The Brilliant Design Behind Geometry Dash's Hitboxes
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Hitboxes in GD have gained a reputation for being some of the worst hitboxes in any game. So today I finally investigated the reason behind this and found out why geometry dash hitboxes are so bad.
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Subscribe: bit.ly/3sTvL54
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Music Used:
Solace - Scott Buckley
Gossip Talk - Arthur Benson
Incidental Encounter - Arthur Benson
First Steps 02 - Official Celeste Soundrack
Resurrections 03 - Official Celeste Soundrack
Undertale OST Amalgam Extended - Elu Tran
Yellow Light - Arthur Benson
DK’s Snowboard Cross DK Summit Mario Kart Wii Music Extended HD
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Footage:
Neiro
RabidRetroSpectGames
Oculations [GD]
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Q&A:
What is Your Username on Geometry Dash?
Risplol
Do you have a Discord Server?
no, I'm not planning on making one right now, but that might change in the future.
What is your Username on Discord?
risp
How long have you played Geometry Dash?
Since 2014. I recently switched to PC in 2021 when I bought my first computer.
What do you use to Edit/make Thumbnails?
Davinci resolve/filmora to edit, Pixlr to make thumbnails (I'm broke💀).
What is your hardest level?
Acu
What other games do you play?
although I mainly play GD, I also play minecraft, roblox, celeste, terraria, and other games I can't remember lol
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#geometrydash #gd
Before any more confusion, i meant to say that only a few people wanted hitboxes changed in the intro. I kinda rushed the script at the beginning, so I'll make sure to do more research beforehand for my future videos.
Also I was wrong about hitboxes causing lag (i was refering to the lag caused from rendering custom fixed hitboxes built in gd which DOES make you lag, but i was stupid and didn't mention that)
Some people wanted fixed hitboxes. But, when they're in avernus, they hate it idk why
I was about to comment both of those, but thank goodness I read this first
Let's be honest if hitboxes were actually changed to be fixed the community will rage even more
your probably right about that lol. But it would mostly be because literally every level in the game would be broken if it did change
Like avernus it has more frame perfects than tarturus and its in 2nd place it makes the game not fun anymore and no one beat avernus because it has fixed it boxes
Yeah I mean we all probably hate fixed hitboxes
@@johnmarcybabol2076this aged poorly in one day lol
@@johnmarcybabol20761st not 2nd
Forgiving hitboxes are often considered good game design , so there you go 👍
if it's accurate it's not a hitbox no more
and good level design (avernus sucks)
@@teslacactus1135pesronally i think fixed hitboxes are fine if you make them visible and obvious. if the tiny spike is invisible then its literally krmal levels of unfair gameplay.
me when hollow knight exists
Fun fact: Gd actually does have coyote jumps, although for some reason they do not work if your icon is right side up. If you are dual however, both icons will always have coyote timers.
Also you can store those coyotes with dash orbs, which makes you able to jump if you do a microrelease after dashing off a solid while upside down :)
I actually never knew that lol. Thanks for telling me
I want to see this in a "impossible or not" level now
is the dash orb coyote jump why in spider you can change gravity in midair sometimes
@@stuffing09 no, thats just a regular coyote timing, unless you are talking about the bug that happens when you hit a moving pad (those can also make you jump midair)
That makes a lot of sense
I genuinely don't get how people hate these
they're awesome
and I love abusing them and being abused by them
you got me in the first half 💀
@@RispGD although I'm not sure about more accurate hitboxes affecting performance on a high level
I mean 22.5° slopes exist
they're at the same angle as the spikes and they have an accurate hitbox
so I don't think that was robtop's main idea, I think he just liked the leniency of smaller ones
"Being abused by them", at first i thought something abhorrent but then it made sense, a level can troll you with them
@@David280GG I did mean domestic abuse if you were wondering
@@AlexEEZ bro what 💀
I also remember one of the Celeste developers say that upon falling onto a platform, you can press jump slightly before actually landing and the jump still activates, which therefor makes it feel much more smooth and fair. Things like this (and gd's hitboxes) make for solid game design for the exact reason you just explained. Glad not everyone's oblivious to all of this, hahah. Great video!
