Nitoandthefunkybunch
Noob
The Pyro is one of the most complicated classes from a technical perspective. The Flamethrower is neither hitscan nor a proper projectile weapon, instead belonging to a special category all by itself. Being such a complex weapon, the Flamethrower has suffered a lot of bugs over the years, both in Live TF2 and TF2 Classic.
Over the past year, we have been tackling these bugs one by one. Over the next few days, we’ll be going over some of the changes we’ve made, including some brand new ones coming in Update 2.2!
You may remember back before the 2.1.2 Patch, the Pyro had the funny little ability to kill you through spawn doors, as well as other thin walls and surfaces. This was a quirk of the hit detection. Flame hitboxes will only collide when something hits their center so they don't bounce away when you shoot near a corner. However, when colliding with a player, it uses the whole hitbox. To prevent flames from hitting people through walls, the game would do a line of sight check from the Pyro to the center of the particle. On thin walls, this line of sight check would still pass since the precise center of the flame hitbox had not passed through.
The solution was to add a new check! Now, the flame has to pass the line of sight check from the Pyro, as well as from the enemy target. The enemy performs two line of sight checks, each to a different corner of the enemy’s collision box, and only one needs to hit, to prevent odd corners from blocking the hit again.
While this fix is already in-game, we thought it would be nice to catch everyone up to speed! See you tomorrow, when we talk about a new bug fix coming to Update 2.2!
Over the past year, we have been tackling these bugs one by one. Over the next few days, we’ll be going over some of the changes we’ve made, including some brand new ones coming in Update 2.2!
You may remember back before the 2.1.2 Patch, the Pyro had the funny little ability to kill you through spawn doors, as well as other thin walls and surfaces. This was a quirk of the hit detection. Flame hitboxes will only collide when something hits their center so they don't bounce away when you shoot near a corner. However, when colliding with a player, it uses the whole hitbox. To prevent flames from hitting people through walls, the game would do a line of sight check from the Pyro to the center of the particle. On thin walls, this line of sight check would still pass since the precise center of the flame hitbox had not passed through.
The solution was to add a new check! Now, the flame has to pass the line of sight check from the Pyro, as well as from the enemy target. The enemy performs two line of sight checks, each to a different corner of the enemy’s collision box, and only one needs to hit, to prevent odd corners from blocking the hit again.
While this fix is already in-game, we thought it would be nice to catch everyone up to speed! See you tomorrow, when we talk about a new bug fix coming to Update 2.2!
