[Video] Pump Action Shotgun Slugs 3 - "Suddenly Amazing"

Discussion in 'Light Assault' started by Iridar51, Dec 27, 2015.

  1. Iridar51


    Watch in 1080p60!

    Picked up pump slugs after a few weeks of not playing PS2. Expected to get stomped. Surprised myself.

    I don't believe I actually have skill to perform on demand what I show in this video. Normally I'd think it was just luck, but then I'd get much lower number of drag shots. The footage in this video is from less than an hour of gameplay.

    Pump Action Shotgun with Slugs Guide
    Light Assault Guide

    My other videos:
    Music Montages
    Video Guides
  2. Demigan

    I'll check it out later frame-by-frame, but it looks like a part of it is caused by what I've started calling the 'drag effect'. As seen in some sniper montages, dragging while shooting seems to increase the to-hit area on your screen in PS2 (and even allow hits on people who never crossed your crosshair-LOS or any possible bullet traveling). There's screenshots of one shot having 3 different impacts, one to the right, one to the left and one directly on the head. Even when looking at when the shot is fired or the bullet appears you can see it happening at different times at different kills, and still achieve the desired hit even though at least one should have missed because the time to fire is literally just one frame, and there's sometimes a difference of multiple frames between the actual shot and when they should have fired.

    Of course with normal weapons this doesn't mean much since you need multiple hits and a drag-shot causes you to miss your follow-up shots. But with OHK weapons like shotguns and snipers...
  3. Iridar51

    That sounds fascinating, but I don't understand what you're saying beyond "dragging while shooting seems to increase the to-hit area on your screen in PS2". How or why would that work?

    Hitting is about a projectile traveling through space and hitting the hit box on the enemy model. How or why can "to-hit area on screen" can be involved and what even is that?
  4. Demigan

    The "to hit" area comes from hitscan weapons without bullet travel, and I made it up to talk about them a long time ago. Upon firing a hitscan weapon the game just checks where you are aiming and wherever you are pointing is instantly hit. Some hitscan weapons have a larger to hit area, so even when aiming right next to someone would result in a hit as their body would still be in the to hit area.
    In PS2 there's no hitscan weapons, the bullet travels through space and hits an enemy, wherever the bullet travels is the "to hit" area.

    However, when using drag-shots in PS2 something weird happens if you check it frame-by-frame. A single shot suddenly has multiple impacts on your screen, as if the bullet is 'smeared' across a larger area giving you a larger 'to hit' area as the bullet travels (which could potentially result in ridiculously large area's at range). You also get to see hits on enemies that you don't expect, as the shots and direction the bullet should travel don't align up with the player but still hit. And when they do align up it's also a hit!
  5. Iridar51

    Let me stop you right there and remind you that visual projectile and actual damaging projectile are two different things in PS2, and sometimes they don't even have the same velocity and trajectory. So whatever we see doesn't necessarily reflect the inner workings.

    Second - what you see as "multiple projectiles" on frame by frame watching aren't actually projectiles, they are just sparkles from the shot.

    So no, I don't believe there's any street magic to drag shots.
  6. Demigan

    I understand that the visual projectile and actual damaging projectile are different things in PS2.
    However, you can see when the shot is fired on each frame. With the speed these drag-shots are pulled off you have 1, maybe 2 frames in which you can have a successful shot... Yet you can see shots too early, shots right on the money and shots that are too late all hit the target!
    So something fishy is going on.
    Not to mention that you can see 3 impacts from one bullet, all along the line where the drag-shot too place. That's not a coincidence. And if just one of those shots hits the target... It's bye bye target.

    No I mean actual bullet impacts on the environment.

    I do believe there's street magic to drag-shots. How else can players hit a target even though they didn't fire at the right moment? How can a player hit a target even though the target never crossed any potential bullet at any time?
  7. Iridar51

    Can you point out specific moments so we get on the same page?
  8. Demigan

    I still have to check yours, but I did it for whatshisname with the CQC sniping montages a long time ago. His opening shot already showed a shot where he actually could never have hit the target, and yet get a hit.
  9. Iridar51

    Elusive?


    Keep in mind that the video stream goes throgh lots of transitions.

    First he records the clip, and it's reasonable to assume that recording is not 100% the same as what player sees on his screen.

    Then footage gets edited and rendered, and some frame data can also get lost along the way.

    Then resulting footage gets uploaded to youtube, where its re-encoded for the third time. Suffice it to say, what we see as a viewer can easily be a far cry from what the player saw on his screen.