yep, that's buffering
celeste has a fairly small buffer window, but big enough that it's really fun
GD has an *Infinite* buffer window
@@alexgamingyz5346 exactly
buffers are a big thing in a lot of games, and many people just don't realise or notice them, and it's super apparent when they lack them. For example, in Hollow Knight there's a speedrun skip where you have to cling to a small portion of wall and crystal dash off of it, and the only reason it's hard is because of the lack of buffer and it ends up being really apparent to the point where the best tip when teaching people it is to tell them to time their crystal dash late on purpose
This was a great video. The fact the you were able to explain how regular hitboxes are better than fixed hitboxes without any confusion was amazing.
Thanks for the comment! I tried my best to explain why hitboxes in gd are not what they seem. It was a hard video to make lol
The avernus incident just shows us why its a bad idea to try to fix the hitboxes
Another important thing to note is the blue hitbox as well.
The icon actually has two main hitboxes, the large red* and a smaller blue hitbox (based on how MHV7 renders them). The red hitbox interacts with everything on contact, like orbs, spikes, portals, etc. However, the Blue hitbox only interacts with block hitboxes, which are also blue, killing the player on impact. The side of the red hitbox does not interact with block hitboxes, though the bottom (and top for some gamemodes) does so the player can land onto them. The smaller blue hitbox allows another notable form of coyote time for the cube, and people have put this to use in demons which require a lot of tech based on clipping through blocks.
*there is also another hitbox similar to the large red one which rotates with the player, and only interacts with rotated objects. I don't exactly see the motivation behind doing this, though I guess it makes the hitboxes of spikes or orbs with rotation make more sense?
Do you know any levels that have used this??
I red this but I have no idea. Let me try to understand this:
Red hit box kills plate and interacts with orbs
Blue hit box deals with slopes and somehow allows you to clip through blocks
And there is another?
@@You_Ate_My_Soap red hit box interacts with most things that kill you, like spikes, saw and such like that, but excluding blocks
then blue hit box interacts with the sides of the block that will kill you, which is why you can kinda go inside a block with the ship
@@ultra.2500Psychosis's ending cube jumps are one example
i think avernus is enough to tell why
It's supposed to be hard yk
@@ProbsAFembobro its the most miserable think ever made 💀
@@ProbsAFemboyea but, “buffing something for the purpose of making it harder makes it boring” -said the wise man
@@ProbsAFembo acheron was also supposed to be hard, so was every extreme demon, but not all have fixed hitboxes
@@thenewboeguy idk blame zoink he's the one who buffed it too much
My only issues with hitboxes are that one slope corner piece with the massive rectangular hitbox and the one type of sawblade where the big one has a smaller hitbox than the medium one
Somebody should make a mod where the hitboxes are super strict and accurate to the shape just to see how much worse it feels.
Intresting idea! I might try seeing if thats possible.
Just play Avernus
@@RispGD and a mod that fixes the upload failed please try again later message aling with the NA level id problem
(my speculation) The reason why the hitbox doesn't really extend down the spike is because in early geometry dash it didn't need to. People didn't really flip the spike upside down and that wasn't seen in any robtop levels so you might as well make the hitbox smaller
I was thinking the same thing tbh. But i didn't end up putting it in the video.
i agree
edit: if hitboxes were "fixed" every single level would need to be completely revamped
really great vid, you should change the title though since I expected something else.
You should make a video on the genius of how GD was shaped, nobody really talks about it but there are so many things that make gd such a smartly made game
Wow, i never expected you too see this video! I'll ry thinking about a better title for it and thanks for the feedback :D
good title this time@@RispGD
This was one of the titles i thought of using, but im not sure why i didnt use it at first lol
@@RispGDwhat was the title before??
