Hitbox Dissonance: Difference between revisions

[[File:hitbox.jpg|link=Touhou Project|frame|Though the proper term in this case is ''hurtbox.'']]

 

 

 

In video games, a hitbox is the part of an object considered 'solid' for the game's purposes. It would be very mathematically complicated to model all the characters' body parts and check when they've touched, so instead, a rectangular or cubic region of each character is chosen as the hitbox. When two hitboxes overlap, the game knows that the characters have collided; when an attack lands inside a character's hitbox, it has hit the character. [[Fighting Game]] jargon usually differentiates the two boxes by calling the attack's a ''hitbox'' and the target's a ''hurtbox''; in other genres the term "hitbox" usually gets used for both.

In the early days, it was literally a box, as a rectangular or circular solid is less math-intensive when doing the collision checks. More modern 3D games have a whole separate model made of hitboxes that closely follows the rendered model in logical space, many including different values for different body parts to enable [[Attack Its Weak Point|hits to weak points]] [[For Massive Damage]].

 

 

* An enemy's hitbox is too small. This makes the enemy harder to hit, and tends to happen with small enemies that are already [[Goddamned Bats]] to begin with.

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[MediEvil (1998 video game)]]'' included [[It Makes Sense in Context|sentient, man-eating pumpkins]] with a headbutting attack that did damage ''before the animation started''.

* One of the many, many flaws of advergame ''[[Darkened Skye]]''. The hitboxes on the enemies are rather smaller than the models (especially, yes, the [[Goddamn Bats]]), while your own hitbox is larger...but your ''weapon's'' hitbox seems to be smaller. Fights are frustrating, to say the least.

 

* The original 8-bit ''[[Ninja Gaiden]]'' trilogy nearly falls into the realm of [[Fake Difficulty]] because of its poorly sized and placed hitbox areas, both in the player character as well as in the enemies. The [[Warmup Boss|Act I boss of the original]] suffers from this too. You can have your sword be centimeters from hitting him, and you'll still do damage.

* In ''Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2,'' both [[Bugs Bunny]] and [[Looney Tunes|his enemies]] had tiny hitboxes, which could lead to odd situations where Bugs Bunny could literally walk right through them without any harm. The weapons Bugs could pick up, on the other hand, had large hitboxes, and in most situations, had no trouble hitting an enemy's small hitbox. It almost completely works in the player's favor, at least, and since Bugs is a [[One-Hit-Point Wonder|one hit point wonder]], you may need all the help you can get.

* In ''[[Battle City]]'' and ''Tank Force'', players and enemies actually "snap" from one half-tile to another even though sprites seem to go smoothly. This was done to ease navigation as the problem was apparent in ''Tank Battalion''.

* Presumably this occurred with things like walls in Superman64, since a few cases shown in [[The Angry Video Game Nerd]]'s review had the player get stuck despite being about three feet from the actual wall. See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dJXgJ1c4vY&ob here]

 

* Racing series ''[[Burnout]]'' and ''Excite Truck''\Bots also use this, with "near miss" and "tree run" bonuses. The "small hitbox" is your whole car in these games though, and the "large hitbox" is the area around it.

* Many early driving games has entirely rectangular Hit Boxes, which was really [[All the Tropes Wiki Drinking Game|egregious]] when it extend all the way to the side-view mirrors.

 

* ''[[Soul Calibur]]''

** ''[[Soul Calibur]]'''s custom characters suffer from this. Since all custom characters are the same height but use a standard character's weapons, the standard character's hitbox is mapped onto the custom character, which leads to problems when using the style of a particularly tall or short character.

* Tekken 5 was pretty notorious for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk34aY6x4t8 grounded mids], especially in wall combos. To clarify for non-Tekken players: some mids do have the property of hitting a character on the ground (downward chops, rising kicks, etc). But there were a lot of straight thrusting attacks that hit a person almost completely lying on the ground or rolling to the side. One big offender was Anna's Tread Water kicks to Judgement Kick (f,f+3,4,3~b, 3), the last of which was a front kick which would hit a grounded opponent or sometimes even an opponent ''behind'' Anna.

* ''[[Super Smash Bros.]]'' has a lot of these problems, partially due to the fact that a single attack will have several different hitboxes with sometimes wildly different strengths.

** Ganon's down special continues for about four seconds, but by the third second it stops doing potential damage. This creates the odd situation where you should be going through someone with your foot but they smack you back. More evident in his recovery (up special) where not only is it unlikely that you will latch onto an opponent, but the punch at the end will most likely never hit.

** Quite a few characters can hit people standing ''behind'' them thanks to attacks with hitboxes that extend behind their back or over their shoulder.