    There's another big question - does what the player sees even matter? Sure game engine renders frames to provide feedback for the player. But in the end, it's all about hitting invisible hit box with invisible bullet, and it only matters that at time X player's gun aimed at direction Y.

    What I'm trying to say: it may not even matter if that moment when aim was perfectly on target has been lost between frames.
  10. Demigan

    Yes Elusive.

    I see what you mean, but that's just not the case.

    Whatever happens, the no record/rendering/re-encoding process will not accidentally add in-game graphics, such as having 3 impacts in one frame/spread out over multiple frames rather than the 1 impact we are expecting along those frames.
    Even if the frame where the aim is perfectly on-target was lost, then we can still see the frames where the weapon starts firing. We know that with the speeds a drag shot is often pulled off that you have often no more than 1 frame to fire perfectly, although in the background you can fire in between frames as well and still get a hit. But that's not what we are seeing, we are seeing a shot sometimes more than 2 frames after you would get a hit, or 2 frames before, and they still get a hit regardless! That combined with having multiple impacts on-screen after weapons fire heavily suggests that there's something wrong when you are drag-shooting, and that drag-shooting increases the area you hit with a single bullet.

    And imagine if what you are saying is true, then Elusive for instance has somehow figured out how to ignore all graphical input on his screen and manage to fire an invisible bullet at an invisible hitbox even though he never saw that the hitbox and bullet even could collide. Which reeks more of cheats than some form of super-human skill to predict how an arbitrary back-end system magically does what you want it to do.
  11. Iridar51

    I need an example.

    That's what drag shooting is all about.

    The normal aiming process is: aim at target, SEE your crosshair on target, let brain process the visual input and confirm that aim is on target - that is what's called human reaction time, ranging from 150ms to 250ms, then fire.

    The problem - it takes "a lot" of time, and the target can move while you're placing the crosshair on it. You can sort of bypass that with prediction, aiming where target will be instead of where it is, but it still takes time.

    Drag shooting tries to bypass that waste of time with superb hand-eye coordination. You see where your crosshair is on screen, you see where the enemy is. The only thing left is to train your brain to tell the hand to move the mouse exactly as far as needed to place the crosshair on target and fire immediately, without visual confirmation that the crosshair was indeed on target.

    So there might not even be a frame where shot was aligned perfectly.
  12. Demigan

    Drag shooting is seeing an enemy move on your screen, instantly determining their current speed, direction, your cursor position, the time it'll take for you to get the cursor on their head where you predict it will be and then moving it there without sending the signal down your arm to stop after you've reached the head.
    That has everything to do with learning to calculate all that in a split second based on what you see, and experience. But somehow Elusive would have been able to not just see the graphics, but see how the back-end of PS2 uses invisible bullets and invisible hitboxes and make them collide with each other, even though when drag-shooting the hitbox and bullet become invisible and misalign with the graphical input on your screen?

    Occams razor:
    Option 1: A problem in the back-end with how PS2 handles bullets when turning at high-speeds.
    Option 2: A problem in the back-end with how PS2 handles hitboxes and bullets, and a human players somehow connecting the two and managing to make use of this back-end system? (even though we already have proof that the system would then be random since he can fire at random moments and still score a hit?)
  13. Iridar51

    It's not about back-end.. I only mentioned back-end to make a point that we can't make 100% judgements just based on captured frame data.

    Incredible things that you claimed to see can be all explained by misalignment of those models and actual hit boxes, as well as lags and what not. It's not about Elusive's ability, that specific kill easily could have been just a fluke, not necessarily a reproducible occurence.

    I fail to see why high turning speeds would affect anything. Just because the player spins in place doesn't change anything abot hit boxes or projectiles, which are still just pieces of geometry.
  14. Demigan

    In one video I found more than 9 of these events.
    This isn't 'just a fluke', this is consistent.
  15. Iridar51

    Why would it apply just to drag shotting then? And what's the threshold for that "rapid turn"? Randomly flailing the crosshair in general direction of the enemy should theoretically triple the accuracy or DPS then, no?
  16. Demigan

    I have no idea how it works, I'm just telling you what is observed:
    When doing a drag shot at high speeds, you see multiple impacts and hits that should not have hit.

    It stands to reason that this does not theoretically triple DPS, since most weapons would have too much bullets miss their target. It works on high-damage, single shot weapons like slugs shotguns and snipers. It does increase accuracy, how much? I don't know. Does it work at long ranges? I don't know.