Essentially, there are three different kinds of weapons commonly used in video games:

Essentially, there are three different kinds of weapons commonly used in video games:


And these can be further broken down into more phyla, e.g., melee weapons being broken down into martial arts, blunt weapons, tipped weapons, and edged weapons. And there can be overlap between them such as a knife or a pie being capable of being both a melee and a projectile weapon (or, in the case of the latter, a healing item). And weapons, themselves, are a substrata of means of attack along with magic and traps.

My favorite of this strata, however, is explosives, which are commonly broken down into rocket launchers, grenades, grenade launchers, and mines. They're often tricky to use but have a big payoff (especially true for time bombs).

Which games have the best bombs? Which games have the worst?

Plasma sticky grenades from Halo, grenades that stick to others in general
Any plantable explosive in stealth games
The bomchus from zelda
Several grenades from splatoon/splatoon 2 (the curling one is my favourite)

The three you listed are correct, but there are two more.

Beams? Hitscans? Wouldn't those be classifications of projectile-functions along with Ballistics?

There were just fucking silly. The remote charges were great too, sticking them to random shitheads, passing vehicles or multiple support structures.

A beam is like a projectile mixed with a hitscan. The beam goes from you or your gun to the closest obstruction. Typically, a beam stays in place as long as you're holding down the fire button. Laser weapons are typically beams in most games.

Hitscan is a bit complicated. It's just a way for the game to determine if your attack will hit. It can do two things: hit the target or not. Sometimes they're connected to projectiles, but traditionally they're not. Further, some games take the hitscan and complicate it so that it resembles a projectile.

If you had these at max level, you could simply spam them on a single tree, drive a car in front of them and wait for an enemy group to pass by.

Use your magic magnet-like gadget to draw them all near the bomb it would blow up. Even if they survived the explosion, the flying wreck of the car would kill any survivors.
Alternatively you could sit inside the car and use your invisibility skill. Once a car full of enemies drove by, you shot the explosives and the car would be like a fucking canon ball, destroying the enemy vehicle but you stayed alive because there is no team/self damage.

You could do a shitload of other tricks such as spaming both explosives and other bomb gadgets into a place and drawing enemies in. It was the most fun I ever had until EA killed it. Then Revive Network gave us back the game we all loved, and EA once again killed that off too. They will fucking pay.

ask me how you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about

pick one, you can't have both
a beam weapon is just a hitscan weapon that doesn't pulse

What about weapons like the secondary fire for the Link Gun from Unreal? It fires in a straight line like a hitscan, but has velocity like a projectile.

if i can throw a grenade and shoot it, it's good enough for me

Wouldn't explosives fall under projectile weapons? Like, it's not the actual explosion that makes a grenade deadly, it's the fragments, or projectiles, of it.

I assumed we were talking about the lightning or gluon gun. If it operates like a projectile I think it would inherently not be hit scan

No, it's not like Ghostbusters. It's like the laser bolts in the Star Wars movies, where they have a constant velocity rather than a fluctuating velocity like a projectile.

you're confusing projectile with bullet
any object that is moving through space at any velocity is a projectile
but not every projectile is a bullet
hitscan implies that it as you click the mouse it scans the area under your cursor to see if there's something that could be hit that is being hit
if something is a projectile in space it's not operating like this
therefor any "projectile" moving through space is not "hitscan" inherently

Technically everything is a melee weapon, since it involves an object hitting someone.

That's not what projectile means.

Is there any game that does bombs only?
Aside from bomberman?

I thought this at first too but projectile weapons fire projectiles from a weapon held in one's hand while explosives have a blast radius that the user, usually, needs to stay away from. They don't necessarily need fragments, either, as they can also be, for example, caustic liquids or plasmas. Although explosives have some overlap with projectiles in some of their substrata: they can also be traps (like mines), or even melee weapons.

Rocket Launchers and M203's are also projectile weapons anyway (although noob tubes from COD4 aren't as fun because they don't arm until they've traveled a fair distance so that removes the risk-of-harming-yourself factor that makes explosives so delightful to use in addition to the cathartically high damage they have). I was thinking more like Bomb Man's power from Mega Man 1.

HL SLAM
Insurgency C4/IED (even better with sound mods)

A thrown projectile is still a projectile I would think
I think explosives in a lot of games are in a lot of ways projectile-hitscan hybrids
Usually the "explosion" at the end operates in a hitscan sort of way in a radius around the "projectile"
I'm not really sure there are too many games where the actual explosion tracks the individual fragmentations that are implied

When I say rocket launcher I think quake rocket launcher
A lot of people consider the weapon kind of low skill or at least a skill equalizer

Plasma weapons make my peanusweenus hard

projectile-hitscan hybrids… I never really thought of them that way. I'd really like to hear a programmer's opinion on how the behavior of explosives in video games are coded.

