Hitbox Angles

As I understand it, the Doom engine represents all Things such as Monsters and Players with a "hitbox".

This hitbox is the reason you can snipe a monster which is sitting at rest very close to corner, and have blood spats appear in thin air, then have the monster walk forward into visible range. This is also the reason the Spider Mastermind is so defeatable with the BFG, as its' large hitbox soaks up all the BFG rays, taking extra damage. You can also see the hitbox effect when you "thingbump" a weapon which is otherwise unreachable.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

My question is: Do hitboxes angle dynamically through 360 degrees, or are they always the one straight angle, and the engine works out Thing direction separately to hitboxes?

They are called bounding boxes AFAIK, and no, the "box" itself does not turn.

Yeah, that would explain why you can fit into an orthogonal 33-wide corridor, but not into a 33-wide angled corridor.

If I were to go about changing this, I would change it into a hit circle. But it's probably not worth screwing around with.

Cool, thanks guys.

It's a common misconception that things in Doom are round when viewed from above. I reckon that's because most editing tools show them as round and because the method of measuring their width (or half of their with) is known as their radius.

As has been said, the boxes are always aligned to the grid. One way to see this in game is to use Zdoom and type

am_cheat 3

at the console. That's just like the iddt iddt cheat but it also shows the bounding boxes of the actors too.

Now that's very useful, cheers Enjay!

udderdude said:

If I were to go about changing this, I would change it into a hit circle. But it's probably not worth screwing around with.

I'm curious if that would break anything.

doom2day said:

I'm curious if that would break anything.

It wouldn't "break" anything, aside from compatibility, assuming that you rewrite every bit of code in the game that deals with clipping of mobj_t's. That's a hell of a lot of code, of course.

Also, clipping against circles, cylinders, or spheres has its own special realm of challenges, some of which are quite difficult compared to bounding boxes.