What causes clipping in video games?

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And more importantly will consoles ever become powerful enough that it won’t occur anymore? For me it’s the biggest breaker of immersion.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Video games will do exactly what the coder told it to do, not what the coder meant.

If they didn’t remember to specifically tell the game that a character’s coat shouldn’t go through the back of their chair, then it’s going to do that. If you didn’t tell it that the hat is supposed to go over the hair and not through it, you end up with overlapping hat-hair.

When it occurs with, say, a mod, it’s often just because the modder added in something the game wasn’t designed to account for. Like the mod for Skyrim that adds capes: the game wasn’t designed with cloaks and capes in mind, so there’s nothing in the code that says that your feet shouldn’t go through the cloak model.

Physics simulations are difficult and don’t happen by default, they have to tell the game how to handle it. The game doesn’t know a piece of cloth apart from a plank of wood so it can’t tell you how it should behave if you haven’t told it.

And even then, detailed simulations slow the game down a lot. So you make simplifications. You tell it to treat the human player model as if it’s a cuboid, and most of the time that’s good enough. But it’s not going to be an exact fit: if it’s slightly bigger than the player model, then the player will bump into things that they shouldn’t. If it’s slightly smaller, they’ll clip through things they shouldn’t.

But it still makes sense. If you know the situation where it becomes relevant only happens for 1% of gameplay time, and only 1% of players will notice it anyway, but it saves you many days of work… that’s a pretty easy sacrifice to make.

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