ah, my first love in FPS games, sniping! regretably, i've found no game that does sniping correctly, even operation flashpoint. and since no one's mentioned this yet, the biggest thing i find wrong with sniper roles is not the targetting, or trajectories or realism of the weapon or shooter, it's the terrain and camoflage, or rather, the lack thereof. one of the first things you learn in sniper school has nothing to do with shooting itself. you learn the art of hiding! and that means camoflage and finding decent cover.

now, current 3d games doing polygon rendering do make this a bit of a problem. so, i can forgive a certain amount of this, but i've yet to see a game that does almost any sort of camoflage for the player himself. now granted, i havent played them all. in fact, whereas i've downloaded america's army, i never installed it, so, maybe someone has done it. but so far, i've seen very little done along these lines. the biggest problem for a sniper is not shooting; it's being found out. in opf i would snipe and snipe well, but the enemy ai was WAY too intelligent about finding me for the most part. decent cover was also very hard to come by. sure, you could find a bush to hide under, but because of the mechanics of modern computer graphics, this really doesnt work that well and you are rarely truly, 'covered up'. in enemy territory it's even worse.

also, in enemy territory, there is one dedicated sniper server i play on. it's the only public server i know that does this. everyone is a sniper. you cant roll up any other classes. the two enemies are divided by a large gorge with only one way to cross to the other side. thus, if you want to play an infiltrator covert ops guy, your chances of making it across that gorge (tightrope walking on a power wire) are pretty remote, being that everyone watches that wire. but the real problem is cover. it's fairly easy to spot anyone, especially since you're also looking through a zoomable scope (normally. you can use a sten or the other louder rifle too). but noone has camoflage of any sort and in fact, some of the uniforms even somewhat highlight you on the map.

and yes, i'd love to play a true sniper game with true physics. anyone that's ever fired a high powered rifle knows about trajectories, range, wind and heartbeats. even weather can play a part in aiming. but you're also going to have to correct 3d graphics to get a good game.

i also agree with the comment someone made about support and with the statement about numbers of troops and ratios. while it's true a sniper can effectively render a decent sized group somewhat immobile, it's also true that numbers can easily overwhelm a lone sniper. games currently dont allow for that much, with the best MP games going up to about 64 players in the FPS category. thus, it's somewhat difficult with map sizes and numbers of players and so on, to play as a sniper in most games. add in unrealistic tweaks done by devs and the sniper class is often relegated to obscurity. you also have to factor in such things as range of vision. games made with the quake type editors tend to purposely limit map ranges due to frame rate considerations. the longer your line of sight, the harder for the comptuter and vid card to keep up. so, you tend to see a lot of maps done with 'fog' or 'haze' to limit line of sight.

games and gaming have come a long way, but it's a far cry from reality yet. but, it keeps advancing. so, maybe one of these days....

K.