Q4 is potentially unfixable

[Oeloe]

If the hitboxes are the same size, what could cause the increased rail accuracy in Q4?

Netcode? Wrong hit detection? Lag?... :>

Or did they unlag the hitscan weapons without telling us? :icon27: That would explain the absence of a truelightning cvar.

[shadd_]

If the hitboxes are the same size, what could cause the increased rail accuracy in Q4?

Netcode? Wrong hit detection? Lag?... :>

Or did they unlag the hitscan weapons without telling us? :icon27: That would explain the absence of a truelightning cvar.

yeah it feels like unlagged at times.

[Lenard]

Would make sense. It also may be the mouse code...

[GODLIKE]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't quite get how you went from this:

Reducing the hitboxes causes a slew of clipping errors both in multiplayer and singleplayer. In multiplayer it causes adverse effects on player collisions with the map and others -- in single player it pretty much just breaks most of the maps causing you to get places you shouldn't, and then getting stuck until you go to the console to quit or noclip yourself out.

plus this:

Its literally the same box, size, positioning and with similiar relations to world collisions. The box isn't any larger than it was in Q3, we're all just better railers.

to arrive at this:

It looks very much like this game is beyond redemption. The shape it's currently (hitboxes and player movement) in is probably the result of avoiding the buggy mess of the engine/game code.

Sorry, but it really kinda pegs my "dramatic horseshit" meter. (Oh, and the thread title? That helps too.)

When you take something as basic as the size of the player collision box (which has been the same throughout every Quake game), and change it in a game that was coded to work with the previous size...surprise! You get lots of errors and problems! Golly!

This is so well-stated, I can't bring myself to paraphrase it.

Yes, we're better with the Railgun than we were in Q3. For many of us, scarily so. The scale of the game is slightly bigger (player is a tad taller) so rail scores are up... etc.

I wish Q4 had Doom3 like per-poly hit detection.. but it doesn't, because they didn't want the intense bandwidth requirements that Doom3 had... So that's just how it is. Is it ruining the game for me? nope.

Shut up and play. The 1.1 beta is pretty good, more patches are coming.. Less bitch, more frag.

[Black_Dog]

If changes in player collision will break a game designed for a certain hitbox size, how about using different boxes for player collision and hitscan tests? That's not exactly elegant, but rather that than a 1v1 game totally dominated by the RG.

[shadd_]

bandwidth issue i assume.

[Penguin69]

Yes, we're better with the Railgun than we were in Q3. For many of us, scarily so.

If the hitboxes are the same size, what could cause the increased rail accuracy in Q4?

Or did they unlag the hitscan weapons without telling us?

It also may be the mouse code...

Nobody has mentioned the main point why people think hitboxes are too large and why railgun aim has gone through the roof...

You are moving SLOWER
Your enemy is moving SLOWER

In Q4 the players are dead weights, sitting ducks.. load up Q3 or watch a Q3 movie using the same fov.. running speed is much faster! Much easier to dodge, much easier to escape or leave a battle. Much more freedom of movement, which improves gameplay and is more fun.

When a game is this slow, it has negative effects suchs as... it comes down to the aim, u can't escape a battle providing your enemy has enough ammo in his selected gun... enemy fire pins you down. very hard to avoid rails.

Other issues would be rocket projectiles are massive... harder to dodge... not gigantic hitboxes. Grenades are insanely large. You can test all this out for yourselfs by aiming past an edge of a wall.. see which projectiles don't blow up in your face. Too much gravity or air friction.. jumps are restricted, less freedom of movement.

I was in favour of letting Q4 be Q4. So I stuck with Q4 for four months, playing a few hours daily, without any intentions to make it like Q3. I got use to Q4 movement and I liked it.. then recently I tried pm_speed 360(default 320) on open maps such as "CTF-speedtrap" and "Campgrounds Redux", for first 10mins it felt too radical and I was unconvinced, but 15mins later I was use to it and it felt better than the speed I've been playing with all this time... it feels great (even though jumps are still heavy from air/gravity).

