Why QC's hitboxes are a problem, and will continue to be so.

[Allah]

From an ACTUAL GAME DEV :

http://forums.reflexarena.com/...
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There are technical reasons why the Keel model in Quake 3 is "conveniently standing around in his cilindrical hitbox" and gameplay reasons why 99% percent of players forced their playermodels to Keel


Hitboxes in Quake 3 are axis-aligned bounding boxes, meaning they don't rotate on any axis, regardless of what the player does. AABBs are used it most games when possible because it's extremely fast to calculate collision and hits against them. QuakeLive moved to a cylinder hitbox for hit detection but I'm confident it always remains flat on the ground for similar reasons.

So, most players used Keel because he was one of the few models that actually sat nicely within that AABB and didn't leave it. Quake 3 had some characters with far more interesting animations, but they were generally avoided because of how inaccurate they were. For example, the Doom model occasionally does a backflip. When he's upside down at the apex of his jump, his entire legs are outside the bounds of the hitbox (so if you shoot them, nothing will happen). But then at the bottom, there's half a player worth of "empty" hitbox (so if you shoot the empty space below them, you'll get a hit).

3. The current hitbox for you guys is a standard AABB, same as Quake3.


As you can see, there's issues with it. It's easy to have the player rotated in a way where he doesn't fill out the hitbox nicely and (since the hitbox is axis-aligned), there's certain angles that give a greater surface area to aim at than others. This was annoyingly inconsistent in Quake 3, so Quake Live eventually replaced them with cylinders to minimize those issues.

The current hitbox we've created for the next update is a capsule shape.*


This significantly reduces all of the issues above, to an even greater extent than cylinder hitboxes do. The hostile was actually designed around this hitbox shape and if you look at one of the early concepts created literally years ago, you can see the capsule design in the background.

So yes, as of the next update, the hitbox will "coincide strongly with the model's geometry" -- although not CS:GO style. Despite seeming good on paper, capsule-per-bones systems like that have a ton of technical issues to go with them too. The most obvious is that once you're sending everything over the internet, it ends up feeling less accurate as there's far more to get out of sync / incorrectly extrapolated between client and server. One potential solution to that would be client side hit detection, but that generally doesn't feel nice to be on the receiving end of (and is a cheaters wet dream). Doom 3 actually had per-pixel hit detection, but it was offline only for exactly these reasons.

And really, a system like that doesn't even make sense in a game like Reflex.

Given the movement speeds, shots to the lower half of a player would basically be a coin toss,

https://clips.twitch.tv/EasyFr...

even if we could magically have the hitbox immune to network issues. I'm pretty confident that if we implemented it, neither us developers or our players would be happy with the way it felt.

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The slow transition from AFPS to modern military shooters can be easily understood through these art concerns being a higher priority than gameplay and that's not the way we work -- gameplay comes first, even if it looks a bit stupid. Bunny hopping will always look a bit stupid, so you're not likely to see a modern AAA title that has bunny hopping. You can't have accurate crosshairs unless you fire from the middle of the view, so you get aiming-down-sights. It looks wrong if you instantly transition to aiming down sights, so you get the delay as the view lerps. It looks wrong if you instantly trigger animations, so you get less responsive input. It looks wrong if you switch weapons in 100ms, so you get extremely long switch delays.

There are hundreds of examples of this, and the core difference between Reflex and other games is that we will always put gameplay first and do the best we can to make it not look weird not creating gameplay around what looks best.

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So besides being interesting, there is as very specific point that needs to be made.

The old AABB hit boxes, regardless of shape were faster to communicate (less upload usage), and faster to calculate ( less CPU usage) and are better for faster paced games, and better for countering desync(getting-out-of-sync/incorrect extrapolation).

There is desync in all FPS MP games, but in something like Siege, where characters move EXTREAMLY slowly RELATIVE to games like Quake, it's not actually a problem, because characters cannot move fast enough during the desync that they will get out of the enemy crosshairs.
Example, fastest character sprinting in Siege is slower than the slowest character walking in Quake Champions.

The Dev's for QC have not, and do not recognize this. I recall once in a AUA Tim Willits and Adam Pyle giggling about the hit-boxes "being too accurate", as if it meant the "game was too technically good", telling me neither of them have played AFPS in a long time, so I question why either of them are working on or representing it.

Also, given that AABB is a very old (tested, simple, reliable, effective) method, it is VERY likely that the reason this is not in the game, is specifically because Id didn't want it.

They wanted to have pinpoint accuracy of modern shooters,
without realizing that these capsule-per-bone hit-box systems only work because
those games don't fight desync by increasing hit box size to perhaps 1.2 times the size of the target,
but slow down the target 4 to 5 times compared to how fast targets move in QC.

The reason given for moving to "static hit boxes" is supposedly CPU usage... but they would further decrease users upload rates, their server CPU usage, and effectively counter lag by choosing a method that doesn't require specific angle orientation, phase of animation or their data and calculations.

When you look how low players satisfaction is withe capsule-per-bone hit boxes, and you see how Saber3D already had this effective method ready to go, you have to be pretty stubborn to think that since your first solution was a Hiroshima of a failure, that a hybrid of the good system and bad one will create something better than either of them.

Its going to have the same problems of just slightly desynced hit-box location during the combination of fast movement, turning direction, and changes in animation.
Enough to cause irregular shotgun damage, and "OMFG I can't believe it" misses to targets that on YOUR screen you clearly hit.

Players will still go "ADADADADA" with Sorlag and Anarchy and it will still work because their isn't enough "extra" hit box to keep this cheap bull ____ from being effective.

Cylinder hit boxes don't have the problem of a hit being given or denied based on a targets animation state or angle of orientation, and being just a little bit bigger than the target minimizes de-sync at high movement speed.

Saber Interactive, who has been getting most of the ____ shoveled on them, is actually probably not really the one at fault for this problem.
It's not even the fault of their stupid fps/upload-rate syncing, since with AABB hit-boxes, it would actually be good thing to upload that often since it would update the server rapidly, and a high tick rate for server upload-to-client like 120 or higher could be applied with minimum cost.

But someone at Id is stuck on this bad idea: the only thing they've opted to change is the impact of animation phase, within the current animation state on the hit boxes. I don't think that will be enough.

[HAUSER]

You don't have to be a dev to know this, most of veteran players (90% of the current playerbase) know what's wrong with hitboxes.

But I can't deny it was a very interesting read :D

[Allah]

Originally posted by HAUSER:

You don't have to be a dev to know this, most of veteran players (90% of the current playerbase) know what's wrong with hitboxes.

But I can't deny it was a very interesting read :D

Thanks, although obviously not mostly my own :>)
Then the question is, if you don't have to be a Dev to know this about hit boxes, then how much else did ID forget?