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Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

In the real world bullet collisions are definitely not trivial. Video games do a laughable job at modeling the ballistics of projectiles. They don't even account for bullet drop.

When was the last time you saw a bullet do this in a video game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABGIJwiGBc

If you do some light reading on "terminal ballistics", "experts" can't even agree on the lethality of bullet designs, especially in handguns.

People love to assume their models are accurate when they are usually educated guesses with gaping holes. Ballistics is no exception.

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First time I actually saw the bullet drop was the original Quake more than 20 years ago.

Set the FOV to some narrow angle to give yourself a sniper sight, go to a long corridor, take a nail gun, shoot horizontally along the length of it. You will see how nails end up below the aiming cross.

If it were a rounding error, the nails would end up randomly distributed the aiming cross.

Alas, shotgun did not sport the same effect IIRC, though the hit of every individual pellet was accounted for separately.

There's actually many games that account for bullet drop! The article talks about this, but off the top of my head there's PUBG, and any game that involves a bow and arrow as a weapon.

Battlefield one of the most popular FPS has been doing bullet drop from a while.

https://battlefield.fandom.com/wiki/Projectile_mechanics

https://youtu.be/cix07R1vlhI Arma 3 is the most advanced I know of, accounting for bullet drop and speed loss when passing through different objects with different caliburs

Project reality, squad even more advanced with wind and smth about earth rotation I forgot the Name of it

There's also the ace3 mod for Arma 3 which makes bullets behave more real

The Coriolis effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force

Video games in general do a poor job, but there are some exceptions. The Delta Force[1] for example did bullet drop 20 years ago, as well as Novalogic's multiplayer game Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising from 2004 which also supported up to 150 players per server.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_(video_game)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Risi...

Some games do model bullet drop.

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