* [[Ninja|Hattori Hanzo's]] [[Limit Break]] in ''[[Samurai Shodown]] III'' had a hitbox that stuck around nearly a second after the actual explosion. Worse, it did not [[Combos|combo]] with the rest of the attack, meaning that a person who blocked the attack could let off the block a moment too early, and end up taking the full brunt of it anyway.

** It is even more noticeable with Hakumen's Yukikaze. The thing hits the entire horizontal plane and even double jumping will not save you unless you have moves that rocket you further up screen.

* NES version of ''Yie Ar Kung-Fu'' suffered for this quite a bit where a hit was registered a miss and vice versa. The fact that the enemy was mostly made out of background instead of sprite contributed to that.

* As you'll find below, ''[[Touhou]]'' is famous for how important your character's hitbox is. This even carries over to the fighting game spinoffs, where sometimes dodging that instant-kill spellcard or that one bullet that would knock you out upon hitting relies solely on your knowledge of hitboxes.

* ''[[Street Fighter III]]'' has a problem with so called "nails"<ref>named because people think the characters are only hitting the enemy because they forgot to trim their toenails or nails.</ref> where attacks would extend just a little to far that they should, as seen above in the quote.

 

* There's nothing quite like putting bullet holes into empty air in ''[[MAG]]''.

* In ''[[Doom]]'', for collision with objects, monsters, and projectiles, everything is essentially treated as having infinite height.

** The plasma rifle's shots are often blocked when just what one would think is just "glow" from them graze a wall.

** There's also a bug where a bullet can completely fail to hit its target depending on where the shooter and the victim are standing in open space, even at point-blank range. [http://games.moria.org.uk/doom/research/shooting-through-things Click here for details.]

* ''[[Unreal]]'' brings us both monster variants:

** The Titan, being essentially a twenty-foot reptilian gorilla, isn't very compatible with the simple collision cylinders used in the game, thus ending up with at least a minor form of the "shoot the air next to him" trouble. That said, this is probably a good thing for game balance due to his immense power and durability.

** The pupae and predator enemies are best taken out from afar, since once in melee range, their narrow collision cylinders make them nigh-untouchable.

* The Spy of ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'': Landing a successful backstab (which is instant death) depends on the view angle of the victim, and not the actual pose of the character, causing dissonance when combined with some animations. This is in addition to lag and the game's rather odd way of calculating melee hits (using the player's bounding box) and, well, you end up with a lot of sidestabs and [[Fan Nickname|facestabs.]] Numerous tweaks and updates have gone toward trying to get it right, though you can't please everyone.

** To add to this: the Spy can disguise as his own team, so the enemy sniper may not even know the player is a Spy.

** Better still, the Sniper is taller than the Spy. It's very possible that what would have been a headshot on a real Sniper will go straight over your head.

** The hitbox wasn't the only thing that went straight to prone. So did the diving players accuracy. This is why before it was fixed in a patch [[Dolphin Diving]] was the biggest [[Game Breaker]] the series had ever seen.

* ''[[Postal]] 2'' has an [[All the Tropes Wiki Drinking Game|egregious]] example with Gary Coleman, especially noticeable when he gets into a fight with NPCs that ALWAYS [[Boom! Headshot!|aim for the head]] and make puffs of blood appear ABOVE Gary's head. This is presumably done to maintain balance in multiplayer and avoid the issues that ''[[GoldenEye 007 (1997 video game)|GoldenEye]]'' had with everyone trying to pick Oddjob.

 

* ''[[Pac-Man]]'' has a smaller hitbox than it seems. Especially apparent in ''Championship Edition'' series. This is an odd case in which his hitbox is based on his position in the maze rather than his actual sprite. It's because of this that you will very rarely see Pac Man [[Good Bad Bugs|pass right through a ghost without dying]] at times.

 

* Many games in ''[[Action 52]]'' suffer from this.

* The ''Robot Ninja Haggleman'' games from ''[[Retro Game Challenge]]'' gives enemies a slightly larger hitbox than the size of the enemy. This means that if you approach from the wrong angle, you will get hit without actually touching the enemy. This is particularly bad for Dark Hagglemen, who have an animation where they laugh after deflecting your attack - but which doesn't turn off their hitboxes.

* In ''[[NES Remix]]'' game play pauses as soon as you die die, making any instance of this extremely noticeable.

 

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' has some examples of both. Many bosses have very large hitboxes to make it easier for melee classes to attack them. Kologarn for example has a hitbox that is so large that you can stand near his right arm and use an area-of-effect attack to hit both of his arms and his body (his body and arms have separate hitboxes). Some bosses on the other hand have very small hitboxes. Saphiron for example has a hitbox that's about the size of his body, with his head and tail extending outside of the hitbox, meaning melee classes pretty much have to stand right under him.

** Sapphiron is a stonking great dragon, so if his hitbox really covered the same amount of ground he did, it would fill the whole room.

