WYSIWYG Combat

[Mrs_L]

I will keep things brief, mostly by pointing to an instance of problematic hitboxes from another game series and the way the developers managed to remediate it.

 

As most of you know, PZ has an issue with zombies flashing green just long enough for you to swing, only for you to miss because you were only just within lateral range of your target and sidestepped for a fraction of a second.

 

In the early days of Team Fortress 2, Spy had a similar problem. When behind an enemy he was in the range and able to backstab for a one-hit kill, his knife would play a signature animation where it would raise and point down ("ready for a backstab"). However, like other classes, there was a (0.25 second) delay on his swing animation, before the backstab would check to see if the spy was still in angle and distance. This led to a horrid number of 'failstabs' and frustration on the part of players who felt cheated out of a hit, when the animation would play but the enemy would turn away just enough to turn it into a regular hit. Spy is a notoriously weak character whose main strength is the ability to backstab opponents; if he fails to backstab, he will almost certainly die immediately to any other character. So, while tightening up some netcode around latency and hitbox rollback, the development team elected to make Spy's backstab instant upon clicking:

What You See Is What You Get. This change has never been reverted.

 

I recommend TIS take a cue from this solution with swinging at zombies. If the zombie is highlighted green when you click, they should be hit, no matter how much later the swing comes. This might result in some janky-looking hits, but it's my recommendation that in matters of jank, the player should typically be given the edge; it makes little sense to rule in the favour of a computer-generated opponent that might come by the hundreds and against a character that may encompass hundreds of hours of effort, and has not made an obvious mistake to punish. On a personal note, I will always prize reliable gameplay systems over how a game looks.

 

If realism is a concern, I contest that if you were attempting to hit a person with a baseball bat, effectively doing so may be difficult but landing a hit at all would likely be nowhere near as stringent as PZ generally treats it.

I suppose that wasn't as brief as I thought it'd be after all.

[PoshRocketeer]

The only problem I see with this is a problem that actually comes up in Brutal  Handwork, it uses pretty much exactly the same targeting system you proposed for its unarmed attacks, but this can cause an issue where unlike in the vanilla game, where your target will automatically swap to the closest zomboid in that direction mid-swing to adjust for the larger threat, you'll be left striking the zomboid who is standing still in a painstate while another is lunging at you, which can cause some injuries that feel a little unfair, so atm I'm happier with the way it is.

[Mrs_L]

But I fail to see how that would feel unfair when the enemy which was highlighted was the one who was hit. If you wanted to hit the other, you should have waited until they were highlighted instead, and failing to attack them was mostly a matter of poor prediction and target selection, not the game being unreliable as it is right now.

[EnigmaGrey]

The reason the outline flashes from testing seems to be due to moving the mouse slightly when clicking or because another zombie crosses into range (becoming the closer target). Without some sort of auto-aim meant to compensate for the time it takes to think of hitting the zombie and actually clicking the mouse, I'm unsure it's fixable.

 

Note that the underlying system does work as desired here.  It's actually one of those noob traps because people will commit to an attack at the wrong zombie or a zombie out of range then twist as the animation plays to try and hit them -- but you can't because the target was decided the moment you clicked the mouse button, not during the swing animation. 

It may be better to think of the overlay as something more basic and less commanding: it helps you figure out the direction to face and understand min/max range of melee weapons a bit better, but not timing of swings. It isn't predictive of success, only a aid. 

[Mrs_L]

Thank you for the response, but my question thus becomes: if the outline is only meant to be a predictor of success and not reliable, how is one meant to adequately decide for themselves if a swing will hit? Not only does your player character use two or more different randomly decided swing animations, but hits are blatantly not calculated by physical model collision, with instances of spears, blunt objects, and your own bare hands clipping straight through opponents without dealing damage quite common. This is leaving aside the difficulty of judging depth in an isometric game, which by its very nature does not provide depth cues beyond Z-levelling (whether something is in front of or behind another object).

 

I enjoy the promise of PZ as a simulator, I would much rather either the highlight be made trustworthy enough to use as a yes/no indicator of swing success, or it be removed entirely so as not to create the expectation of reliability that isn't fulfilled. Project Zomboid is a refreshingly punishing game for its class, but perhaps the most common and devastating punishment of all, the infection, is attached to a system with major readability issues that need to be addressed before a full release.

 

If the target highlight truly is an unfixable system for one reason or another, I would propose ditching it entirely and allowing the player to manually perform swings of their choice, leaving hit registration entirely to model collision. The readability of an isometric world wouldn't be solved by this, but there would be no more false expectations raised by the target highlight.

[Mrs_L]

Hilariously, I had thought I had recorded the entire interaction with Shadowplay, but forgot I had Barotrauma open behind Project Zomboid. I in fact recorded about 20 minutes' worth of intense Barotrauma main menu footage, with PZ music in the background.

[getstoopid]

34 minutes ago, Mrs_L said:

If the target highlight truly is an unfixable system for one reason or another, I would propose ditching it entirely

Well you just could disable the outlining...

[EnigmaGrey]

44 minutes ago, Mrs_L said:

Thank you for the response, but my question thus becomes: if the outline is only meant to be a predictor of success and not reliable, how is one meant to adequately decide for themselves if a swing will hit? Not only does your player character use two or more different randomly decided swing animations, but hits are blatantly not calculated by physical model collision, with instances of spears, blunt objects, and your own bare hands clipping straight through opponents without dealing damage quite common. This is leaving aside the difficulty of judging depth in an isometric game, which by its very nature does not provide depth cues beyond Z-levelling (whether something is in front of or behind another object).

 

I enjoy the promise of PZ as a simulator, I would much rather either the highlight be made trustworthy enough to use as a yes/no indicator of swing success, or it be removed entirely so as not to create the expectation of reliability that isn't fulfilled. Project Zomboid is a refreshingly punishing game for its class, but perhaps the most common and devastating punishment of all, the infection, is attached to a system with major readability issues that need to be addressed before a full release.

 

If the target highlight truly is an unfixable system for one reason or another, I would propose ditching it entirely and allowing the player to manually perform swings of their choice, leaving hit registration entirely to model collision. The readability of an isometric world wouldn't be solved by this, but there would be no more false expectations raised by the target highlight.

It takes practice; learning to interpret distance and the length of the selected weapon through trial and error. Naturally, if you're clipping through the enemy, you're far too close and waiting too long to strike or walking into the space the zombie occupies. That, itself, should be enough of a tell. Remember, the overlay is off for melee weapons by default. We're well aware it's not that useful, but some people like it and insist on using it. I'd hope it's done with knowledge of its limits, but more often people just recommend its usage blindly, so it's no wonder it's frustrating. 

 

I would love to have model-based colliders, personally, but it's probably a long way off (if it ever happens). Until then, it's just down to distance and direction.

[PoshRocketeer]

On 9/8/2023 at 7:01 AM, Mrs_L said:

But I fail to see how that would feel unfair when the enemy which was highlighted was the one who was hit. If you wanted to hit the other, you should have waited until they were highlighted instead, and failing to attack them was mostly a matter of poor prediction and target selection, not the game being unreliable as it is right now.

That sounds great on paper, but in practice it's really clunky and ruins the way the combat plays out. You think this is bad? wait until you swing through a zombie to hit the one behind them. THAT is bad.

 

Personally I think you're grossly overstating the issue, in over 1500 hours I hadn't even noticed that it happened until you mentioned it, and even now that I know it can happen, it's still yet to actually come up in gameplay. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by PoshRocketeer