"Geometry Dash's most HATED Feature"
When it comes to performance, it really does not matter if the hitboxes are simple shapes or not (most of the time) because only objects close to the player should be checked.
intresting, I always assumed from what I heard that they can cause lag
You can do both. And squares are very simple to code for collision checking, just check if either the x or y is within 4 points.
It really does. More complex shapes mean a lot more computing power is needed, even if you only have a few objects having their hitboxes at the moment loaded at any instance in time. There is a reason why almost every game has simplified shapes for hitboxes.
The Brilliant Design Behind This Video’s Thumbnail
Seriously branded like a youtuber who has been doing this for a long time
Thanks :D
I've been practicing making about 10 different thumbnails/titles for each video so far (unlisted videos too). But luckily, this ended up being the one that worked.
WOW STALLIONGD OMGOYMGKGOGMGOGKG IM YOUR BIGGEST FAN WOOWWWWOWWWWWOWWWWW WOW OMG GMGMGOGM I LOVR SILENT DICCTRAS OH MY GOD WOW OMG IM GLAD TO BE THE SECOND REPLIER IN YOUR THDIDBD FOH MY GOD WOW WHAOH WHAT RHOE WHAT HOW WOW BLAARRRG BLEEEH WOWOWOWOWOWOWW WHATWOWOWOWOWWOWOWW LOSLSOALA YOLOOOOO!!111!1!1!1!111!1!1111!1!1!1
hey its stallion
4:42 MOM LOOK THERE I AM!!!
If ship couldn't ever enter a spike's texture without entering its hitbox straight flying wouldn't have ever looked as stunning as it actually does with the hitboxes GD has plus it just makes building hard gameplay a lot simpler
Imagine pixel perfect ship straightfly, that no matter how many fps and/or Hz you have, you can't do.
With all you need it simply place bottom spike two blocks down from top spikes
Only people who have a problem with the hit boxes, are the ones who don’t have the slightest clue of the most basic of game design concepts. Pretty shocking how many people that play video games have no idea how they work, or the principles that go into designing them.
watch rob make an April fools update with perfect fixed hitboxes
bro couldve said a single sentence like "smaller hitboxes make the game easier and smoother to play" but yapped his way to 5 minutes
exactly bro
the accuracy doesn't matter, what matters is how the player feels. in a game like this, a death should feel like a mistake of a player and not cause "i jumped there!" or "i didn't even touch it!" because that's the last thing you want the player to feel: that the game is unfair
3:32 slaughterhouse jump would be impossible without this (the gap not double spike)
The overlap makes it easier to see how much wiggle room you have, because seeing a 1 pixel overlap is basically impossible, and it makes the gameplay look far more intense because you can get closer to the obstacles
As someone who does game dev this seems like second nature to me. Surprised there's even people arguing about this, I thought they were all joking.
Fr
Tbh that's just standard game design, you never make obstacles as big as they look otherwise it feels unfair, and if something is helpful to the player you make the hitbox bigger
People very often overhype the difficulty of Getting Over It and I'm tired of hearing that. I have not played Celeste but I'm already 90% sure it's harder.
Hollow knight is a great example of this - check out skurry's recent hitbox only video for how cursed they are, and yet the average player would never ever notice the wierdness (except for Sly's great slash attack that ones way too big :/)
its crazy how many people only knew games did this because of the megahack
As an indie game dev its interesting having someone teach basic game design fundamentals in such a round about way. Generally in single player games you want to make hitboxes as forgiving as possible to not frustrate the player. It's better for the player to be able to be inside attacks then die from the slightest touch or what may seem to the player is no contact at all.
This is why most games intentionally do not show people hitboxes. Random idiot who do not know what they are talking about will always complain if they know the hitboxes.
"to help you understand" "this might sound confusing" "let me explain" bro it made sense 30 seconds into the video lmao
FR its annoying
I knew exactly what he was gonna say just after seeing the title and thumbnail lol
Like bro it’s not that complicated
Ok guys, hear me out. Let's make a lava themed top 1 extreme pretty similar to the golden using fixed hitboxes, since normal hitboxes make the game easier, fixed makes ot harder. The community will surely love it!
