or

i may be dreaming

Off-topic, will there any large, bulky, vastly inaccurate rapid-fire guns for space troopers to lug around to clear hallways of boarding parties?

All the guns I code are innacurate!  It levels the playing field for me against everyone considering I'm on a different side of the world from the testing team and the test server we use   If I can't hit anyone normally no one should be able to!

In space combat especially you can see a line of blaster fire against a black background easier than a small fighter way off in the distance.

Actually, I do remember that from TIE Fighter (I think it was). It was nice to watch a dogfight for some kilometers off - you just saw lots of green and red specks going off and not necessarily the fighters themselves. Or maybe that's just how I remember it.

Every other blaster in-game has a far shorter "range", though that word in itself is just an amalgam of two more important variables: speed and timeToLive.  The speed determines how far a projectile goes per second and the TTL tells it how long it stays in-game.  We set a decent TTL on everything so the server doesn't fill up with an endless amount of projectiles (should they all be fired into the air) as that would lag the thing up to no end.  I think 2 is the average TTL we use.  The average speed is between 250 and 1000.

Most of our projectiles will span out to about 800 metres, which is the visual range of our ground maps.  Even if the visual range is longer though, without the aid of a targetter it's impossible to see anything as more than 1 or 2 pixels past that distance.  And even if you can see them, there's another setting that makes shooting at distant targets kinda pointless: damageloss over distance.  Our projectiles (like most projectiles) lose their damaging ability over distance. So the further away you are when you shoot someone/something, the less damage you're going to do.

And to respond to the initial poster, every one of our weapons is either a blaster or missile launching device.  This means that every projectile that is fired is visible in some form or another.  Firing your weapon at extreme range usually carries a big risk because of that, as now you are painting a bright red or green line across the map that leads directly back to you. In space combat especially you can see a line of blaster fire against a black background easier than a small fighter way off in the distance.

Anyway.  In conclusion, not even taking into account the inaccuracy inherent in the controls (none in the game have the ability to target to within decimal points of 1 degree) and the deviation in the weapons themselves, it becomes apparent that not only is it near impossible to hit people at extreme range, you'd do little damage if you somehow did manage to hit them, and it'd only serve to put you in greater danger rather than killing the enemy to do so.

I hope that answers your question

This means I can get killed by a laser bolt fired all the way from the other side of the map.
Sounds kinda bad, just spray and pray.

from the player beside you that would be funny

I'd actually like a flat front-line map with lots of trenches and such, to be played in a World War I 'mow down the enemy beyond your LOS with machine guns'-style of combat. I remember I was making something like that for GC - a devastated map with lots of craters, wrecks, barricades, and, of course, trenches.

you do realise the increidble bad luck you would need for that to hapen?

You do realize that means it'll happen to certain people all the time ?

I would love to see such a map.
Does any-one remember the map 'berlin outskirt' from Forgotten Hope?
That was one of my favourites, the satisfaction of taking the all the flags from the Germans and totaly rape them was just awesome.
Then again if the Russians coulndt take a flag it was pretty much the other way around.

This is the way the should make a Hoth map, all flags for the entrechned rebels.

I was also thinking of making a trench map SK but it got transformed kinda. I am still considering it though.