aiming near someone, the gun aims as if you're pointing directly at them.
@@nerdonspeed3493 recoil is the upward motion of the barrel as a result of firing.
spread can be both horizontal and vertical.
Play a round of Battlefield 4 or 1. Pick a weapon with a bipod, go prone, ADS then go back to hip. Start firing.
While the recoil is almost non-existent, you will most likely have a lot of horizontal and vertical spread on your shots
Man is legit thinking of mechanics FOR the big companies
I love this concept and would love to see someone actually try using it, there are some games that move the gun slightly with the camera but they still usually originate the bullet from the face from what I've seen
I do like how this raises the question rather than being a statement as it invokes discussion for understanding and progression rather than a judgement and assumption
What happens when you are trying to lead a target that is on middle distance, but the backgrounds is far away ?
You aim down sights probably. You wouldn't be hip firing if you wanted that kind of precision.
@@gman1515 Sure, but someone could still hipfire if they wanted to
@@Ghi102 They're just not going to be accurate and shouldn't expect to hit their target, just like the way it is in games now.
The bullets would behave as they do in every game but the gun may spaz out a bit and shake too much creating a weird look. I think this is one of the reasons this approach isnt used. Along with recoil it would end up making the gun have a seizure. I guess you could prevent all this with some maths but why not just make it go at an angle and skip all the hard math part? It wont add much to the game imo. Also would look weird when peeking i think
@@plebisMaximus either this or they are going for accuracy by volume. Either way the very slight shifting of the gun barrel at those distances wouldn't make a difference.
I love that you ask US the questions sometimes, while still providing insightful commentary. :D
that being said, I have no clue lol.
In addition to bushes and transparent objects the problem is also dynamic objects in multiplier games. The gun angle rely on the distance to the enemy and sending too much enemy data to the client beforehand can lead to possible hacks and exploits.
I'd love to see this in more games and if you're gunna go the "oh but it might ruin stealth" argument I think that's probably an easy fix by making certain objects like bushes eliminate the effect
could make the bush lower your accuracy, which isnt too bad of a thing, might also help balancing some games
What about exploits similar to color aim? Once it detects specific movement in the gun model, then program automatically causes it to shoot
@@WhosYouG dude it's an exploration via an unauthorized code that's literally hacking and its what anti cheat is for💀
@@impliqued1910 yha but that's not how guns work and it also leaves the initial problem of being detected
Just don’t put this in a stealth game. Easy
You give me questions I never thought I'd ask.
There's one problem, tho. This approach heavily favors one side of the screen when peeking over a corner. Which means that position of the gun model on the screen (on left or right) would affect the gameplay.
It also will be noticeable when player tries to shoot at a moving target. If your bullet comes always at the same angle from the gun then you can compensate. But in case where your gun dances on your screen like a mad rabbit you will have difficult time adjusting as it will be virtually unpredictable.
I don't know why but games where the bullet comes from the barrel never really add the possibility to switch hands or just the side you hold the gun on. They all favor the right side.
You could just let players change shoulder. ARMA3 does it.
IRL gun handedness greatly affects how you can interact with and use cover, so being able to fire offhand or having strategies that allow firing around the off-hand side of cover from the stronghand are important.
@@e33manguy A lot of additional animation work for a relatively minimal gain. Also not all weapons can be really used left-handed.
@@usokitsuki you never played a game where you can change the side have you? I have, it's better than you think. And you missed the part "or just the side you hold the gun on".
I think Arma 3:s approach is the best. Bullet originates from the barrel and draws an invisible line to infinity. When looking at infinity, the crosshair is at the center of the screen. If anything blocks the line, be it glass, bush wall ground etc. the crosshair moves to there. This doesn't account for bullet drop though.
Another benefit is that it clearly shows if your shot is going to hit the side of a building when peeking a corner
And considering you want to use sights for pretty much anything that isn't in your face, it works great. You get a certain sense of the line the crosshair moves on that gives you an idea on where the shot lands even if there's something blocking the crosshair
This is an amazing idea. Only flaw it has, is that it makes blindshots unconsistant. (shooting slow bullets like snipers would have a different angle based on depth, making harder to predict where a player will be) but asides from that it works! it would take some extra work than just the collision interactive crosshair though.
