Games - Hitscan

	Games - Hitscan

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
(with the exception of the original Quake, where the railgun does not exist). 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). A notable absence of hitscan weapons is in the game Operation: Flashpoint, where absolutely 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. In the arcade game Silent Scope, the rifle is also a projectile weapon.

A close real-world analogy for hitscan weapons is a lasertag weapon. Also, although a rifle (or anything that fires bullets) is a projectile weapon, the high velocity of its bullets means that they usually appear to hit their target instantly. Another useful 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 bullets of hitscan weapons are practically instant and hit or miss as soon as the computer has calculated their effect.

Hitscan weapons are generally programmed slightly differently than projectile weapons; to process a projectile hit requires collision detection, whereas a hitscan weapon hit requires more of a geometric calculation.

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