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[Jake Baker]

Great topic. The core architectural difference between hitscan and ballistic registration usually comes down to where the server enforces authority over the shot. On hitscan, the cleanest modern approach is server-side lag compensation with position rewinding: the client sends a fire event plus its predicted snapshot, the server traces a raycast from the weapon’s origin at the exact server tick the shot was registered, then temporarily rewinds each nearby player’s position history to that tick before validating the intersection against their hitboxes. This is what games like VALORANT and CS2 use to make your shots feel responsive while keeping the server authoritative—the catch is that rewinding has a window limit (usually ~500ms), so server-side hitscan still can’t fully solve rubberbanding for players who’ve been lagging hard. Deferred hitscan (client predicts, server validates async) trades some “hit feel” for fewer false hits, which is why many competitive titles still favor server-authoritative hitscan despite the input latency.

For ballistic projectiles, you’re dealing with a fundamentally different problem because the trajectory itself is the entity the server must simulate. The server owns the full physics sim—velocity, gravity, drag, and travel time—

"Nintendo 64 with UltraHDMI mod + EverDrive 64 X7 setup."

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