- Maps should have certain blacklisted collisions for the crosshair to ignore. (Like most regular objects that are not part of a map geometry, stuff that may get in the way of a shooter and its target's fire range, see trough objects as glass, or annoying geometry that is unlikelly a player desires to aim at)
a smoothing animation for drastic depth changes in the crosshair that forbids the gun from shaking too much.
a system for ignoring and spotting players under certain conditions, like hiding, or invisible, for example.
a system that makes the crosshair ignore a collision upon player proximity (like hiding in a bush)
If I recall, TF2 has a system similar to this for the soldier's rockets. I think it only applies to distances up to 4k HUs(Hammer units) or something along those lines.
In the aim assist range of 200-2000 hu yes. Beyond that it aims at your crosshair 2000 hu away
It's funny that you mention this aiming mechanic as it's the one I use in my current project xD
Basicly, the speed divided by time is the distance that the gun travels to get to the new crosshair location, this makes it so any shots in between will open new angles off error, also if the target isnt far away or close enough, the gun will have huge firing errors
I believe the biggest issue would be the "server-side" validation of bullet trajectory. Basically, when player shoots the actual bullet is calculated on the server and server decides if it hits the target or not. I guess it would be too much expensive for the server to calculate where player aim and what 3D object is at the end of his crosshair (all 3D objects/meshes would have to be in the memory of the server) and since servers are usually run in virtual environment without any GPU acceleration this could cause an issue.
Most calculation from shooting game happens user's computer. Only results go to the server. That's why there are so many hack or cheating programs for shooting game.
@@zitnbit Maybe in past, but not in the current modern competitive games. Sometimes you hit another player (by pre-firing) without even seeing him. You do not directly see the hit, but server see it. Hack are just "assisting" you with aiming, but they are not sending the packets or information to the server that player hit another player. Only information of shooting is being sent.
"It gets a bit wonky if you're close to the object" I'm reminded of Perfect Dark, which, if you were holding a pistol and got very close to an enemy, you'd tilt the pistol and hold it sideways automatically since accuracy didn't matter at that range.
The pistol tilting is badass as fuck ngl
As a developer myself i can answer the question "why isn't this a popular mechanic"
Because some shooters aim at consistency, where your crosshair should be a 100% way of calculating the hit regardless of a distance, sometimes it's vital for gameplay to work at all. Some others aim at a more logical approach, which can make gameplay less comfortable for players that are used to the first system.
Not even mentioning that this system can be abused to locate players that are normally unseen, unless there's some dirty hack to fix this.
And you haven't mentioned the system in serious sam, where the crosshair is moving, not the weapon itself. It was also implemented in ARMA i believe.
Warthunder uses this system with an offset third person camera that you can sort of change the height of (use camera at height of commanders cupola or use camera 1/1.5 meters above tank) and it actually works pretty intuitively. I've never had any issues leading targets with it as some have speculated. The main issue it causes in Warthunder is the large offset it can create when you are next to a wall, using the third person camera to peek around the corner. Due to the (usually) fairly limited rate at which the gun can be raised or lowered you are occasionally left in a situation where you cannot fire at the target for several seconds while the gun is coming back down.
Making the gun point in such a way can mess with consistency in bullet travel scenarios as, for example, hitting someone in the sky. If your crosshair is on them, your bullets trail behind (as they are moving). If you lead your shot, it also might miss as the crosshair points in world space will usually shoot under or over.
There is also wall clipping scenarios we'd have to deal with like "can enemies take damage if they can't see your gun" and also counter measures of if your gun is inside a wall as we cannot cast from the barrel in that situation.
Considering that, we find that casting from the character model is the most intuitive and leaves less of a mess.
This problem is pretty common in the game ROBLOX where it's actually third-person and guns can shoot sideways. If you don't raycast from the body, you end up with people shooting through walls or people barely peeking the barrel of the gun under cover and shooting sideways.
Can you make a video about how BIG maps work?
What do you mean
@@WispOfLife I guess how the game handles only keeping the nearby parts of the map loaded in
I can see a problem with it. Imagine an enemy on a plain world. you would get confirmation that your aim is on point by your gun snapping a little
You could fix this by giving the characters a larger collider for this purpose. If you aim near them, the gun shifts based on looking at something their distance away. It also fixes the problem for if you're using a shotgun and you're not quite aiming at them, but some of your shots should hit.
