Games you think would be better with a smaller/larger hitbox

[ACSeraph]

I actually really dislike how the bullets in cave games have smaller hitboxes than the bullets themselves. Makes everything look too cluttered.

[juonryu2nd]

I feel like RayForce would be a lot less frustrating if it had a smaller hitbox. It would also be a lot easier but I wouldn't mind that.

Yeah, this. The invisible walls at the sides piss me off more, though.

[Squire Grooktook]

I think Rayforce's hitbox is just right personally. Big enough that you have to do some fast dodging for macro patterns and certain hazards, but small enough that you can go through most gaps that will actually turn up in the game. Don't recall ever running into invisible walls though.

[juonryu2nd]

What I meant is that you can't fly all the way to the edge of the screen. I had countless deaths where I tried to dodge stuff by moving along the wall only to get hit because I forgot that the maneuverable area is smaller than it looks.

[e_tank]

R-Type feels very consistent despite it's unorthodox approach to hit boxes. All enemy/environment hitboxes I would assume are oversized, since while playing it certainly feels like almost all the ship is vulnerable except for a portion of the cockpit.

that's right, and saying r-type uses a single point for collision detection, while technically accurate, is probably misleading to those not familiar with the basics of collision detection. in reality r-type uses hit boxes just like pretty much every other shooter out there, they simply changed one problem into an equivalent but different one much in the same way BrooksBishop already described in the post about the approach used in Aeternum (great game btw), and that is if you take 2 convex shapes and shrink one of them to a point while inflating the other by the shape and area/volume of the shrinking one, then testing if that point is contained in the new expanded shape is equivalent to testing if the two original shapes overlap. many of the most efficient collision detection algorithms out there are based on this principle.

anyway, in r-type the ship's hit box is represented as a point (at the center of the ship) and everything else had its hit box inflated/expanded to compensate. this changing of an aabb (axis aligned bounding box) vs aabb test to an equivalent point vs aabb test is a simple optimization that probably saved them a few cycles per each overlap test against enemies and bullets, and potentially a lot for testing against the background, depending on how they went about it.

Personally, hitboxes suck. It's all about the hitcircles. Works way way better for shooting games.

not if your game is on older hardware and also has to test for collision against a large background environment, ie games like r-type. that would be my guess why it's uncommon on older games.

The only games I know use them are Hishouzame and Kyuukyoku Tiger, though. Does anyone know of any others that do?

cool info! i'm a bit surprised, iirc the 68k had a pretty slow hardware multiplier so w/o the use of something like mult/log lookup tables to eliminate the mults a bunch of circle vs circle tests would be a quite a bit slower than a bunch of aabb vs aabb tests. i'm guessing it didn't matter much since both these games focus on few/fast bullets vs many/slow, so they could afford to do whatever felt best.

The actual collision checks are all circle (player/enemy) vs. pill (bullet hit circle extruded from previous frame to current) to prevent tunneling.

i have to say i dislike the idea of using continuous collision detection in shooting games unless it's absolutely necessary. imo missed collisions on the player adds an neat little element of luck into the game. doj for example checks bullets for collision with the player every other frame, thus highly increasing the odds of missed collisions. and while not a shmup, in pac-man who doesn't love it when you're backed into a corner and think you're gonna get got by an oncoming monster only see pac-man zip right past him unscathed thanks to a missed collision, yay!

[Captain]

Gwangedash has really funny hitboxes.