phantom rifle firing

[______________Hodaka]

I assume this is a bug. Two things now happen when fighting mobs and shooting them with my rifle.

1) The rifle almost always fires twice, one is always a phantom shot and doesn't seem to even use ammo. Definitely no damage.
That one has existed a while.

2) Suddenly my rifle will start firing fast over and over and over again, but it's another phantom shot. The problem with this is, I'm getting shot several times in a row by the Mob I'm attacking, and I've even died from this. After several shots, suddenly one real shot will fire and the effect goes away until the next time it decides to rear it's ugly head..

Both of these waste valuable fight time and could cost a character their life, but the second is really deadly because it's a prolonged amount of time where you're not doing a single drop of damage and the mob is pounding the snot out of you..

I died needing 1k of experience to level in a mission last night to a "gray" because of this bug

[__________starknaked]

Ok, I don't think you're actually losing anything because of this.

Basically, the animation that you see when you see your character firing and hear the gun firing, this has nothing to do with the actual firing that takes place.

The text that you see in the chat window which tells you when damage has been done is a much more accurate representation of what's going on in the fight.

That rapid firing that goes on now happens while your gun is reloading, so that's why you do no damage when that is happening.

[______________Hodaka]

Maybe I'm just hallucinating,but it sure seemed to take *A LOT* longer than my normal reload time. I didn't time it however, I just died..

I had it happen today, and took someone's suggestion to move around. I jumped in the air and my normal shot then hit the mob and i kept firing normally again. I did this everytime it happened and it seemed to significantly cut down the amount of phantom firing that went on..

Guess for accuracy I should dig out my stopwatch to time it.. these are all just perceived times..

[cold]

Originally posted by jws


1) The rifle almost always fires twice, one is always a phantom shot and doesn't seem to even use ammo. Definitely no damage.
That one has existed a while.

It's not only the rifle, all weapons I've used do this, including melee. I have no idea why, though. I've seen this in other games games too (Baldur's Gate), maybe it's just a trick to make the battles look more intense.

2) Suddenly my rifle will start firing fast over and over and over again, but it's another phantom shot. The problem with this is, I'm getting shot several times in a row by the Mob I'm attacking, and I've even died from this. After several shots, suddenly one real shot will fire and the effect goes away until the next time it decides to rear it's ugly head..

This happens when your gun is empty. My guess is that your character is pulling the trigger rapidly and doesn't realize until a few seconds later that it's empty

[_______________spydr]

Most of the phantom firing is an artifact of lag.

Your machine calculates that you should fire ...NOW! So it shows it. A split-second later, the server says "FIRE!" So it shows it...

It's the difference between what your computer says and what the server says. Since the server is the one that does the damage and the inv control, only those shots count towards damage and ammo. When it string-phantoms, thats a pc-server desync (probably); your computer says you are HERE and their server says you are THERE. Your computer has no mechanism for checking your location. It's particularly bad when your computer thinks you are out of range of the mob, and the mob is meleeing you, because it's in the right place (according to the server). Some shortcut, bandwidth- and processor-saving piece of code makes your computer check to see if you're in range, so if your computer thinks you are at X,Y; and their server thinks you're at D,H; and the distance is all wrong, you can't attack because you're out of range, but the mob can (and does) because they are in range... It leads to big problems.

I've been asking for a /resync command for a while now (started shortly after the first forum wipe), so we don't have to alt-f4-f4 and reload AO to just get back into sync. And a resync command would be really simple. It would just warp you to where the server says you are, as well as warping any critters in view-distance. Simple as 3.14159265359....

[Bauxite]

It is NOT a reload thing, I have two computers and two accounts, and the other computer sees the first continue shooting a dead corpse.

In FACT, it will continue shooting this same dead corpse even while another monster beats the crap out of them. It CAN get you killed while not fighting back.

If you do nothing, it tends to "correct" itself in 30-60 seconds, but thats ages versus some pissed off mean red thing, especially if it would only need a little extra damage to die faster while your group tries to blow it away.

Amazing how many bugs you can notice with two monitors side-by-side. For example, there are NO THIN SOLITUS FEMALES. You can choose thin, solitus and female, but guess what? Everyone else sees you as a regular solitus female on their screen. Didn't bother to check males, but whens the last time you saw a thing sol male eh? Fat cannot be hidden however.

[cold]

The only time I saw it happen, is when you kill a monster with your last bullet. I don't use that much ranged weapons though, so not 100% sure.

[______________Zierow]

I play both an Agent and Soldier as well... and both experience phantom fire.

I can't really say it's a lag issue, because I really don't lag. Hard to say it's a bug, because it's really never hindered me. It's more like an extra effect that shouldn't be there

The reason it throws me off because I've noticed a bug where when you reload now if you try using burst or fling you lose it with no damage applied. And with the phantom fire, it's harder for me to notice when i'm reloading.

And I can't confirm that the phantom fire slows my reloading process either. Both seem to reload at thier estimated times.

That's just my take on it.