** Thaddius: one of his boss abilities is to charge players up with either positive or negative charges. If the two groups stand too close together, you all die, so his hitbox is unnaturally big, or nobody would ever be able to kill him.

*** A common method of dealing with this, when in a group that has lots of melee types, is to exploit the lack of collision detection by positioning people directly on top of each other. If one of the melee clumps freezes, then yeah they're all hurt, but it's manageable and won't chain to anyone else.

** The proto-drakes in ''Wrath of the Lich King'' are pretty notorious for lousy hitboxes. Since they fly you don't often have a ground reference and the ground-hitbox-indicator-circle-thing (new trope?) is often hard to see and irritatingly small, which ends up with the player often getting "Not in range" or "You are standing behind him you dolt" messages when trying to melee.

** The Ancient Smoldering Behemoth, one of five bosses from the daily quest chain in the Molten Front, is easily the largest of the monsters, but has an extremely small hitbox, so that you have to stand underneath him in order to melee him. The problem is that he also uses an area of effect attack centered on himself (which you must avoid for an achievement), making it more difficult to run out and back.

* ''[[Monster Hunter]]''

** A similar issue happens whenever a monster attacks by spinning in place to whip its tail around (which just about every wyvern or dragon with a tail does). Even if the monster is so tall that it looks like its tail would just whiff over your head, it'll knock you down.

*** Note that wyverns with similar body types don't necessarily have the hitboxes scaled to match. It's entirely possible to avoid a gypceros's tail sweep by standing directly under its crotch, but trying the same trick with a monoblos or diablos (who are both quite a bit taller than a gypceros) will get you clobbered.

*** This has been improved somewhat in Monster Hunter Tri, where you can avoid some tail swipes at distances that would have surely gotten you thwacked in earlier installments.

** It also works both ways though, as since most of your melee weapons involve swinging them around, if you're under a monster and your weapon just ''grazes'' their [[Attack Its Weak Point|weakness]], the game will register it as a full-fledged hit. There are some stories going around where people have cut off tails just by poking the tail with a weapon.

* The Hitbox on a Mobile in [[Gunbound]] is literally only one pixel wide. This means that you can unleashe a [[Macross Missile Massacre]] or [[Bullet Hell]] on an enemy, completely obliterating the ground beneth them, only to have them still be alive, perched on that one pixel your blast did not destroy. This also makes it insanely hard to kill the opponent, as most projectiles don't explode unless they connect with another hitbox, and with the ground gone and the opponent being literally one pixel wide, it's considerably harder now to kill them.

 

* ''[[Mega Man 3]]'' has a lot of this, because Mega Man's hitbox is a rectangle. Mega Man's hitbox consistent for all the NES games (not including ''MM 9'', which is an entirely different engine), but it's actually possible to see it, if briefly, every time the Blue Bomber gets hit. The white "damage field" that blink through Mega Man is exactly the same size of the hitbox. It's slightly taller than Mega Man, and slightly wider.

** Where it gets ridiculous is when Mega Man fires his weapon while standing still. He leans forward, extends his arm, and projectiles emerge from the end, but his hitbox remains the same, and thus the entire outstretched arm has no collision detection at all! He can shove his arm into any obstacle and launch bullets from inside it if he pleases. In games where Sniper Joe's shield has its own hitbox rather than simply a shielded state for the whole sprite during certain animations, Mega Man can tiptoe up to Sniper Joe, reach past the shield, and shoot him directly, without having to wait for Joe to lower his shield.

** It gets stranger: You could actually jump to kick the monster into going the opposite direction and even ''walk on top of a monster's hitbox''. It was up to you to stay on top; the monster wouldn't carry you along.

** This is [[Handwaved]] in the manual: it is stated that you need some room to fire your weapon, so you can't kill enemies if you stand too close; this is actually because your hitbox will already touch the enemy at that point.

* ''Canabalt'' invokes this on purpose for the player's comfort. Buildings extend a bit past their visible right edges, and crates' hitboxes are a mere two pixels tall.

 

* ''[[Allegiance]]'', being a team-based strategy/space combat hybrid, is especially susceptible to such problems, since flying ''every'' type of ship needs to be a fair experience for every player. Sometimes, the hitbox for a spacecraft with a complex shape oversimplifies the object's geometry a little ''too'' much. At the extreme, there is one ship that ''looks'' very small, with several thin wings, but ''acts'' as if all the wings were joined by solid surfaces, making what looks like a compact and difficult ship to hit an easy, bulky target in reality. There are also small, but annoying problems with the hit-boxes of a few space stations, which can be a problem since player ships often have to dock at these, and bumping into invisible walls when it looks like you should be flying into a docking bay is never fun. Fortunately, only a very few models suffer from these issues, and only require a little extra care. As the game is being developed by fans, there have been a number of attempts to create new hitbox models and fix these issues; some progress has been made, but the solutions aren't always easy to implement in practice... not to mention that in a few cases, some players have [[Good Bad Bug|gotten used to the hitboxes]], and don't want to see them fixed!