I must say Q3 hit a sweet spot with movement speed, not too fast, not too slow.. it enchances gameplay due to reasons mentioned above. I would like to see Q4 build on Q3's nice movement with sliding and ramp jumps etc.. but slowing the movement down is bad for gameplay.

A good Q4 slider / ramp jumper can get upto Q3 movement speed. Raven misinterpreted this idea and made movement slower to compensate. Sliding / ramp jumping should be something "extra" imo, not something to get us upto enjoyable speed. Also there are two very important points missed... 1. we don't want to have every map heavily covered in slopes etc. 2. sliding etc in battle is not wise so we're a sitting duck.

[^misantropia^]

models=polygons
hitbox=polygons

dont see why it would be hard to make a roughly upside-down bowling pin-shaped hitbox and it adversely affect ping, etc.

Could someone get full-on nerdy technical as to why/why not?

Capture the shape of the hitbox in a nice, mathematical formula and, at the very worst, you'd enlarge every snapshot with a few bytes. In this age of broadband cable with ~1500 byte MTUs, that ain't no biggie. Not entirely sure about Q4, but Q3 snapshots are usually only 40-50 bytes large.

[Freakaloin]

I'm an idiot...

[Johnny Law]

You are moving SLOWER
Your enemy is moving SLOWER

In Q4 the players are dead weights, sitting ducks.. load up Q3 or watch a Q3 movie using the same fov.. running speed is much faster! Much easier to dodge, much easier to escape or leave a battle. Much more freedom of movement, which improves gameplay and is more fun.

Runspeed is the same in Q4 as in Q3, i.e. 320 units per second. Units are comparable across both games since the player "footprint" covered on the ground is the same (as is gravity, for that matter).

There are two obvious culprits for perceived differences in speed. One is if you used a high FOV in Q3, although you already mentioned FOV above. The other is the taller "eyeheight" of the player in Q4.

Additionally... I believe, just from personal tests doing jumps across gaps of specific sizes, that player acceleration is lower in Q4 than in Q3, or at least acceleration gained from an initial strafejump or circlejump is lower. I could be wrong, but if not, this may account for some perceived differences in movement speed as well.

It might be nice if there were a definitive and official list of what has changed in Q4 since Q3, in regards to player movement, eyeheight &FOV, bounding boxes for collision and hit detection, and the behavior of weapons (at least those weapons that were inherited from Q3). I see so many players complaining about changes that don't exist... this thread is only one example. There's two things bad about that:

- If the perceived change is simply an optical illusion that doesn't affect gameplay, people may get over it if they stop obsessing about it.

- If there _is_ a difference in gameplay, it might be easier to figure it out (and then accept it, or see if it should be corrected). If thing A has changed, but a player perceives this as a change in thing B (which really hasn't changed), then as long as the player complains about thing B, the developers are going to ignore him.

Of course, it's not all about what has changed from Q3 to Q4 ... it _should_ be about the qualities of the game, forget about whether it is exactly like something else or not. I do see a lot of good discussion along those lines. However it has to compete with a lot of "this isn't like Q3" complaints, and it seems like a lot of those are just noise.

Oh well, whatever. I've dipped my toe in the melodrama and that's enough for one weekend for me.

[Penguin69]

Johhny Law... Q4 is clearly much slower, no optimal illusions could make it that slow. Using same fov's, Q3 is much! faster... check the movement out. Its clear as rain.

[Oeloe]

If changes in player collision will break a game designed for a certain hitbox size, how about using different boxes for player collision and hitscan tests? That's not exactly elegant, but rather that than a 1v1 game totally dominated by the RG.

That has already been tried:

ESR quote:

to the hitbox problem: what about 2 boxes? one collision box, so everything is goin to be fine with collisions, and in this collision box the hitbox, which is smaller and only effect hits from weapons, but not collision

SyncError's reply:

Was actually tested, majorily increased lag (in FFA, TDM, CTF). Not worth it at all.

