Shooting is a skill and, like all skills, it requires good teaching and lots of practice between lessons or between competitions. Practice doesn't come cheap in terms of time, cartridges and clays but with DryFire you can shoot hundreds of targets every day in your own home with a level of feedback impossible outdoors. Version 5 is the latest release of DryFire software and is supplied with all new systems. Customers with Version 4 black dual head simulators may upgrade to version 5 via the store. The photo below shows how to identify a Version 4 system by the '4' moulded into the camera head. When your shotgun is loaded, tap the screen to pull the clay pigeon and grab the gun. Aim to the target by dragging your finger. When you have the target aquired, tap again to shoot.

Latest releases

DryFire Competition, DryFire Rifle & Pistol and Swing have now been released.

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The combination of winter and Covid means all of us will be out of practice at the start of next season. This could be a big opportunity for those who want to be up with the winners when competitions begin again - intensive practice at home with DryFire will keep skills honed to perfection.

For 20 years DryFire has helped Sunday shooters and champions improve their scores by providing intensive practice against highly accurate targets - all in the comfort of home. So, now is time to take the opportunity to spend an hour or two each day improving and honing your shooting skills with DryFire ready for the start of the 2021 season.

Using your own gun you can practise any discipline: trap, skeet and sporting, at any level: club, national and international. Targets follow national and international rules with the same angular trajectories, and the same angular speeds, as clays outdoors.

Pigeon Shooting Games

You select the layout or target you want, e.g. Olympic Skeet Station 4 doubles, stand in front of the wall or screen, take up your shooting position, swing back to your hold point, call 'Pull', acquire the target, start your swing, allow the correct amount of lead, fire and follow through - exactly as you do outdoors.

DryFire provides accurate feedback, to the nearest fraction of an inch, as to where your shot went: above, below, ahead, behind - the sort of feedback we rarely get outdoors.

International distributors wanted

We are actively looking for additional DryFire distributors and dealers.

Note for readers in the USA

Please see the information at the top of the support page.

Long before I picked up a shotgun for the first time, my experience of shooting involved a NES Zapper and the Nintendo game Duck Hunt. A small box-shaped television would project a pixelated duck on to a convex screen made of thick glass, at which my friends and I would shoot wildly. Accuracy never felt like a major consideration to the game’s developers, and pointing the toy gun in the general direction of the TV would kill your target and send an on-screen pet retriever bounding off to collect the digital quarry.

Approximately 20 years later, the DryFire training system took the accuracy requirement a lot further. The system sent a laser dot across a wall in your house that early users would try to catch. While fun, the technology was still in its infancy and never recreated the clay shooting experience.

Two years ago, DryFire received a makeover. Software developer and distributor Wordcraft International re-launched the product after consulting with the shooting community about the flight of clays, how they react in different conditions and how much lead you need to break them. In doing this, the company became the UK’s leading target simulator. It now boasts over 2,500 units around the country, and businesses are catching on.

The first shotgun theatre is now located in Rotherham at the South Yorkshire Shooting Club. An air rifle range at its roots, the club’s owner, Trevor Horner – a canny businessman who also behind the Idleback shooting chair – argues that the industrial estate location is a benefit. “The object was to offer a shooting facility to an urban district rather than being limited to rural setting, and when DryFire became available, it was an obvious next step for the club.”

Built like a large home cinema room, the simulator projects a typical Olympic Trap layout with a picturesque wooded background on to a 5x5m wall. In the centre of the room is a table, on which sits a Marocchi shotgun with a laser pointer in its top barrel, a light magnetic electronic unit attached to the action, and a pressure sensor wrapped around the trigger.

The computer system is quite incredible. One laptop will easily run the DryFire program and you can save each shooter’s profile according to their height and choice of shotgun, including barrel length, preferred chokes, cartridges, point-of-impact and of-pull. This is a useful feature for a club like South Yorkshire that’s attracting an increasing number of shooters. Some come for coaching sessions while others use it for fun, but a lot of people have returned for second, third and fourth goes. Your personal profile records several thousand shots and can replay them to measure your development.

Trevor continues: “The system is there for novice shooters and sportsmen. You can come along to practise a single shot if there’s a target you’re struggling with, because DryFire tells you what the fault is. There’s also corporate and fun days we put on where we blend it with the airgun side of the shooting club.”

Once set up on the laptop, the product is easy to use. You aim at a dot in the centre to calculate your eye line in relation to the projector, and you’re away. You can select from a seemingly endless number of layouts for all disciplines, including game, and training options.

My first DryFire attempt was dismal. Just two out of 15 targets broke, and each shot gave detailed explanation about how bad I was: yet it had an addictive video-game like quality. After three goes, during which I amassed a total score of 8ex-40, it was time to figure out how I could improve. Andrea Roach, managing director at Wordcraft International, was on hand to offer assistance and showed me through the AimPoint feature.

Developed in the past few years after studying bucket loads of data about clay target flight lines, AimPoint provides the user with a travelling cross-hair on the screen that moves in front of the target to give you the correct lead picture in each situation. In addition to this, Andrea took me through the on-screen information that pops up following each missed or made shot: “The pointing error is the distance between the centre of the clay and the centre of the shot cloud. It tells us how far below and to the left we are away from this particular target. You can see how far the target had travelled by the time you pulled the trigger, and how many seconds it had been in the air for.”

My aim was the issue with most of the targets, but on occasion I had simply let the clay travel too far and lost too much power in the shot to break it. This is where talented shooters, or those with coaches, could break down the shot in detail and build up different ways of approaching certain situations.

After Andrea’s advice on a new choke setup, and the help of AimPoint, my scores started to creep up. One’s natural reaction on these systems is to aim at the clay no matter what – that’s what 25 years of pixel-based gaming does to you. But with the arrival of Nintendo Wii, the intuition of X-box Kinect, and now the lifelike clay simulation of DryFire, interactive computer systems have never been more clever.

If you approach the DryFire simulatorat South Yorkshire Shooting Club in the same way you would a clay target at your favourite outdoor shooting ground, the experience won’t feel like a simulation, but a real and useful training system that can improve your target-hitting capabilities.

Pigeon Simulator Games