Wirehead Studios

In a recent thread about the SNG being somewhat lacking, it was compared to the Hyperblaster, and it aws mentioned that although they travel at the same speed (1000 ups), they use different trajectory code. So I was wondering what the difference was...

LA

The SNG fires in a straight line. If you stand still and aim at the same spot and hold down the trigger, all the nails will hit the same spot.

The hyperblaster shoots in a wave pattern. If you stand still and hold the trigger down you'll end up with some spread that becomes more pronounced at greater distances.

Therefore it's much easier to lead at medium to long distances with the SNG than the hyperblaster.

That is true, providing you still have any ammo for the SNG. it uses it a lot faster than the hyperblaster does.

The Q1 weapons also run on a 50ms clock, whereas the Q2 weapons run on a 100ms clock, though this mostly affects grenade physics.

This is because locations and such are truncated to teh nearest integer each frame?

No, all vectors are floating point arrays of 3 elements.  It has to do with the precision in which the movement is run.  Grenade physics involve gravity, but it's calculated in sort of a straight line in the push function.  If you run it 10 times a second like in Q2, your simulated curve precision is lower than if you run it 20 times a second, like in Q1.  This means Q2 grenades will stick quicker and bounce shorter owing to how the velocity truncates during the bounce check.