@@DanielLCarrier that would still be the same problem
@@anna-flora999 The gun would shift when your aim is close to the person. You'd have no confirmation that it's exactly on them.
@@DanielLCarrier or have a distance check, if they are so far away don't do anything to the gun.
Hey grabaj,
I'm new to godot after giving up unity, I couldn't learn c# this well and so I want to learn gdscript in the shortest amount of time possible (I urgently need it for my IB personal project)
You make amazing videos and I've learned many things that games use that I wouldn't have learned if it weren't for you and I really like your videos so yeah I would extremely appreciate from all of my heart if you helped me learn the basics of gdscript
Thanks in advance garbaj, keep up with the good work man
Spellbreak partially used this, though it was kind of patched out where your character model (3rd person game) was also centered to help. It mainly went wonky because they are slower projectiles than most games so in close combat it acted a bit funny because you would hit people more to the right of the cross hair, closer to the source of the projectile.
I love your video in this style, thank you man!
Polygon on steam has intresting sights and bullets comes out off barrels
As far as I know the ARMA series of games used this mechanic. The result was a lot of issues with weapons getting "hung up" on close proximity objects you were trying to aim over. This was partially fixed with a "brace" feature allowing you to use a bipod or window frame to "fix" your weapon to a surface for more stable aiming, but that created more problems as your angle of fire generally was restricted in this mode and sometimes what you were fixed to put your character model in positions that clipped with terrain or structures allowing you to be shot "through" that object. Another issue came when working with optics, especially zoom optics. If you were near an obstruction but it wasn't one you could brace on the sight over bore would often cause you to shoot your cover because as you aimed closer to the edge of your cover, even though the cross hairs were on an enemy the muzzle of the gun had decided you were aiming at the terrain.
All of this is personal experience from a player's perspective, I'm not a programmer. I might be wrong about how the aiming works in ARMA but the description of it's function and the realism it allows matches very well in my mind with this series
I think the mechanic you mentioned about gun always points center of the screen is most widely used in games like csgo and valorant, and to break this mechanic they add a spray pattern and along with some kind of bullet inaccuracy so the bullets do not always hit the same spot the crosshair is pointing at. They turn out to be pretty great games 🙂
That's actually really cool. It's like what I subconsciously do when I'm strafe firing in Nerf Wars IRL. I know the blasters I build well enough that I can just kinda guess at where it's going to land without being too far off even though I normally run rifle platforms so they're off center from my eyes.
I had a similar idea a few months ago - it is probably about projectiles. I know that the distance between the camera and the gun is very small compared to other things. But when you aim a wall, and expect hitting enemy a half way between you and the wall by predicting his trajectory, and end up hitting not his head, but a little distance to the left - It could be annoying. It is also a problem, because the distance which you should offset your cursor to make a headshot is not constant, and in my opinion it would be very hard to learn shooting to moving things.
This is probably it
True. Which is why in real life, we alawys aim down sight. This is 100% it.
Steady point ma G
For some reason I feel like the original Goldeneye did something like this. Could be wrong but when I saw your mock up gun move my mind immediately went to all those hours of Bond I played back in the day.
I'm also kind of fine with the idea of a off-center 'hip-fire' shot, good enough for close range engagements where a speedy reaction may be demanded but punishing you for using it at range. I've always seen the crosshair as more of a focal point assist to help you guide in a sighted shot anyway, I often just turn it off in game as I usually have no trouble focusing on center regardless.
In many shooters unsighted shots aren't centered anyway, though I'd absolutely implement this mechanic in a single player FPS because it's an excuse to have cool 'dynamic' animations where you're character model reacts more fluidly to what you're aiming at in a way that isn't obtrusive to the mechanics.
The issue is animation and mesh deformation to a bizarre offputting level.
Lol legit 12:00 at midnight when this got uploaded
It's 11:03 A.M. here XD
Australia?
Same
You can schedule for when an upload gets published
@theMX89 I'm in Brazil.
Hey you should mock-up and FPS design wherein instead of the gun adjusting to match the crosshair, the crosshair moves across the rough center of the screen.
