Small ship hitboxes really need work

Adept · Post by **Adept** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 9:19 pm

Here is something that I think even most vets aren't too clear on, and which I think need's urgent attention. In Allegiance, or any other shooter, you really hope for "what you see is what you get" to apply when it comes to pumping bullets into your opponent. Unfortunately in Allegiance this isn't even remotely true. I've only recently realised the full extent of the problem. The hitboxes are horribly sloppy and uneven work, and this applies to the original Microsoft stuff as well.

Let's take a few examples. Starting from the mildly problematic.

The IC fighter. Already the biggest of the bunch, but the way the hitbox is defined doubles the volume. Everything within the black lines is hull, as far as Allegiance is conserned, the image we see is just eye candy. That means that the stubby wings more than double the front area of the fig.

The Rix fig would probably need to have it's thickness increased, but even it's not such an impossible target if you know to shoot below it. You'll hit much better than you'd think... Oh, and from above or below, remember it's actually a kite, not a spike with curved wings.

Now for a real problem child. The Dreg interceptor looks like a sleek if spiky creature. With the high agility, you'd think it's a good dogfighter. It would be, but the hitbox is actually that of a flying army tent... or maybe a barn. If you've wondered why everything seems to hit your dreg int, here's a few clues.

From the front, your hitbox is a gigantic square! Look how small your ship looks inside there. The true hit-area is easily five times what you see.

Here's the same ship from the side. It looks even more ridiculous

***

And so on. Microsoft never really polished Allegiance into a ready product. It was an experiment they eventually dropped. We on the other hand love the game, and there is no reason not to make it as good as it can be... and a part of that should be making the hitboxes match what you actually see in game. They don't need to be pixel perfect, but the current situation is a disgrace.

This problem is either mostly unknown (as I hope) or something people mysteriously don't care about... or at least not enough to fix it. I'm therefore volunteering to do my best for fixing this situation. Raingriffin has promised to help me set up and figure out Blender, and I hope to get started next week. This is not a job that requires a terrible amount of skill, but rather patient plodding and being careful not to break things.

I want to do my part in making Allegiance as good as she can be, and this seems like a good place to start.

Spinoza · Post by **Spinoza** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 10:07 pm

Wow, this is worse than I expected... you really need to put more emotion into your voice when you speak of this on TS.

Re: solving the problem, I hope the technical stuff is all there...
AFAIK Alleg accepts only convex objects as hit boxes. I understand that a model can have a multi-part hitbox, I hope it's not a problem. Doing the hitboxes is actually quite simple... just a tad tedious.

I wonder whether the current situation favors noobs or vets?
I would guess that total noobs and uber-whore benefit the most. The noobs just spray and get lucky. The uber whores probably take advantage of this whether they do it consciously or automatically.

People like me probably get a bit screwed... I think the RIX fig front view may be the worst offender for players with average skill.

Here's why:

Shizoku · Post by **Shizoku** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 10:12 pm

This has been known for a long time, lots of people investigated and compared hitboxes when the nix models came out. The problem with altering them now, is that we've gotten to a really nice balanced game based around the current hitboxes. Altering the hitboxes dramatically alters the entire balance of the core resulting in thousands of hours of rebalancing everything.

Personally I would rather see new factions then the cc team having to go back to square one.

Spinoza · Post by **Spinoza** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 10:25 pm

Shizoku wrote:QUOTE (Shizoku @ Oct 25 2009, 02:12 AM) This has been known for a long time, lots of people investigated and compared hitboxes when the nix models came out. The problem with altering them now, is that we've gotten to a really nice balanced game based around the current hitboxes. Altering the hitboxes dramatically alters the entire balance of the core resulting in thousands of hours of rebalancing everything.

Personally I would rather see new factions then the cc team having to go back to square one.

I agree that the game is more or less balanced... across factions and techs!

This however is a different sort of imbalance... an imbalance favoring uber vets with "insider info" and the skill to use it over people like me... even if I memorized all the hitbox shapes, it would take me hundreds of hours to re-train myself to aim for the invisible hitbox instead of the model. BTW, this is more an isue for people with middling aim, because as I demonstrated, we tend to lose more from a small mismatch between model and hitbox.

This is all with regards to ships like the Rix fig and IC figs which are just a bit funny...

The Dreg interceptor is not funny... it's FUBAR.

Adept · Post by **Adept** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 10:29 pm

I did think about that Shiz, but let's rather fix it than shoot at invisible shadows with the ship images there just for style. This game deserves better.