I won't pretend to know how the Q4 engine works, but i think that Runningman had a point with his remark "this isn't 1999". Q4 Still uses the same hitbox that has been used since Q1. Geometry in Q4 MP maps is quite boxy; not that complex for collision detection one would say. So what has changed since Q1 or Q3? Why would it be so much more difficult to do hit detection on a 1000 or 10000 ups rocket? Many Q3 mods showed the hit detection works perfectly at insane speeds. Is the Q4 engine so incredibly demanding (or inefficient) that basic things like hit detection are limited to projectiles moving at 900 ups (don't HB bolts move at 1800 ups?)?


Btw i think this is a quite truthful comment:

Hitbox fix = bring back TankJr, Keel, Lucy and all those other fat fucks.

[Goofos]

The hitbox size is ok, i think the problem is somewhere between server <> client and the physics. It detect hits when i miss and if i make a direct hit it detect a full miss. The accuracy scales to much with the connection.

[Runningman]

so does q3
unlag it and force peoples net settings so they cant lower them for packetloss or screw things up like cl_timenudge did and any other thing that makes people hard to see/hit.

[Oeloe]

This is pretty ugly too: http://www.apocalypse.at/files/q4rockets.avi

I tested it in Q3 and you can fire rockets/nades when the crosshair is flush with a corner of a wall. I hope reducing rocket and nade 'size' will be less of a problem than tweaking the rocket speed or hitboxes...

[Jagou]

If the RAIL, or any other weapon is unbalanced...wouldn't it be easy to just reduce the power of the weapon ?

If it's that easy to hit someone....make'm do it twice ! :P

I know it's more of a bland answer than a real solution....but it seems like a viable alternative.

As far as people being better with the rail than we used to be... I'd say it might have a lot to do with the combined increase in technology as well as player experience. We have much much better hardware now, FPS is getting more and more "steady", broadband internet is much better, hell even our mice are MUCH better than they used to be. Monitors are bigger, we've swtiched from PS2 to USB2 now, etc...

All speculative but I thought it worth sharing.

Jagou

[Foo]

The point about being better with the railgun nowadays is demonstrably nonsense - The rail accuracies in Q3 today and Q4 today are vastly different.

If the hitbox isn't bigger, and it's still a single rectangular hitbox, then there must be a discrepency in the way those hitboxes behave. perhaps a rail shot is compared against the player hitbox over multiple game snapshots?

Fucked if I know, but it's not right. If it 'can't' be fixed, then the gun needs to be nerfed to retain a balance.

[Foo]

In any sense, its ENTIRELY too easy to die in Q4.

I'm not sure that actually qualifies any point though - I mean if you can die easily, so can your opponent. There aren't any instant death headshots in the game either. If Q4 suffers from this, I think it's fair to say CPM suffers from the same issue too.

In Q4 you have to take a lot of firepower before going down if you're stacked with health and armor.

[Runningman]

In any sense, its ENTIRELY too easy to die in Q4.

lol, ya think? all the damage numbers have ZERO thought put into them. 100 damage shotgun, 100dmg rail, 100damage rocket, 100 damage nade hahahaaha

[Runningman]

they really need to make a team from ppl straight out of the community to get this game tweaked

[Foo]

In this day and age, community interaction on that level is like some kind of dream or something.

[DooMer]

Those damages are also straight out of q3. The maps are just low on health and armor.

[Runningman]

uhhhh lol.....
my previous thought of you doomer has just gotten worse

[DooMer]

I'm right. The shotgun does 110, btw.

[Runningman]

k, then go tell every mapper to change his/her map. whoops, im sorry.

i just assumed it would be 100. howd you get this 110? SDK? baseq4 pointblank shot? thats just funny....
btw, sorry i just cant fix it by myself the mod stopped A LONG time ago.
http://www.overdrivepc.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9678