How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?
I'm making an action MMO with both ballistic bullets and sword fighting:<p>1) If you look at how Nintendo solved ping-pong with Wiimote Plus (gyroscope addon) after the obvious letdown of the Wiimote standalone (only accelerometer): they gamified it, there is no 1:1 and the game is still fun. VR prooves this case too, as non-superhuman input is hard to sell after you give a man the mouse!<p>2) Ballistics are expensive on MMO's because you don't want a proper physics engine on the server. Two solutions I imagined: A) you chunk the projectiles temporal movement as vectors and add those to a 2D array that loops over time and has a limited amount of concurrent bullets per frame. B) You make a distributed voting system where other players detect and report hits to offload the server.<p>For sword fights I think left/right/jump/spin attack should be enough to get the player into the minigame of parrying and attacking interleaved (against many enemies). You just need to work on the abstraction so it's as fast in latency as possible and then make sure it's fun. The most important thing is to not try to simulate reality, reality is boring.<p>Look at how PoP Sands-of-time did it?