After mangling Minecraft's code for over 6 years I've seen the vanilla game evolve so much further than I think anyone could have even guessed. If you told me back in 2011 that you could make an Atari 2600 emulation in the BASE VANILLA GAME, I would have sent you to the looney bin. But here we are, with armor stands and NBT code long enough to fill a small novel, and the next update, "The Update Aquatica", is just around the corner. But all this time, something fundamental has been missing. A key concept and simple program that predates Minecraft by a decade; Raycasting. Specifically Omni-directional Raycasting, or just a straight line that can be drawn from a point and directed anywhere in a 3-D space. Basically how projectiles in any 3-D game work, by drawing a line starting from you and traveling wherever you look. Minecraft Command Crafters have STRUGGLED with the very basics of this simple concept, myself included. It puts a hard limit on what can be accomplished in the base game. So I thought to myself, what if this basic algorithm found in every 3-D game with a gun in it was just plopped into the game with one, simple, brand new entity.

This is not real. This is not in the game, but if it was, this is what I think it might look like.

The command shown is not real, but if such a thing as a "raycast" entity exists, it could be formatted in a way like this. You summon the entity. It is invisible and has a tag of "speed" that makes it constantly move by itself at that speed in the direction that it is facing. When summoned via an execute command, it is spawned facing the same way as the entity it was executed off of. Meaning when you summon it, you essentially have an Omni-directional Ray with ONE command. The other tags I've added are extra customizations that this entity might have, like what particle effect to display on the path of the ray, how fast it moves, how long it lasts, and how large the area of the ray is. This isn't even that hard to program! Legendary mods like the Flans's Mod have been doing it for years, why not include a way to do it in vanilla?

This is what executing the the command above would look like.

After you summon it, you simply need a command to execute if any player/mob is in the radius of 0 of the ray, which basically means intersecting the ray, and you can do whatever you want with it! Set the entity that was "hit" on fire, make them explode, kill the ray if it hits its target, or don't and have a piercing projectile. There's a lot of design space.

Here's another example, with the speed and size changed to create an instant \"hitscan\" projectile.

Here is a simulated result.

Just think of the stuff that the Einsteins of the Minecraft Community (aka not me) could create! Boss battles with epic projectiles to dodge, weapons that shoot devastating missiles or lasers, and yes, you could add guns in Minecraft. A full recreation of Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty with every single weapon working with less than 10 commands.

I think if something like this actually was added in a future update, it would be just as revolutionary if not more than when the mighty armor stand was introduced.

So what do you think. Is this a future you want to live in? I know I do.