Yeah! It should be more hell themed because everyone surely loves hell themed especially when it’s the 400th top 1 that uses the hell style! We should name it “Avernus” because it sounds cool ig!
him: other platformer games
my brain: celeste?
him: celeste
me: OMG CELESTE
You COMPLETELY MISSED the reason spike hitboxes are small. They were designed for the cube gamemode. The cube rotates when you jump, but its hitbox doesn’t rotate because hitboxes can’t do that. Thus, your cube cuts way deeper into spikes than it appears to.
This isn’t done to make things easy for the player, it’s done because the cube isn’t where you fucking see it!!!!!!!
The Normal Design Behind Geometry Dash's Hitboxes because the community has never seen a hitbox in any game ever
If Hitboxes were fixed from the start, then Michigun would've never been famous for his specialty
as a person who played celeste for years before i ever touched GD, i never understood why ppl hated the hitboxes so much. forgiving hitboxes in many cases are FAR better than accurate ones, play celeste for 2 minutes with show hitboxes on to see
well, gd actually does have coyote time, in game modes like the spider you can still click after falling off the platform. but for the cube i totally agree
same for every other ground based gamemode im pretty sure. you seem to have less time with reversed gravity tho which is strange
@@rraaiin well, with mini every game mode has coyote time
@@death0910 just tested it and normal size has it too but for some reason only in reversed gravity
Gd has a coyott time of 2 frames
Generally, platformer game spike hitboxes should be smaller than the sprite appears so that the gameplay is more fair. So the spike hitboxes are perfect imo.
Also in Celeste, the spikes are five pixels tall while their hitbox is only three.
Robtop: bro wtf I just wanted to make a funny square hitbox.
This is legit just game design 101. Its never abput being accurate to the sprite, its about making a fair and fun game experience
The forgiving hitbox helps player have an easier time with tight jumps and makes gamemodes like the ship feel so much better to move in than they would be otherwise.
I do not understand the people that complain about the hitboxes.
this sort of game design is made so it's a minority of people complaining about game design rather than the majority
just, damn look at the people complaining of interactable objects in re4r, if those weren't painted yellow you'd be complaining about having to interact with everything you see
True, if it wasn't for games making their hitboxes bigger/smaller than the actual object. A lot of games would be alot more annoying in my opinion
Rp top, all you need to do it’s make the hit box reach to the bottom of the spike, like no one uses the going under spike mechanic
Also i feel as the bad hitboxes remove the "I didnt even touch the spike" exuse
mushihimesama type hitboxes
and I'm pretty sure that's intentional, the default cube shows the much smaller player object collision (compared to spike collision) hitboxes with a dot on it's center
I'd love to see a geometry dash-like that takes this concept to the next level
as a celeste expert*, seeing celeste hitboxes explained was pretty weird lol
*not really
As someone who plays modded Celeste (funnily enough in the expert difficulty so i’m litterally a Celeste expert), that’s how i normally see the game.
No but seriously there’s some really wack stuff you can do with it. Look up “Celeste dashless+” it’s completely insane
If the hitboxes were ever fixed, hundreds, thousands of levels will either become way more difficult, or impossible to play
1:01 - 1:10 are we just not gonna talk about how well the gameplay in the bg syncs with the bg music
ok but that one inner slope block with the huge rectangle hitbox sucks
Honestly robtop should’ve made the spike hitboxes longer in the bottom to prevent weird straight flying and wave stuff
Also notice how portals and orbs have *bigger* hitboxes than what would be intuitive. That's for the same reason, because otherwise it would feel unfair when it looks like you touched them but you actually didn't. In general, "good" things have bigger hitboxes and "bad" things have smaller ones.
