Aya wrote:
Also, headshots in TF2 are broken. Many times I hit the upperchest/shoulders area and it's a headshot. Very rarely do snipers make an actual headshot.
Good news everyone! That isn't really a bug per se, it's a design choice made by Valve.
How the game determines shots to a specific location in a character's body is simple. They divide the body into sections bounded by cubes and once a specific cube has been hit, it gets generalized into the 'target location'.
Now, what does this have to do with head shots? Well, look at the screen shot I took of the heavy and soldier with hitboxes shown with the Valve Model Viewer (included in the source SDK):
The green and red cubes are the upper torso and head hitboxes, respectively. To my understanding, Valve made a conscious choice of enabling headshots for
both parts due to two reasons.
First, the hitting mechanism, i.e. the way a shot target location is traced, has to be the same for all classes. This means that the same technique is used for a scout, sniper or a heavy. As such, the hitboxes used for the tracing must be the same. Curiously, the head of a heavy isn't
that much bigger than the head of a scout, is it? Heavies are easy to hit, not primarily because of their slow speed, but because of their large shoulder breadth.
The second reason is balance. The sniper would be useless if head shots were too hard (read: impossible) to obtain, this eases their game play a bit.
As you can see, the hitboxes bound not only the head but the little area surrounding it. Thus, as per seen in the video, you can do head shots just fine even if it would just buzz past the target's ear.
Apologies for the lengthy post, but I had nothing better to do!
