45
votes
What is the little dot/icon at the center of the screen in an FPS game called?
In addition to what Josh Petrie mentioned: if you're looking for more advanced ways to aim weapons, the center dot in your bottom image is also called a "pipper" in real-life applications.
This ...
- 510
19
votes
Should the bullet trajectory calculated by server or by client?
Always assume the client is a lying, cheating, bastard.
The client is responsible for:
Receiving input from the player (and sending commands to the server, which validates)
Rendering the known ...
12
votes
Accepted
Why aren't game bullets implemented as if they were real bullets?
The main problem is tunneling.
Game physics engines typically use discrete collisions. That means they advance all the bodies by one short time step, then check if they're intersecting, and handle ...
- 115k
8
votes
How is shot synchronization implemented in multiplayer FPS?
When dealing with different frames of reference interacting with each other instantaneously, you have to compromise somewhere, you cannot have everything consistent everywhere; that's a fact of life. ...
- 14.6k
7
votes
Accepted
Simple framerate counter?
To measure framerate you need two counts:
How many frames (not draw calls) have passed, and,
How much time has passed.
Your framerate is therefore calculated as:
...
- 19.7k
7
votes
FPS Crosshair, Should it be drawn on center of the screen or to the forward of bullet spawn point?
There are many reasons a designer/programmer would want to draw the crosshair on the exact center of screen, or a little lower. A hybrid system may even be implemented, taking advantage of the ...
- 4,240
6
votes
How can I minimise data sent through a network in a modern FPS?
When we implemented our networking engine we exploited a number of compression techniques:
First we write all of our snapshot bit-wise: bools are only 1 bit
instead of 1 byte (or more depending on ...
- 3,022
5
votes
Why do most FPS games have a machine gun, shotgun, and sniper rifle?
Why has this happened?
This HASN'T happened.
Duke Nukem 3D and Unreal Tournament (to use your examples) were creative games, both were trying lots of exciting new things, in new themes, in new ways. ...
- 21.2k
5
votes
Accepted
Networked projectiles in an authoritative server
This is what we ended up doing:
Client side
Detect player clicks button to shot missile
Immediatley simulate rocket visuals on client
In parallel, send command to server
Once predict hit something, ...
- 636
5
votes
How to create bullet impact effects?
You're probably looking for a combination of the following concepts:
Particle system for the bullet hitting a surface (i.e. sparks on hitting metal, wood splints on hitting wood etc.)
Decals to ...
- 305
4
votes
Accepted
How do fps games do ironsights for weapons
You can use a model. Often, HUD elements, sometimes including weapons, are rendered seperately from the environment. In the simplest example you'd set up the animation so that the ironsights line up ...
- 3,775
4
votes
Why do most FPS games have a machine gun, shotgun, and sniper rifle?
Aside from Josh's answer you have to keep in mind something else: players know what each of these weapons does. If I pick up a sniper rifle I know what I can probably do with it (shoot long distances, ...
- 965
4
votes
Accepted
Should the bullet trajectory calculated by server or by client?
Note that most of us cannot answers specific questions about either of the games you mentioned. We aren't the authors of that code and can't reasonably know exactly how it was built.
Generally ...
- 41.4k
4
votes
Accepted
How to implement view bobbing?
Head bobbing consists of transformations to the camera to imply human movements of the player. The player would be using his/her feet to step from one foot to the other. This causes all sorts of ...
- 1,624
4
votes
how to convert FoV into zoom 2x, 3x, 4x...?
Technically changing the FOV isn't zooming, but it does the same thing, so let's not take that into account.
You can calculate the size of the view plane where the object lies using trigonometric ...
- 14.5k
3
votes
Best field of view
Configurable.
The best field of view depends on many variables. For instance, how large the monitor is, are you using eyefinity, is the aspect ratio nonstandard, how far you are from the screen.
...
- 3,203
3
votes
Should the bullet trajectory calculated by server or by client?
More than likely, it works like this (major speculations):
Client sends Shoot command to server, along with parameters such as
position, direction, velocity, type, etc...
Server accepts command and ...
- 8,279
3
votes
Sending a players mouse movement to the server in an FPS
Translate mouse input to rotation on the client-side. Then send the new view direction to the server, not raw mouse input.
Usually there is more than one way to change the players view direction (...
- 112k
3
votes
Accepted
Multiplayer FPS Gameplay: How to encourage players to dispense ammo?
I'd like to examine two multiplayer class-based FPS games with support classes as case studies: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Team Fortress 2. Both have separate classes that give health and ammo, ...
- 14.6k
3
votes
Multiplayer FPS Gameplay: How to encourage players to dispense ammo?
There are a few better ways to get players to share ammo, however your your example mechanisms wouldn't work that well, example 1 has the weakness of not really giving any reason towards player B has ...
- 965
3
votes
Why should a FPS game use a "floating arms" approach over full body one?
Because it's more simple.
Player's avatar arms are one thing to tweak and make look right in a 3d world. If you add the full body, it takes more resource to accomplish, and does not always add much ...
- 15.7k
3
votes
Accepted
LibGDX - FPS drops
You should avoid invoking new instances in your render and update methods. As these methods are called numerous times per second, this can be a pretty straining task, as the unreferenced instances ...
- 91
3
votes
Not see through models without adjusting clipping panels
You could render the weapon in a separate pass/camera, and just overlay the weapon onto the other view. In Unity this is pretty easy to do by adjusting stuff like the Clipping Mask and Clear Flags of ...
- 15.6k
3
votes
Accepted
How do Aimbots get detected?
Most games allow you to manually spawn an invisible bot, and a lot of aimbots don't filter these out.
By spawning 3 different bots and checking if the user aims at them, you can check whether they ...
- 14.5k
3
votes
Accepted
First Person Shooter Character in Unity - Meshes Clipping When Close to Body?
The way this is often done is to render in two passes:
first, render your scene with your normal near & far planes.
next, clear the depth buffer, and render your character's visible first-person ...
- 115k
3
votes
Accepted
Camera view matrix from position/yaw/pitch/worldUp
If you're transforming a vector \$\vec v\$ like this:
$$\vec v ' = M \cdot \vec v\\
\begin{bmatrix}v_x'\\v_y'\\v_z'\\1\end{bmatrix}=
\begin{bmatrix}X_x & Y_x & Z_x &T_x\\
X_y & Y_y &...
- 115k
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