in a first person shooter game with realistic guns (ie handguns, semiautomatics).. maybe have no crosshair and have the gun kind of aim at the player itself just like in tomb raider, however have the aim improve with more experience or rank. have crouching help too. just an idea =/

So wait. Whose aiming the gun here? Auto aim has been done in doom and in every console fps since then. Aim improving with experience A) sucks major balls B) done in deus ex. No cross hair, yeah, right.

The Getaway

one of the most realistic game. no crosshair. no health bar. no driving arrow indicator.

never even heard of that game acrid_acid, looks like a better version of GTA3.

Been thinking about that myself for a realistic shooter. Perhaps have a "foggy" region that shrinks when you aim at a target and to aim even better, you bring up the weapon in your line of sight.
No ranking, no skills or anything like it. Takes away the whole idea with a realistic shooter, doesn''t it?

How about making bullets do a realistic amount of damage to an organic body? Someone taking a single bullet in the chest really should not be able to move much.

Iron sights were used in an Unreal Tournament mod called Infiltration. Basically, you brought the sights up to your eye, and used them as a crosshair. It was impractical to run everywhere with a gun up to your face, so you carried it at a low ready, which made shooting innaccurate. If you got surprised, you could either shoot from the hip and hope, or grab some cover and aim. it was neat, and if you didn''t understand where the point-of-aim was on the various weapons you were using, you couldn''t aim well at all.

As to realistic damage, that''s a very sophisticated topic. It''s come up in the zombie thread in Game Writing, and I thimk that outside of a survival type game, realistic wound dynamics is more trouble than it''s worth. I get shot in the chest, I either want to lose some HP and keep fighting or just die and respawn. If my character is crippled by blinding pain, unable to use one of his arms, and incapable of opening his eyes, he''s of no use to me as an avatar. In Rainbow 6, you could be "incapacitated", which was the same as dead, except that character would recover over the course of a few months and be available for a mission down the line.

azn_elliot, if you just mean having accuracy depend more on character stats than on player skill, it''s a problem that a bunch of people, myself included, worked onfor a project a while back. We wound up giving the player a simple, approximate aiming system, and then letting the character pick the target closest to the crosshairs and shoot at it. So it doesn''t matter if your targetting reticle is right on or not, it''s just for choosing a target, not for aiming the gun. We included a manual-aim feature for when the player wants to shoot bottles or something, but fighting was more dependent on the character, unless the player sucked too much to get the reticle anywhere near the target.