Huntress hatchet aim

I used to swear she was tossing around homing beachball-sized hatchets with GPS, but when you see it from the killer's perspective it's ping & latency mostly. Same thing with being hit once you've vaulted and taken a step or two.

you can play huntress with wide hitbox hatchets or you can play deathslinger/trickster with tiny needles with your prefered drawback of 1 ammo pool or 8 hit requirement to injure.

I think the issue there is adjusted the survivor hitboxes doesn't just affect Huntress, it effects every killer in the game.

The survivor hitbox is a vertical cylinder where it is because it makes calculation really simple and all melee hits consistent, and it makes survivor transition between walk and run animations feel correct and natural without causing the animation to sudddnly shunt the hitbox forward. After all if the hitbox matched the running survivor animation, the hitbox would be on a slant leaning away from the killer, and you would have to get ever so slightly closer on all melee hits for them to land.

This would mean to reduce the distance you would want to aim down and swing at the survivors feet, which is just silly... You also get this issue that you have to keep rotating the hitboxes in line with where the survivor turns... which as well as just being a lot more computationally expensive compared to juat tracking a vertical capsule, imagine how screwy it would be for spin techs and elevations.

Now the hatchets being as wide as they are is just computationally simple, you simply have a sphere hitbox you can easily do a calculation based on a single point, 1 simple vector calculation. It's a quick way of not having to deal with the rotation of the hatchet hitbox, and also not having to use a bounded square, which will obviously have extra reach it shouldn't have (imagine you're observing the hatchet spinning from the side, now draw a square around it, you'll have extra zones in the corners beyond the reach of the hatchet you shouldn't have).

Ideally you'd probably be best to have 2 smaller spheres spinning around the axes centre of rotation, and use those for collision alculations, or if you don't wanna handle the rotation, have 4 smaller spheres make up your hatchet... but you can easily see how much more collision calculation you're adding into the system compared to 1 single unmoving sphere.

So I think all of this is a case of BHVR quite sensibly enacting the age old principle of "keep it simple stupid".

Not quite as easy in practise as it is on paper, see above. 😅

Having a hitbox you have maintain its orientation is not so simple, because you have do multiple calculations to rotate something. You to move it the middle of the world, rotate it, then move it back. Obviously we do this all the time for animations but hitboxes are often made very rudimentary to simplify calculations and collisions as much as possible.

Generally speaking, the vertical capsule for survivors is good enough and actually better for DBDs loop gameplay. It makes it so that swinging at a survivors head is better than swinging at their butt. Imagine your m1 melee attack is a block that comes out the killer... (its probably a ball on your killers hand that they drag sideways, but I don't know if that's how it works, so let's treat it as a block... the idea remains the same). As I throw my attack, what is closer to me? With a vertical capsule, it's the top of the capsule directly on your eye line as you swing that's closer... with a slanted capsule it's perpendicular to the slant...

As such we would all have to aim down just to fix this issue for Huntress... and as I say checking this collision is more performance intensive as you have to maintain an orientation for the capsule and move it with the survivors movement, rather than a simple and less error prone "survivor on this coordinate, so hitbox is here" logic.

It's the same for the hatchet, there is a need to maintain the orientation of the hatchet when calculating hitboxes in a revised version, rather than a simple "hatchet on this coordinate, hitbox is here".

Now to be fair, to my knowledge, Huntress is not a performance issue killer, I'd imagine Nemesis is the killer I would cite to say a killer that has performance issues, and has an orientation assigned for his hitboxes with multiple hitboxes (I believe his is 5 long sausages) that would mimic how the hatchet could spawn. If Nemesis can perform at an fine frame rate, a revised Huntress hatchet can too.

The easiest approach I would imagine would be have 4 spheres in a diamond formation centered on the hatchet in the orientation where Huntelress releases the hatchet, and simply track the 4 of them for hits instead of the 1 sphere currently. Since the hatvhet never has to cjange direction, this should be fine. That would at least slim down the hatchet to hopefully reduce the fake hit issues.... though you may get instances where a hatchet can squeeze partially through a gap before a trailing hitbox hits a wall, allowing hits that would otherwise be blocked... but that would be rare and require very specific maps/scenarios to replicate, and it some ways, would still make sense the hatchet can partially squeeze through.

However the survivor hitbox is probably more trouble that it's worth to try and fix.

You're missing my point... you'd have to completely redesign how m1 melee attacks work...

Every single m1 attack gets slightly further away with this change, even if you make the hitboxes match the model perfectly, the point remains, you have to swing at a survivors butt for the best chance to land hits.

This is why people need to leave trickster alone, he has to hit 8 times, high walls and elevation screws him up like rpd stairs and if not quick enough or not using laceration duration add on, he is screwed.

She and Nemesis had just been the most braindead now out of range killers since their undeeded buff and yesterday for weird reason I got 5 of her and 4 of him barf.

I even watch an vid video of mine years ago when it seem it that she did not use to have beach ball hit boxes before 6.1 and was easily dodging them, here it is. I was still new to dbd that time and just got into streaming so that user name is invalid now.

https://youtu.be/KHAJMUU0xME

Welcome to online gaming where you can get shot around walls. Doesn't matter if you have fiber internet, there is still distance between you and the server and the server to the other player.

What you don't see from the survivor perspective is all the false hits Huntress gets. You see the impact, see the blood, hear the hit, but the survivor is perfectly fine.

Like pictured in another reply, the survivor hitbox is not the model but a box centered on the model. That means when your running there are parts of your model that won't register a hit. If you want realistic hitboxes, then survivor hitboxes must be reworked as well.

You see, I mostly agree - I think her hitboxes are stupid, but for the sake of simplicity and because I do not trust anything to be changed in this game that's been here longer than 2 years without breaking something else somehow, this is one thing we just have to grin and bear - with one exception.

Instead of making her hatchet a sphere, or multiple rotating spheres around an axis, surely you can just make it a cylinder? Make it much narrower without having to compromise on diameter or compensate for the rotating - even if you get hit with just the handle it'll hurt like hell, and it will still cause damage - it just won't be a literal flying beach ball. I know very little on hurtbox logic so do correct me if I'm wrong, but having a cylinder instead of a sphere just makes so much more sense imo.

Yeah that's fair, there are lots of ways it'd likely be "good enough". A rotating capsule certainly is probably the best solution for accuracy.

Tbh, even if it didn't rotate and you just had a slightly oversized capsule tilted forwards at 30 degrees, that'd probably still be good enough for noone to notice in 99% of cases anything dodgy (and certainly not notice enough to distinguish it from lag).

2 capsules in the shape of a cross would also be a perfectly valid solution...

It's kinda a game of trying to figure out the best way to cheat xD

I wouldn't consider it wasted dev time for making something look like its in the realm of possibilites because hits like those still occur on low ping for both sides. Even myself I've thrown a hatchet 10 lightyears way too far to the left or right and it still magically hits while both players had good ping.

Frankly to fix one they have to fix both and even then ping will always exist, so nothing stops jank hits it just makes it look slightly better on the killers screen and requires more skill