Shmup logic

[40wattstudio]

Pretty new to this forum so apologies if this topic has been covered in depth before. It didn't seem so from running a search.

I read on this site that some games have a 1x1 pixel "hit zone" to make it easier for the player to dodge bullet patterns. I'd never really noticed that before but I tried it out and . . . sure enough! you can safely pass through some bullet patterns that way.

But in particular I'm wondering if the same logic applies to enemies. Is it common for them to also have a 1x1 pixel "hit zone" or is their whole image area often fair game?

[Queen Charlene]

enemies typically tend to have hitboxes that are much bigger (either a similar size of the sprite, or exact-pixel to the sprite), whereas the player and enemy bullets tend to have very small hitboxes. in some games, the size of the bullets is almost the same minuscule size as the player character.

[40wattstudio]

enemies typically tend to have hitboxes that are much bigger (either a similar size of the sprite, or exact-pixel to the sprite), whereas the player and enemy bullets tend to have very small hitboxes.

That's what I suspected, thanks for confirming! So what's the common practice for a "bigger hitbox" for the enemy? 50% of the enemy area? 70%? I imagine whatever it is, it would have to be consistent across all enemies.

In my own experience, I tried making the whole image as a hitbox, but that resulted in some pretty questionable "hits" when the image had a lot of transparent dead space.

[guigui]

Radiant Silvergun (the Saturn port at least) has that very nice option to display all hitboxes while playing. I learnt a lot on the game by playing that way.

Here are some general rules when it comes to modern/manic, please stop me if I'm wrong :

* your hitbox is (much) smaller than your sprite
* enemie's hitbox is (not that much) smaller than their sprite, I'd say about 80% of the sprite. Some parts of big bosses like moving cannons, decorative parts may not even have a hitbox at all.
* enemie's bullets hitboxes are (much) smaller than their sprites. In Mushi for instance, the purple/white colored bullet only have the white part as deadly hitbox.
* your bullets hitbox is actually larger than their sprite.

Fun fact : Ikaruga player's ship do have hitboxes that cannot go over each other. Ths ships instead bump out of each other.

[40wattstudio]

Radiant Silvergun (the Saturn port at least) has that very nice option to display all hitboxes while playing. I learnt a lot on the game by playing that way.

That would be a cool feature to turn off/on. Or just have the hitbox highlighted in such a way as to look like a natural part of the image.

Currently I'm trying this logic:

Player has a 1x1 pixel "killzone". Any shots that hit here do normal damage. Collisions with enemy ships are instant death.
The rest of the player image is a hitbox where only minimal damage is done. As player gets damaged the actual sprite and hitbox get smaller.
Player and enemy shots are lethal for the whole image size.

As for the enemy ships . . . still on the fence about how to handle their hitboxes. Any suggestions are welcome. But at the end of the day I'm trying to avoid the situation where it "looks" like you scored a hit . . . and you didn't.

[40wattstudio]

Speaking of shmup logic, can anyone name some games where the generic enemies have some sort of AI instead of just patterns?

[To Far Away Times]

Speaking of shmup logic, can anyone name some games where the generic enemies have some sort of AI instead of just patterns?

Zanac Neo has enemy behavior that changes based on the weapons you use (and maybe based on rank too). It's more detailed than enemies just firing more bullets or firing faster. I think that is pretty unique to that game though.

Something else to note in bullet hell games is that not only does your ship usually have a smaller hit box, but some bullets may be like that too. The most noticeable case will be large bullets that are one color in the middle and another color along the edge. If you see this, usually only the middle part of the bullet has a hit box and the outside part is safe. Touhou games have bullets like this where you can be "inside the bullet" and be safe.