Invisible bots

[Whales]

I was playing on Manhattan just now and ran into invisible bots on three separate occasions. The first time it was a steel giant who killed me, when it did the killcam snapped the bot spawn location. The last one I encountered was another heavy who was sleeping from the gate cap and it appeared that nobody on my team saw him.
Has this been happening to anybody else?

[SirP1zza]

record fix; stop
Isn't it just another glitch which can be fixed by this or are you thinking about something different?

[Whales]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[itsgalf]

yeah it's been happening a lot more lately to me. It's similar to the 'false-giant' glitch.

record a demo and stop it, like what P1zza said.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

I'm inclined to agree with the responses above. Sounds like the same kind of glitch that makes regular bots look like giants and such. I think TF2 in general has had "players are invisible" type glitches more frequently lately for whatever reason.

What generally happens is that if the server lags a bit, or more likely, if your connection to the server is a bit unreliable, you'll drop a few packets and your game client will get a slightly wrong idea of what's going on. Basically the game engine tries to save bandwidth by having the server just send you data about the stuff that's changed since the last frame, but if your connection happens to drop a packet from the server that said "this robot is not a giant, and oh yeah, by the way, he shouldn't be invisible either", then your game client may wrongly believe he's supposed to be a giant and invisible until told otherwise. The game server thinks your client got the packet, so it doesn't realize anything is wrong.

The reason why the "record demo; stop" trick works is that it makes the server send your client a full update. So if your game client had accumulated various inconsistencies because of dropped packets or whatever, the full update will send all of the information about what's currently going on in the current frame, meaning that anything that's gotten screwed up previously will generally get corrected.

Originally posted by Prince Of Whales:

The first time it was a steel giant who killed me, when it did the killcam snapped the bot spawn location.

Based on what this sounds like, there's a small chance this could be a legitimate game bug. If you ever get a screenshot, or a video, or a demo file, post it and we can take a look.

[GIR]

Originally posted by sigsegv:

I'm inclined to agree with the responses above. Sounds like the same kind of glitch that makes regular bots look like giants and such. I think TF2 in general has had "players are invisible" type glitches more frequently lately for whatever reason.

What generally happens is that if the server lags a bit, or more likely, if your connection to the server is a bit unreliable, you'll drop a few packets and your game client will get a slightly wrong idea of what's going on. Basically the game engine tries to save bandwidth by having the server just send you data about the stuff that's changed since the last frame, but if your connection happens to drop a packet from the server that said "this robot is not a giant, and oh yeah, by the way, he shouldn't be invisible either", then your game client may wrongly believe he's supposed to be a giant and invisible until told otherwise. The game server thinks your client got the packet, so it doesn't realize anything is wrong.

The reason why the "record demo; stop" trick works is that it makes the server send your client a full update. So if your game client had accumulated various inconsistencies because of dropped packets or whatever, the full update will send all of the information about what's currently going on in the current frame, meaning that anything that's gotten screwed up previously will generally get corrected.

Originally posted by Prince Of Whales:

The first time it was a steel giant who killed me, when it did the killcam snapped the bot spawn location.

Based on what this sounds like, there's a small chance this could be a legitimate game bug. If you ever get a screenshot, or a video, or a demo file, post it and we can take a look.

it also resets your scoreboard.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Originally posted by GIR:

it also resets your scoreboard.

I'm working on figuring out why some of the scoreboard stats get messed up at various times. Particularly when players leave and join the server, aside from the lag thing.

I've figured out which entities are responsible for tracking the stat numbers, so I'm making some progress.

[EyeOculus]

I never had a natural glitch/lag/dpsdrop/whatever, that causes invisible Bots or WannaBeGiants. I forced it once with a huge ping and huge FPS drop.

[Kitt 🌟 Stargazer]

Only time I've seen invisible robots is when I was using custom models for them that fixed all their hit boxes. After I removed it they stop giving me that issue. I'm guessing it has to do with sv_pure.

I still get giant normal bots though as well as bots wielding multiple weapons when they're obviously not suppose to. I usually get a frame rate loss when those kick in where the game very briefly seems to get stuck and then unlocks, causing for these weird bugs to kick in. It also can reset stats when it kicks in as well.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Originally posted by Eye:

I never had a natural glitch/lag/dpsdrop/whatever, that causes invisible Bots or WannaBeGiants. I forced it once with a huge ping and huge FPS drop.

Well specifically you would need packet loss to happen. Really high ping and low client FPS still might mean that your client gets all the packets, just later than it should.

The cheat cvar net_fakeloss should probably trigger it pretty often. Maybe I should make a video of that.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Actually for some reason I can't get this kind of glitch to happen at all between my dedicated server and my PC client. Even with loss, high latency, and low server framerate. Don't know what ingredient I'm missing.

[SirP1zza]

Originally posted by sigsegv:

Actually for some reason I can't get this kind of glitch to happen at all between my dedicated server and my PC client. Even with loss, high latency, and low server framerate. Don't know what ingredient I'm missing.

Well I get that glitch alot with my pc,maybe get a max performance config to drop down pc fps?

[Whales]

I have had pings of up to 2k (ping in console) quite a few times and this is the first time it happpened to me

[76561198143988551]

There was this one time at coaltown, the whole team got whipped out by a flaming invisible giant heavy at bot-spawn (He didn't even move from there) and half of the team was on top of the middle buildings or behind the fences. After that we couldn't get out from our spawn point because we got "sniped" by that one heavy, we couldn't kill it since it had uber-protection or at least we thought that.

Can anyone explain this?

[Mk✿Flower]

I see them a lot too. But luckily you can predict the bots movement patterns and spam in that general direction until the killfeed says so.

[Soldier Claus]

Originally posted by Mk✿Flower:

I see them a lot too. But luckily you can predict the bots movement patterns and spam in that general direction until the killfeed says so.

This is admittedly the fix I usually use. Typing is hard.