...

Back in the day we used to run Goldeneye matches with nothing but mines. Really let the guys who were good at strategy shine, because you can't just shoot someone who goes by. The best that can be managed is to toss a remote mine at them and detonate it, but they might just run away, which of course if you can corral them toward the proximity mines you laid earlier…

RPG 7 rockets in farcry 2 has limited fuel and doesn't self detonate at the range limit like the irl version of it so you could use it as a mortar as well. Not to mention the genius that is the chink mortar they have in that game. It takes some practice to get the timing and ranging right but after that, you're the master of ambushing convoys and outpost from a high place where the enemy AI don't even know where to go to retaliate.

Reminder that this guy made a thread while trying to post.

lol dummy

You know, if you're going to bump this thread: I'd really appreciate it if you made an actual contribution to it.

Like, for example, which Mega Man boss had the best explosive weapon? My money's on the Black Hole bomb because every other bomb was either an ammo hog or underwhelming.

Silent Bomber. You can "shoot" bombs too, but dropping them is a big part of the gameplay.

I am always delighted to get my hands on an RPG-7 in games. It's like a bazooka dressed as an AK-47; the best of both worlds.

Embed related is a comparison of the weapon in 30 different games and, what a surprise, it's a piece of dogshit in MW3.

I'm kinda miffed that it's always only available with the HEAT warheads, instead of the Thermobaric or Fragmentation warheads that are actually used in an anti-personnel role.

If the game in particular, the blast radius is enormous, rocket is fast, and the player is slow, then the projectile/rocket doesn't involve much skill.

If the game in particular, the blast radius is small, rocket is slow, and the player is fast, then the projectile/rocket is a "harder" weapon to use.

What I find really tragic when I'm playing a game is when an explosive is worth so much money that it is wasted when it's used.

I never use C4 in New Vegas because it can be sold for 700-1100 caps and there's too little of it to waste on any enemy.

With the RPG-7 in RE4: the only redeeming thing about it is that the two rocket launchers you can get for free can be sold for a lot of money. The explosion is lame, it turns boss fights into anti-climaxes, you can frag Ashley with and it's a one-time-use disposable item like a LAW so there's no point in using it unless you're a craven little baby and need it to kill the Verdugo.

WAIT.
What if you have a gun fires fists that punch you and then explode?

Why would you want a gun that punches yourself?

Car bombing people in BF2 was always fun too. Fuck you EA, you'll get yours.

Every time I play a newer fallout game I always go fists and explosives. Grenades are everywhere and can be thrown around corners and over barriers to give a huge tactical advantage and are fucking hilarous while fists have never let me down. Not carrying guns (which sell for fuck all anyway) means I can carry more grenades and fists have infinite ammo plus are weightless.

B-bomb jack?

I played Red Faction Guerilla for the longest time just fucking around in the game blowing everything up. There was even a video once but which I can't find anymore, of a multiplayer game where a group of people laid down one singularity bomb at one spot at the same time in the map with the huge pipes. One of the pipes actually flew out of the map and you could see it taking off into the horizon.

MGSV had good explosives.

If I had to implement explosions in a 3D system, how I'd do it would depend on what kind of system was already there. Take minecraft, a voxel game- in its case, you want to destroy all blocks in a sphere of a certain radius, so you already need to code in a distance-from-explosion-centre based 'damage' effect. If you have that, it would be very convenient to extend that to entities. Conversely, if the game already has an efficient and extensive particle system and immutable environments (some kind of fps that's not just hitscan) it can be fine to just have an explosion be a visual effect that emits a shower of invisible bullets in all directions that vanish after a certain amount of time. Given bullets bounce off walls, this means you can hide from explosions behind cover. It works well for destructible cover, too- if 10 bullets were going to hit you, but 5 are used up to break the box you're hiding behind, you get the explosion-like effect of being partially protected. Of course, if your game engine can't handle lots of bullets or doesn't even have many 'bullet'objects (say all the guns are hitscan and the only moving projectiles are, say, rockets) the work you'd need to do to basically add a bullet system from scratch would make it more efficient to just use the earlier inverse-square-distance-from-explosion-centre system and hack in any additional functionality you need.
TL;DR: Depends what your engine can and has to do.

No, most guns aren't projectile based, but hitscan based.
Get your shit together, fag.

Also, what about an area of effect weapon that is not explosive per se, like a flamethrower, or poison gas?

In this context, if your weapon fires a projectile to kill an enemy from a distance and you don't have to get close to him to swing the weapon at his body: it's a projectile weapon whether it uses hitscans or not. Stop being autistic.

Also: flamethrowers are projectile weapons because they shoot projectiles and poison gas in explosive as well because it has an area of effect and you can't get too close to it without taking damage (unless you have a gas mask or something).