Basic question: When targeting with iron sights, is my target just above the sight or should the sight be on the target. For example, if I’m aiming for a headshot on a guy with my pistol, am I covering his head with the metal bump or should his head be above the bump? Forgive my firearms/FPS n00bishness.
Playing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (with “Complete” mod) which is pretty unforgiving in the targeting department. Only similar game I’ve played, Far Cry 2, was a lot more forgiving and I never had to wonder exactly how the sights worked. I’m assuming the mechanics behind iron sights is pretty universal though.
It depends on each game, some have more pronounced gravity effects on bullets than others. Some games have sniper rifles with trajectories like rainbows, while other have pistols that shoot with the accuracy of lasers.
One thing you can do is sight the gun in by shooting at a wall, tree, or whatever and see where it puts the bullet holes vs where you aimed.
On real guns, you want to cover your target with the top tip of the front sight blade, but on video games it varies. Shooting stuff with easy references (like the middle of a circle marking or something) is the easiest way to test how it works in that game.
It’s also relatively rare for games to model ballistics, most guns are hitscan - meaning they instantly hit whatever you were targetting when you pull the trigger. STALKER may be one of the ones with ballistics though - I can’t remember.
From memory, Stalker models ballistics, not as enthusiastically as, say, ArMA, but it does. One of the silenced sniper rifles has a trajectory like a softball. (And hits like a train) Since you can see the projectile fly to the target, this isn’t too much of a PITA, but you do have to elevate a bit to get head shots. And, IIRC, Stalker heavily emphasizes head shots.
I try to put the top of the blade in the middle of the head or chest, as opposed to a target-shooting “bulls-eye” 6-o’clock hold. I end up losing sight of the target if I try to put the top of the blade on the top of the target, but to each their own.
If they’re modeling ballistics with anything resembling accuracy, then how high you have to aim will depend on how far away the target is, and how the gun is sighted in. Contrary to popular belief, “point blank range” doesn’t mean that the barrel of the gun is poking into the target’s skin: It means the range the gun was sighted in for. So if a target is at exactly that range, you should aim so the sights are pointed exactly at the spot you want to hit. The further away the target gets from there, the higher you need to aim, and if the target is closer than point blank, then you actually need to aim below your target.
If they model ballistics, don’t they model elevation adjustment on the sights? Because with real firearms it’s entirely up to the user as to how high you put the front sight relative to the target to get your bullseye.
Not S.T.A.L.K.E.R., no. Most weapons are zeroed in around 20 meters or so, but sniper rifles typically have scopes with ranging pips to help with the bullet drop.
That being said, it won’t matter one bit when you’re facing the most creepifying enemies in the game. And by that I mean I would suggest Bloodsuckers attempt mating with speeding freight trains while on fire. No really, fuck those guys.
‘Controllers’ were what settled my hash in Shadow of Chernobyl. Kept an RPG around just to deal with those guys. Bloodsuckers were all kinds of terrifying though. Especially in the dark. Just makes it that more satisfying when you kill them though. Led one into a whirlygig anomaly once (after having it chase me through most of the map) that is one of my most satisfying video game kills ever.
I vaguely remember something about zooming the scope for one of the weapons in Arma or OFP, in order to bracket some range lines on the torso of a bad guy and, once that happened, the central cross hair was zeroed for that range. I think it was supposed to model the ART for the M-21. In practice, for all games that modeled bullet drop, I just used Tennessee elevation and shot until he died. I’ve never found a game that had sight adjustments—never played Arma2—or required keeping a rifle diary. Hard to do, I’d think, given the limitations of even high-end computer graphics. And even for the Arma series, that seems a little sadistic for the developers. Does Arma2 represent mirage, or other realistic ways to dope wind?
ARMA2 goes into detail beyond most shooters, but doesn’t model mirage or wind. In ARMA2 Operation Arrowhead you are in an Afghanistan-type mountainous desert area with little vegetation, so you’re making kills from hundreds of meters away at times. The scope adjustment is handy in those situations but seems to only be on the higher-end sniper rifles.
The target point is supposed to be the very tip of the front sight post, at whatever range the sights are zeroed at. If a game has instant-hit bullets, the range doesn’t matter, but even then, most games don’t bother getting that very precise with lining up the graphical sights with the actual bullet physics trace, because either the ranges are short or the weapons are just innately inaccurate to begin with. Stalker’s a good example: it doesn’t really matter what you sight on, because unless you’re using one of the end-game quality rifles, and usually not even then, you’re not going to hit where you’re aiming anyway. The aim point is just a suggestion
As for ballistics in general, there’s really no point to it for most games. Unless some very strong universal zoom ability is in play, a game isn’t even going to be able to support combat at ranges where ballistics begins to matter. Most shooters are on such a small scale that even a shot as short as 100 meters is considered an extreme sniper rifle only shot, and at that range your typical high power rifle around gets there in a tenth of a second and drops maybe 2 inches. That’s not a big deal, so it either gets ignored completely or wildly exaggerated like in Stalker.
As for other games, Red Orchestra 2 has both ballistics and adjustable sights on almost everything, as was the norm in WW2. It’s usually not very relevant to the gameplay, since game’s combat is generally within 200 meters, but if you’re trying to, say, slip a shot over the top of a wheel of a train car, it can start to matter. I could see some machine gun arcing area fire at kilometer-plus ranges coming into play if any really huge third-party maps come out.
Not always true. For example, I remember shotgun sniping being a thing in the first *CounterStrike *- because while all *other *guns besides sniper rifles would always automatically generate small deviations from the aimpoint that would get larger the longer you held the trigger or the more you moved while shooting, and shotgun pellets were also dispersing around at random, due to a quirk in the code there would always be one central pellet that travelled straight and true exactly where you were aiming. And since headshots pretty much instakilled in that game unless the target had bought a helmet, well… shotgun sniping
Counterstrike doesn’t have iron sights anyway, just a user interface crosshair that is the actual bullet trace. Naturally, there’s not going to be any error there. It’s a completely different design from aiming using a potentially free-floating weapon model that, depending on how the developers implemented it, may or may not even be directly connected to the game’s actual bullet trace.
