let me explain something about events. a client hits a button, the game/server does some other stuff, sends what are called 'events' to the clients that are connected. those events tell the client to do stuff. This is the way quake3 does things. (q2 also but not really).
When a mega goes off it's actually firing more then one shot at once. its firing 5 shots. that's all well and good, but there's no reason for clients to get 5 events per frame for something that's just gonna draw bullets. So what I did was have it broadcast 1 event per frame, like a chaingun, and have the client do the other 5 events by guess and by golly. That means that ok, the actual traces won't line up with the marks on the server side. There is no reason to do that percise of a trace in my eyes since its such a spread and so fast, noone is going to be able to dance around the bullets its so random; the attacker has no way to choose where those bullets go in the spread.
i did the same thing with the pellet. the pellet rocket does 8 traces when it blows up. what i did was send 1 event to the clients, the clients draw the 8 marks wherever they want and do the traces wherever they want. its simpler that way and cuts down allot on bandwidth usage.
if anyone's gonna argue against this, cause i'm interested in anything if i missed anything, let me know now. this is not the way pistols/machineguns/sniperrifles are done, this is only for 'blast' events. also keep in mind: who really cares if the mega's or the pellet's bulletmarks don't line up to the damage traces?
remember 3 gunners firing means 15 events per frame sent to a client. now it's 3 events per frame.
that's all. lemme know what you think.