RealPandemonium · Post by **RealPandemonium** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:17 am

I always took it for granted that the hitboxes encompass all the space in between the extremities of the model, but I guess not everyone does.

Why not just add a section to cadet that informs the noobs about this and suggests where they should aim to maximize their hitrate?

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:55 am

Wow, I knew hit boxes don't match the model exactly, but just how different they really are is weird. O_o

I don't think this should be left as it is just because the game is balanced for broken hit-boxes. Firstly, balancing the game is an ongoing endeavour, as the constant updates of the CCore show. Secondly, even if it takes time to rebalance the game for fixed hitboxes, the end result would be gameplay that makes more sense... And just a better experience on the whole. Keeping the game buggy just because that's the game people have gotten used to seems, well, unfair to the game itself. It deserves better. It does not exist to please those who have learned to shoot invisible hitboxes, but as a fun and awesome game in its own right, for new players as well as old, and if there's a way to improve it, then it should be done, even if it means people will have to re-learn how to aim a bit. And Adept is awesome for figuring out this issue and volunteering to work on it. ^_^

Teaching new players to aim for broken hitboxes seems like an odd solution too, I personally think. 6_6 It's like we'd be saying, "by the way newbie, the hitboxes are broken, and we're not going to fix it even though we could. You need to learn how to play our broken game that makes no sense. Here's the invisible parts you need to aim for:"

(Well, I exaggerate, but still. It's obviously a bug, not a feature...

)

Even if it's impossible (and perhaps not desirable -- if the dreg int was fixed 100%, It'd be nearly impossible to hit head on, it seems...) to make hitboxes that match visible models perfectly, surely it could at least be improved over the "dreg flying tent" and "rix kite fighter" level... And preserving flaws in the game for the sake of convenience just doesn't seem great to me. >_>

Then again, I certainly don't know how to change any of this, so I wouldn't be the one doing the work...

I suppose it's easy for me to complain. I'd donate for the change to be made, or something, though.

SpaceJunk · Post by **SpaceJunk** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 2:39 am

Shizoku wrote:QUOTE (Shizoku @ Oct 25 2009, 12:12 AM) Personally I would rather see new factions

+1

Weylin · Post by **Weylin** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:04 am

I didn't realize just how awful the hit boxes were...

Is it possible to make the box smaller than the model?

For example, could a hit box be made to not cover something like an unimportant tail fin or something sticking out of a ship, especially if it results in a highly inaccurate hitbox?

That top down view on the rix fig... I never realized that the whole god damn area from wing tip to tail tip was able to be hit. I thought the rix fig would have surely used at least 2 separate hit boxes, one for the wings, one for the core... yikes.

Spinoza · Post by **Spinoza** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 5:57 am

Weylin wrote:QUOTE (Weylin @ Oct 25 2009, 06:04 AM) I didn't realize just how awful the hit boxes were...

Is it possible to make the box smaller than the model?

In principle yes but it would introduce visual artifacts.
Basically your bullets would hit an object inside the model so that's where the shield/hull damage effect would appear or rather disappear.

Let me reiterate the part about convex hit boxes:
Hit boxes are traditionally convex in games because it simplifies collision calculations
For complex objects, the solution is to cover the model with several hit boxes, each one convex on it's own.
AFAIK Alleg supports multi-part hit boxes... bases almost certainly use them.
Unless a dev comes in and says otherwise, it should be possible to fit realistic hit-boxes to any odd ship.

More hit boxes would mean more a little more work for servers and clients... but it would probably unnoticeable in any computer made in the 21st century. These ridiculously simple hit boxes were made in 1999, taking into consideration that people would be playing with computers built even earlier... newer computers should not have trouble with a 5-10 fold increase in the number of hit boxes.

BTW, I think for most ships it would be a lot less than a 5 fold increase... the Rix fig for example could be hugely improved with just three boxes: hull+wings, tail and foot.

I would be very very suprised if this was problematic because of computing power...
FYI the minimum requirement for Alleg was a Pentium 200 Mhz. Yes, that's the actual original Pentium, as in 80586. 200Mhz Pentiums were state of the art circa 1995-6. Allegiance came out in 1999, same time as the Pentium III.
I'm sorry about droning on about this, but every times issues like this comes up people bring up the (IMO) completely baseless idea that there could be players which would adversely affected by minor changes to the minimum requirements.