Fakeshaft

Fakeshaft is a controversial topic in the QuakeWorld community.

History

The concept of fakeshaft seems to be inherited from Quake3's native "cl_TrueLightning" console variable, and mimics it's behaviour. The controversy is: unlike in the Quake3 community, where cl_TrueLightning is left alone, in the QW community, for a long time this concept was thought to be a kind of cheat, and thus banned from ruleset smackdown, and thus from most tournaments.

What it does

Paraphrased from the ezQuake docs: The Lightning Gun fires 10 shots per second with 30 damage points each (300 damage points per second) in QuakeWorld.

Originally, the rendered beam position on the client viewscreen was also updated only 10 times per second, according to where the last damage hit went.

By enabling fakeshaft feature, the shaft beam will not stay on the same position for the whole 100 miliseconds. If you move your crosshair away from where the last shaft hit went, the shaft will still point to your current crosshair position, by linearly interpolating the movement. If you use full fakeshaft (value "1"), shaft beam will always point straight to the crosshair.

Discussion

The case for fakeshaft being a cheat is the claim that it helps aiming the Lightning Gun. It makes you less distracted from the "swaying a telephone post around" syndrome, e.g. the lightning shaft does not lag behind the cursor.

This is said to help higher pings most (because during lower pings fakeshaft is a lot like normal shaft anyway).

The case for fakeshaft not being a cheat responds to the above claim by saying that fakeshaft hurts as well as it helps. Supposing standard 77 frame per second rendering, 67 of those frames have the potential to draw the shaft away from the point where it is actually hitting. Thus, when the opponent is dodging vigorously, fakeshaft's illusion does not let you know where the shaft is hitting for 87% of the time, making it harder to aim the next cell for maximum damage by placing it in the middle of players current position, and where he is strafing to.

This illusion is most visible (and therefore most detrimental) during higher pings (again, because during lower pings fakeshaft is a lot like the normal shaft).

However, the above case can be discarded alltogether, because the same illusion of fakeshaft is possible by using various techniques, including hud elements, modified v_weapon model for LG, larger crosshair, cutting out a thin rectangular piece of paper and taping it to your monitor, etc, all of which were never banned (or are impossible to ban).