* In ''[[Defense of the Ancients]]'', the Keeper of the Light's Illuminate spell uses an effect similar to the Shockwave spell in ''[[Warcraft]] III''. However, the area covered by the spell is a lot wider and somewhat longer than the visual effect, meaning that you can "dodge" the shockwave and still lose an assload of health.

 

** ''Rhythm Heaven'' is a compilation of mini-games that are all hit-or-miss timing windows, but the windows seem to vary for each mini-game. Generally, the simpler the game, the harsher the timing window. Most of the games have ''either'' a near-hit or near-miss animation, but few if any have both. Not to mention the Space Shooter endless game that cuts down the timing window as you go.

** ''O2Jam'''s timing windows are out of whack. First, the timing windows get faster as the song's BPM goes up. Second, they loosen when you use speed modifiers. Conclusion? ''You get punished if you're more comfortable with lower speed mods than higher speed ones.''

** The hit boxes in ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' and ''[[Rock Band]]'' are a point of contention among high-level players. In general, the timing window in Rock Band is pretty moderate, but ''the window shrinks'' when notes are placed very close together, which leads to ''[[Fake Difficulty]]'' on the hardest songs in the game (this is lessened in ''Rock Band 3'', which has a new mechanic for extremely fast and\or imprecise strums and trills). Guitar Hero, on the other hand, is known for timing windows so big that "rhythm" is no longer a necessity. This is generally compensated for by including songs that are, for lack of better words, "walls of skittles".

 

* This is part of what makes the infamous Cliff Racers of ''[[Morrowind]]'' so bad: the hitbox is misaligned so that it manages to both hit when it shouldn't and miss when it should have hit. Once you kill them the hit box still haunts you, as you need to remove the corpse to be able to grab anything near it or you will attempt to loot it's plumes instead.

** Fortunately, getting below them and aiming for center of mass is pretty reliable.

* Fighting against other hunters in ''[[Phantasy Star Online]]'' is harrowing, as you need to land a blow directly in the center of their bodies in order for it to register...unless you're using a gun.

 

* The 'graze' mechanic in many [[Bullet Hell]] games involves two hitboxes- one very small (sometimes just a few pixels), which is fatal if struck, and a slightly larger one that gives extra points if bullets pass through it. This encourages players to take extra risks by getting closer to the bullets as they weave through the patterns.

** ''Raiden DX'' has the graze bonus, despite being a non-Bullet Hell shooter with a ship-sized hitbox released in 1994.

** But perhaps the most extreme example is the fanmade [[Mario]] knockoff, ''Super Marisa World'', [http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Super_Marisa_World:_Bosses#Kaguya_Houraisan during the Kaguya battle]. Damn, that's a small hitbox!

 

* Capital ships in the first ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]]'' have a bit of this going on, when at some angles of attack a ship's sprite doesn't quite match its actual physical model. This can result in blaster fire (or worse, missiles) passing clean through the enemy battleship.

** The first two Wing Commanders (and spinoffs based on their engines) in general have a fair amount of this, as they simulated 3D objects flying freely through space by using sprites. The hitboxes are rectangular, no matter what the actual sprite looks like. This is especially noticeable when you are firing at a flat-shaped enemy fighter that is aligned diagonally, and you can hit it at the "empty" corners of the hitbox.

 

* At one point in ''[[Heroscape]]'' a model's cloak was not considered to be a hitbox. This had to be changed in later sets, as players were abusing the rules by turning their models cloaked backs to the opponent and claiming they were now immune to fire.

** Previously in 4th edition of 40k, for the purposes of shooting the Model was considered to be a cylinder, as tall as it needed to be for the purposes of being able to be shot at or not (so as long as you see part of the base, you saw the entire model). This was changed with the 5th edition, where True Line of Sight took place and you had to physically see the model in question. Problem is this causes massive issues since many players would model their commanders and characters on massively scenic bases, which would make them tall as hell. Moreover, the 5th edition introduced fliers, vehicles that are mounted on a massive clear pole on their own bases, which makes getting cover for them incredibly hard. It also caused the modelling community much headaches, as alot of aesthetic choices on the modeller's part are now against the rules, as it made the miniature physically smaller (and thus harder to actually hit) while others are being mothballed because they gave the model such height it was impractical to field them now.

 

 

* Skittles adgame ''Darkened Skye'' suffered from this in ''spades''. The hitboxes on the enemies and the character's weapon were smaller than the sprites...and the character's hitbox was ''bigger''. Leading to <s>hilarious</s> rage-inducing situations when you're flailing away at a little flying lizard and doing no damage at all, while it rapes you by clawing at the air a foot and a half away from you.

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fighting Game]]

[[Category:Hitbox Dissonance]]