I really liked the idea of the narration, but for such a short video, the intro was very prolonged going around in circles instead of showing the motives briefly and once. Worse is the very brief explanation of several points, given that the intro was already long enough, but the end result didn't go deep enough. Specifically outlined:
2:34 Simply not always true. If spikes had a triangular hitbox instead of a rectangular, it would barely make a difference. Circles on the other hand would indeed hit performance more, but there's also plenty of shapes that are computationally far more difficult. Plus the game also uses circular hitboxes for some objects (like saws as seen in the next frames). Furthermore, ultimately it is not just the hitboxes themselves requiring more computational power, it is also the proximity of the player to those hitboxes. You are not calculating the hitbox of a spike at the end of the level that's one minute ahead of you, since you are not even close to it. In short, it is good practice to group all objects into equidistant chunks and only filter those that are in close proximity to the user. Also, let's not forget about collision blocks that also share a similar story.
4:13 This should straight up be illegal. The base of the spike should never be open for the user to touch. The obvious fix is to extend the spike hitbox height towards its base, without increasing its width. This would prevent this ridiculous straight fly, but also not prevent the actual straight fly through the heads of the spikes, as they are intended to be placed.
Thanks for the criticism. I'm still working on making better videos as of right now, and i dont have much experience. And as someone who taught myself how to edit, i dont know all the techniques yet for making a good intro. Im trying to improve as I go. The only issue is my channel got popular before i had the chance to even practice.
Also I know i made a lot of mistakes in this video, but I'm working to stop it from happening again in future ones.
if u use the hitboxes in a wacky way (like the examples u showed at the begining) then its gonna look wacky, if u use them in a normal way, theyre actually good
ok but what about the massive gap between the bottom of the hitbox and the bottom of the spike? i dont think a miniwave should be able to phase through spikes
the spike hitboxes in celeste are fine because if you squint your eyes, the spikes look like squares. but in gd the spikes are bigger and more triangular, making a square hitbox not fit well
3:33 geometry dash does have this feature but only in specific circumstances. Botting the hell heaven shows just how far you can still jump after falling off a block at certain times (It’s like 100+ frames on 6969 fps)
Lol I love how avernus (the level with fixed hitboxes) was in the background at the start 😂
it's common practice in games to bias hitboxes in favor of the player like this. games that don't often feel unfair, because the human brain isn't actually that good at estimating things accurately in fast moving situations.
as someone who played i wanna game i gotta say accurate hitboxes and no bs that make game feel better goes hard! also this is unrelated but gd has one of best hitboxes in games i have ever seen. my favorite part about it is how you can jump with a cube and hit the spike from jumping too late.
I never really thought about why rob made the GD hitboxes, well, the GD hitboxes, but I gained some *k n o w l e d g e* from this vid, so yeh
I love how this is so short yet gets a lot of information out in a short time.
that said there are a couple very questionable hitboxes. notably there's a layout shell with a thick outline that is a square but it has a rectangular outline. Also the larger dagger saws being smaller than the medium dagger saws is whack.
People actually complain about hit boxes? Don’t they know that it’s done on purpose?????
If hitboxes were actually fitting the spikes, Cataclysm would still be considered the same way as in 2015
accurate hitboxes would most likely not affect performance in any way unless the hitboxes are constantly being checked every single frame which they should never be from the beginning
ngl fixing gd's hitboxes is like taking a car and giving it the least accurate hitbox and giving it to one of the best ssl's in the world, it just doesnt work
Don't forget how the gd hitboxes are "HOW THE HELL DID THAT HIT ME I WANT EVEN TOUCHING IT"-proof, this is one of the main reasons why fixed hitboxes are annoying, especially in ship, at 4:18 you would see exactly what i mean. Did any of those deaths look fair? Did the ship icon look like it *actually* hit the spikes? No, this is why spike hitboxes in games like gd, and as you mentioned, celeste, are smaller than they look.
In Team Fortress 2 player, there's a weapon that's stats are literally based around the fact that you can hit a player when you hit approximately 1 meter from the player model. And it's balanced
one of my first games on my ipod touch oh man the days
this hitbox is like this so that people would NOT "i didnt touch the spike"
Easy game design tip: make the hitboxes for things which are good for the player big, and bad for the player small. Cheating the game to be in the advantage of the player makes it feel fair, paradoxically.
