What range are weapons calibrated to? Perhaps we could change that...

It's not the shots crossing, because it happens in one-weapon ships with autoaim off. IE: My centurion, with autoaim off.

rogue then you should probably explain what it is in more detail.

It doesn't twist on my valk WITH 2 rails.

Pirogoeth2, when you deactivite autoaim it still DOES happen.

Not in my experience, i'll check next time i'm on.

Here's the test we did (me and somebody else):

2 one-rail Centurions face off at 1100m, the limit of the rail effective range. Zoom in to max zoom and deactivate autoaim. Center reticle on opponent. Fire. All shots will miss, going off-target on the left, right, top or bottom.

That's because of qua... qua... um... rounding.

(quantization*)

I'm spaced, and all my shots are weird
my bus cannon shots travel snake-like, zigging and zagging a little

harvestmouse, the further you are from the center the less accurate your coordinates are...

A1, why not dynamically allocate more memory to the location of far away players, and objects that are close enough to them, maybe with some speed based failsafe so that a bug doesn't space some one far enough to cause a memory problem?

Eldrad, what? Are you suggesting we use arbitrary precision arithmetic? That'd be way too complicated. We could increace precision... or we could just not put anything out that far and bring you into the next adjacent sector instead.

This whole thread is all about quantization effects. When you're far away, the floating point number used to represent your position becomes less precise. When you shoot a laser, your firing direction is quantized. Both of these precision limits are imposed to improve network performance, and in 99% of what you do in Vendetta, the precision is quite adequate.

I've already explained the potential fix for rail guns. This is not a bug, but the weapon is certainly less effective as a result. The problem has nothing to do with autoaim.

The 'twist' you see is just an artifact of the way laser shots are rendered. They're supposed to look like really thin cylinders, but they're rendered as quads oriented in a direction that's supposed to face the camera. If you're almost parallel to them, and you are when you're shooting lasers, they're nearly degenerate, and the direction it chooses to draw in changes rapidly. Hence the 'spin'.

So any shot rendered this way will flip over once due to the quantized laser shot direction being pretty close to, but exactly the same as, the camera direction. If you're firing with autoaim, however, it fires in different direction from the camera anyway, so you might not see the 'spin' there.

This if off-topic, but no, FOV won't and shouldn't affect the background. It's like using a telescope, not like shooting a probe with a camera on it 1000m in front of you.

a1, yes I was... increasing the precision probably isn't worth it because I think the only people who have flown that far out do so to test or see that effect, so even if they had to go twice as far... or a hundred times as far they'd still probably do it, and no one else does anyways. Bringing people to the next sector seems like a good idea it will provide a "clean" finished product feeling for those people who test the limit after the game's release, and the current precision will still give a very convincing illusion of limitless space for most players.

How hard would it be to apply the same fix that you suggested for rail guns to all guns based on the target they were shooting (ie if shooting at a mine use higher precision)?

thanks for clearing that up. I'll space a rag with many different weapons aboard, and see how they behave in deep space. this may be enlightening : )

bump

Talk about a REALLY useful bump.

rogue: heh, you bumped this for the rail contest right?
something else that puts rails at a disadvantage:
when I fly a valkyrie, my ship quivers. if you're not pretty darn close to me when you shoot, there is no way you'd hit me with rails. (the quivering doesn't matter as much against rockets or gauss though)

One thing is stuck in my head after reading this:

a1k0n:
"or we could just not put anything out that far and bring you into the next adjacent sector instead."

What happens at the edge of the system? "Wraparound" comes to mind, but that's just wrong.

At the edge of the system/sector you just keep going out while two things happen:

1: either your fps drops like a ton of bricks or things get very jerky.
2: your connection to the server gets laggy, and your chances of being disconnected increase the further you go out.