Hitscan
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In first-person shooter games, a hitscan weapon is one that, when fired, instantly hits whatever the weapon is pointing at. This is in contrast to projectile weapons, which fire projectiles that take time to travel. Usually, handguns, sniper rifles and anything that fires ordinary bullets or lasers are modelled as hitscan weapons.
One of the most well-known examples is the railgun in the Quake series. The advantage of hitscan weapons is that because they hit instantly, there is no need to lead the target (to aim slightly ahead of a target in order to compensate for the time it takes for the projectile to reach it).
Hitscan weapons are purely abstractions; instantaneous travel is impossible in the real world. There are, however, a few real world analogies to hitscan. Guns appear to act like hitscan weapons because the bullets they fire move so quickly that humans cannot see them; they appear to hit their target instantly. This is not true hitscan, but nonetheless many older games model guns as hitscan weapons for performance reasons, since hitscan is a reasonable approximation at short ranges seen in most shooter games.
The timespan, however, between perceiving and reacting, makes even real instant reactions impossible.
A closer analogy is a lasertag weapon, which fires a harmless laser beam. The laser beam travels at the speed of light, which is the quickest that information can be transmitted. Which is actually faster than a hitscan shot in computergames, since a computer can not process all necessary commands as fast as light travells from point to an other. The time, which a packet takes to travel from one computer to an other also makes an real instant hit, in computergames, impossible, and is called a "lag".
A similar analogy is how light photons appear when they travel from their source. Human beings perceive a room to be lit as soon as a bulb is bright because the photons travel at the speed of light. In a similar way, the effects of hitscan weapons are practically instant and hit or miss as soon as the computer has calculated their path.
A notable absence of hitscan weapons is in the game , where all the weapons, including the M27 and the Dragunov sniper rifles as well as rifles and submachineguns are projectile weapons; as a result, the player must lead the target when sniping from a very long distance. The same is true in the Delta Force series of games, as well as Red Faction, although in the latter case the effect is only perceivable on very large maps. In the arcade game Silent Scope, the rifle is also a projectile weapon.
An issue with games featuring hitscan weapons is that this eliminates one of the main gameplay mechanics found in a large amount of prior games - the mechanic and fun factor of dodging projectiles. For example, an overhead "shooter" game is in fact primarily about dodging, since the shooting is oftentimes simply automatic. Since the majority of first person shooter games adopted hit scan weapons, the element of dodging is markedly less.
Some popular examples of hitscan include Unreal Tournament's shock rifle and minigun, and the machinegun, shotguns, and railgun in the Quake series. In the original Unreal Tournament, the shock rifle uses both the hitscan and projectile methods. The weapon hits the target immediately, but a laser travels towards the target even after the bullet has hit something. This can be seen easily in slower gameplay, and when firing at objects farther away.
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