3:35 it does, although it's only when you are upside down, most noticable with mini ball.
a diffferent perspective: whe someone finally fixed them, the communtity was mad. (avernus)
Exactly! “fixed” hitboxes are anything but fixed: they’re just bad game design
Well I don't think anybody really ever wanted the hitboxes to be fixed, just thought they were weird, let's be honest lol (good vid tho bro)
(also sorry I keep disagreeing with things, but Getting Over It isn't as hard as Celeste imo)
Ik it seems like I hate the video but I just NEEDED to comment these things for some reason. I actually loved the video, it was really well made! And I fully agree with the main idea of it
I definitely made alot of mistakes trying to make this video, but it was my first time trying out this video style and i didnt expect it to get so popular lol
@@RispGD Yeah it's all good, Idk why I was looking at so many mistakes myself, Ig I was in a weird mindset
I never found the hitboxes in this game bad, if they were accurate to the actual object it would feel ridiculous and unforgiving, when being so much as GRAZED by a spike kills you, at least with the current hitboxes crashing into a spike actually FEELS like crashing into it
Gamedev here. Making hurtboxes smaller than the visuals is game design 101
the mental gymnastics you have to do in this video is insane.
this whole thing could be condensed into a two minute video or less
Nice video! What do you use to make your thumbnails. I’m trying to make my own videos but can’t get anywhere because I have bad thumbnails.
Try the websites pixlr or photopea. They are free and similar to Photoshop
I get the spike hitbox but it needs to be extended downwards so all the mini game modes can’t just go under spikes. The shape is good, but why does it not reach to the bottom??!
In terms of performance, a fixed hitbox for the spike would probably actually be more performant than the current one. It would just require a triangle the size of the spike.
Rectangles and circles are faster than triangles
@@PlzDoNotTheFade no, since triangles are the most simple shapes to draw and also have the fewest vertex points
@@treudden perhaps for a human, but computers dont work like humans do. the most simple shape to a computer is indeed a rectangle
2:37 hollow knight: are you sure about that
If the spike hitbox was accurate cant let go will be harder or even worse we would never had it maybe
(but probably we would cuz robtop wanted some songs in newgrounds or whatever it's called)
Y'know how people hate Avernus for their fixed hitboxes?
Yeah, they can't change.
For once I am looking at a video about something else than Celeste, and yet the video still covers Celeste, I cannot escape mount Celeste
Someone should make a top 1 with fixed hit boxes so to the average viewer it looks really easy but when you play it it’s way harder fr fr
someone areadly did that
Another reason the hitboxes are good is that the hitbox of your icon never rotates despite the icon doing so when it jumps. The hitboxes are made so you don't die while seemingly not touching any spikes
The fact that he used avernus as bg footage at the start is hilarious.
tldw: anti-how the fuck did that hit me measures
its kinda crazy yall JUST NOW realized this🤦♂️
FR
having hitboxes be smaller than the object theyre attached to is literally basic game design. it makes any game more enjoyable and less unfair
Bloodbath with fixed hitboxes 💀
Top 10 reasons why buffed spike hitboxes shouldn't be called "fixed"
#1: This video
This is lemoncak in an alternate universe where he never made shorts.
💀
Its interesting coyote time exists when in reverse gravity actually
i think forgiving hitboxes are good, it makes every death feel like the player's fault instead of the game's fault
it will be fine if robtop just makesit so the borrom goes to the actual bottom and not that you can just go under it with a small icon
THANK YOU, finally someone making a video on why the hitboxes are like that and not saying BLAHBLAHBLAH BAD HITBOXES because blahblah
that’s literally this video
hey great video and microphone! If you could please share your mic settings 🥺once again great video
Well i don't use any mic settings, except i do use obs to record my voice. My microphone is the HyperX Quadcast btw
alright thank you!@@RispGD