An interesting mechanic could be the rare at which the crosshair ‘jostles’ based on what’s currently happening to your player; sprinting, shooting, being shot, crouched, using a bipod.
This could make for very unique, realistic, and refreshing gun-play
Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and the TimeSplitters games seem to do this already with the gun also pointing at enemies slightly off-center for auto-aim. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned these titles as they're solid examples.
My first thought was Perfect Dark and Goldeneye as well. Maybe we're just old?
Ok I'm not insane. Immediately thought of Goldeneye.
I think one thing "wrong" is similar with aim assist, you give the player a visual cue that they are on target on something different even if their human eyes haven't quite spotted such target, which will be a big unnatural advantage in low visibility settings like darkness, smoke or fog. Since you are not limiting this to targets of interest, it's not as bad as the aim assist in Goldeneye 64 which would pretty much warn you that there's someone hidden in the dark.
I don't think it's a big deal though and could certainly be mitigated, maybe even negated.
They basically do this in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries to handle weapon convergence on their mechs (weapons are located at different areas, e.g. the left arm, right shoulder, right arm, etc.). One big issue is that, in areas with a lot of small objects (usually trees), a small adjustment in your aim can shift the point of impact of your weapon drastically. For example, you were trying to hit a bad guy but slipped and clicked on the tree 100m in front of him, which your left-side weapon tries to compensate for by angling up and right to hit the closer point of aim, which sends your shot off into nowhere due to the new weapon angle. It doesn't notably effect hitscan weapons like lasers, but for cannons and other projectile weaponry the effect can be very noticeable.
This is partly by design, since forests have traditionally acted as semi-reliable cover in Battletech and Mechwarrior, but for a fast-paced and competitive online environment you would have to be very cognizant of this limitation during your level design process to prevent it from becoming frustrating.
Nice. I think that it can get jittery since its procedural in nature if the conditionsa are not meant and will give random weird movements.
My approach to this in unreal engine is to make two arrows where i reference its location as the start of trace during non aiming and aiming, even during procedural block. So if i am not aiming, it uses the arrow location that is slightly offset to the side where i can cusromize per weapon. Then during ads, it uses the arrow that is centered on the muzzle.
There is two ways to interpret what the function of the crosshair is, one is that it tells you what location will you shoot at OR what direction will you shoot torwards.
And yes, in most cases it's the first one, but in some cases, such as wallbangs, smokes and other hidden elements, it's the other one.
Also i think this is kind of unnecessary to do, but having the bullets angled to the barrel of the gun is also wierd. Best way in my opinion (obv. depends on context aswell) is have the bullet go like as "promised", and what you (and everyone else) see would be only visual.
I like the concept more of just having the gun move around on the screen, cause when you hipfire you have to aim with the barrel of your gun, which is very natural if you have ever hip fired a gun (even in VR it's a similar feeling)
Thought you would talk about not zooming the entire screen when aiming downsights to give more realism to the gunplay, but still really interesting!
It's a neat idea for sure. The problem comes with foliage and windows and any transparent objects that you want to aim past.
The more flexible system that is in place in many games is that the gun moves on the screen in a 30 degree angle but the player turns only after a bigger movement of the mouse.
this is the one mechanic I will surely choose for my FPS game
Thank you for this brilliant idea.
Regarding it getting wonky when you're aiming at something very close, some games already animate the view model to avoid "colliding" with the wall, which could be one solution
what that has nothing to do with it
@@Jwellsuhhuh if it's close enough for the angle to look weird, change the gun animation state to one that's designed to handle it
@@Jwellsuhhuh actually it kinda does. this is pretty similar but instead of it being a wall an inch away from the camera its an object a few feet away. either way they're both changing the way the gun is lined up with the cross hair based off of whats in front of them
How about having multiple dots representing the bullet path at different distances extending out to infinity, but perhaps color coded according to whether a point along the path is both reachable by the bullet and visibile to the observer. Shooting through a bush which is marked as obscuring vision would cause the points that were further away to change color regardless of whether anything in the bush would block the shot.
Time splitters 2 (playstation 2) used this style of aim for weapons but did not offer an aim downsight option. They also moved the cross-hair across the screen with your weapons following target if you used their auto aim option.
