And more importantly will consoles ever become powerful enough that it won’t occur anymore? For me it’s the biggest breaker of immersion.
In: 2
Most collision detection in games is done with hitboxes. These are invisible boxes that form an outline of any object for which collision may be possible – walls, trees, player character etc. The game runs a clock and every “tick” it checks the state of moving objects to see if they clip into another object, and respond accordingly (eg. stop movement, reposition the object, rebound etc). This physics clock usually runs a bit faster than the game’s frame rate.
The reason hitboxes are used instead of the actual geometry of the model/sprite is because calculating collision and physics in general is processor intensive, so it needs to be simplified as much as possible. But because the hitbox does not follow the exact outline of the object, you end up with some extremities clipping through solid objects, or having collisions with empty space. That simplification can also includes not doing collision detection at all on things like hair, grass, loose fabric, held objects/weapons, certain frames of an animation, long decorative parts of a costume, etc.
But the thing is hitboxes work well 99.99% of the time so there isn’t much incentive to move away from it, even if 20-30 years from now we had processors capable of doing physics calculations fast enough on the geometry. And if we did there would be some cases where it still wouldn’t work, like if you exploit a bug that makes you go so fast you can pass through a solid object faster than the physics tick rate can detect it and stop you.
Latest Answers