Created attachment 2457[details]
Railgun bug: at long distance, no inner trace and outer spiral starting away from you
Hi, this is the first bug I write about here.
This is a bug that comes from the original game, and is still present in ioquake3 v1.36.
When you are using the railgun with "cg_oldrail 1" and you shoot when aiming to a very far point, the inner trace is not drawn and (depending from the distance) the outer spiral is drawn starting away from you (even very far: you may have to zoom to see it clearly).
It would be nice to fix this bug, after so many years...
To test it, go to Q3DM19, take the railgun, reach the most far platfom (the one with the quad), and shoot to the opposite side of the arena, aiming to the sky at different heights: when the aim will get far enough, the inner trace will disappear, and then the outer spiral will start far away from you.
It seems that this may not be only a "graphic" bug, but also that the railgun does NOT hit anything over a certain distance: its range seems shorter than the range of the machinegun (it's a server-side thing, so changing cg_oldrail cvar makes the trace seem normal, but you don't hit anything anyway).
In this thread on the OpenArena forums http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3996.0
it has been told that the railgun range is 8192 units, while the machinegun range is 8192*16=131072 units.
But OpenArena took part of its code from Team Arena, and someone says that for Team Arena it's id Software that shortened the range of the railgun, maybe to avoid extremely far frags in the three "mpterra" maps.
I'm sure that the standard baseq3 has got the "graphic" part of the bug, but I don't know it it has got also the "short range" shot or it is only part of Team Arena.
Maybe, if the railgun range is 8192 and you will not change this (I don't know if ioquake3 makes such kind of changes), it would be better to maintain the graphic bug, too... to be able to argue if your shots are useful or useless when shooting at very long distances (but only if you use cg_oldrail 0). Fixing the graphic bug and adding a "too far" or "out of range" message after such kind of shot would be a more elegant solution.
(In reply to comment #2)
> In this thread on the OpenArena forums
> http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3996.0
> it has been told that the railgun range is 8192 units, while the machinegun
> range is 8192*16=131072 units.
>
> But OpenArena took part of its code from Team Arena, and someone says that for
> Team Arena it's id Software that shortened the range of the railgun, maybe to
> avoid extremely far frags in the three "mpterra" maps.
I'm sorry, I copy-pasted the wrong URL. That topic has NOTHING to do with this problem.
This is the correct link: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3998.0
Created attachment 2457 [details] Railgun bug: at long distance, no inner trace and outer spiral starting away from you Hi, this is the first bug I write about here. This is a bug that comes from the original game, and is still present in ioquake3 v1.36. When you are using the railgun with "cg_oldrail 1" and you shoot when aiming to a very far point, the inner trace is not drawn and (depending from the distance) the outer spiral is drawn starting away from you (even very far: you may have to zoom to see it clearly). It would be nice to fix this bug, after so many years... To test it, go to Q3DM19, take the railgun, reach the most far platfom (the one with the quad), and shoot to the opposite side of the arena, aiming to the sky at different heights: when the aim will get far enough, the inner trace will disappear, and then the outer spiral will start far away from you.