I messed around Unity with that same concept some time ago, I made it so that if you get too close to a wall the gun would press against it, making it go "backwards" towards the camera (skipping all that double camera-wall clipping trickery people do), if you approached the wall from an angle, you could pivot and tilt the gun by using the wall, for example: making the gun point to left and shoot there without even looking there. Fun times. I'm too lazy and too much of a perfectionist to ever make a game so gg
Occasionally, some of the best ideas are indeed those little five-minute experiments that were done just for the thrill of it, without worrying whether it could work in what kind of full game.
Perfect Dark back in the N64 had a mechanic similar to this one.
But instead of the having the gun always point at the cross hair, the crosshair itself would move with the gun, instead of being fixed at the center of the screen.
For instance, when looking around, instead of the crosshair staying fixed at the center of the screen, the crosshair would move to keep the aim straight, instead of the gun moving with Joana and the crosshair staying in the center.
Golden Eye also had something similar with it's auto-aim, where the gun would physically move on it's own to target the nearest enemy on your screen, since that game didn't have a crosshair unless you were aiming.
So yeah, this really isn't something new, it's something that has been done more than 2 decades ago at this point, but just never caught on somehow.
auto aim is not the same at all though, the system talked in this video not moving only to ajust on enmy it will ajust on whatever front of you could be building, crates or anything
@@lainiwaku yes and that's how many old games did it. You can see by walking up to a wall and see the weapon shift in character's hands, IIRC Medal of Honor on PS1 did that.
Spent a some time polishing my aim mechanic with this in it, still presents other issues. Part of shooting is the mental concept of your ballistics trajectory, which in this case, will still be at an angle when using hipfire. Making it harder to predict when and how your ballistics will hit over long distances on moving targets. This mechanic still works pretty good with instant hit raycast but not so well with physics projectiles.
I read somewhere that some games use two points of origin in combination, you get a visible "bullet" originating from the barrel, but an invisible bullet that actually does the "hitting"
Its because its easier to code 👍
ive learnt two things today, this and the fact that weak sperm exists
@@doe2218 r/oddlyspecific
@@nymphicus404 r/cocaine
I think a cross hair that matches where the gun is currently pointing, along with a point that shows the centre o the screen would be interesting.
Have the gun crosshair and the center point align only when you press the shoot button.
Then ArmA, especially with TrackIR (or just Alt for free view)
I think you meant only 'when you press the ADS button'. It would be an interesting feature but you have to consider whether the amount of effort would be actually worth it. At this point you're just over-complicating the system wayyy too much than what's necessary. Also, how would hip-firing actually work with that? Would it follow where the bullets are landing or would it follow where the barrell is pointing? It could make things pretty weird.
World of Tanks does this style of aiming, and the problem starts to appear when you stray away from hit scan. Wot definitely shows the problems with this when aiming over hills and trying to hit an enemy that's just cresting said hill. If you have to aim ahead of them, your shell is liable to fly harmlessly over them as it attempts to hit the mountain in the far distance. As adaptive aiming is great for hit scan, anything with even a touch of leading involved in its use (the Kraber being a prime example) suffers drastically. Just my two cents based purely on my own personal experiences.
with projectiles that take time to travel, with this mechanic, sometimes the bullet will hit something the gun was not aiming at and will end up weirdly off centre as it was adjusted to hit the centre of the screen either closer or further away than was adjusted for. It makes the aim feel a little inconsistant as well as making it much harder to properly lead shots; sometimes you'll aim for someone 20m away who's running to right by aiming at the wall 100m away in the distance to the right of the person (so that they end up running into the bullet).
I think I love Insurgency's weapon system, could be biased cuz I have almost 80+ hrs on steam but I just love the gun mechanics, it feels REAL. Like you move the gun and the character swivels their arms to where ur looking, if you shoot without aiming you see the gun jump up gradually with each shot depending how fast ur shooting. And the recoil even feels like a real gun shooting, as opposed to feeling like the John Wick accuracy of most popular fps'. I'm starting to even dislike CoD now because the aiming and recoil pattern just pushes away from the enemy unrealistically, whereas the recoil in IS is judged on the gun u choose and how far u are shooting from, it's not some hitscan RNG bs that most fps' use and I love that alot