View ET-hitboxes: buggy/offset on railgun (ET Main)

As Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory uses 2 to 3 boxes drawn around the actual player model, it is essential for you to know how these boxes look to get a good aiming. So perhaps you want to check out for yourself what they look like in different situations (e. g. while climbing a ladder, while beeing in the railgun-train, while swimming, …). In order to view the hitboxes, you need a server that allows cheats and use debugbullets. Sadly in most cases there are no possibilities to view the hitboxes in your recorded replays/demos unless the game was recorded with cheats enabled, because the debugbullets hit boxes are server side things. But you of course can start a server on your own and have a look at those hitboxes, analyze them and improve your gameplay by beeing some knowledge-steps ahead.

If you are alone and if you don’t have another PC in a network, do the following:

/sv_pure 0 // allow any custom content, like supplydepot
/devmap MAP* // start a local server
/g_debugbullets 8 // go into debug mode
/cg_thirdperson 1// go in third person-view to see your hitbox
/cg_thirdpersonrange 100 // play with the value
/cg_thirdpersonangle 180 // play with that value, too

* replace MAP e. g. by oasis, fueldump, battery, railgun, goldrush, radar

If you have a second PC available in a network, start again a localhost-server with cheats enabled, connect the other server and again go in debug-mode:

/devmap MAP* // start a localhost-server on PC 1
/connect 192.168.0.XXX** // type this on PC 2 to connect with PC 1
/g_debugbullets 7 // go in debug-mode

** replace XXX with the local IP of PC 1 – get it e.g. by using “ipconfig” on ms dos-commandline

Now everytime you hit the other player model, its strong>hitbox-model will be visible to you and you can take a screenshot and do some analysis. Other useful things in this context:

/bind ENTER screenshot // bind "take a screenshot" to a key
/cg_railtrailtime 5000 // specify how long the boxes and bullet trails will be visible in ms

Besides setting your overall sensitivity with “set sensitivity” you can do some fine tuning. With tweaking the variables m_pitch (vertical [up/down]-sensitivity) and m_yaw (horizontal [left/right]-sensitivity) in your configuration, you can effectively improve your aiming for getting more headshots.

How do m_pitch and m_yaw work?

As the author of the rtcw.jolt.co.uk-article points out correctly: illustrations may be the easiest way to describe the effect of a.) sensitivity, b.) m_pitch and c.) m_yaw:

Note those are just illustrations to visualize that you can squeeze your mouse-responsiveness vertically and horizontally using m_pitch and m_yaw.

How does the game engine translate your mouse-movement?

As ruffnux points out in his acceleration-bug-report, every “count of frames” times per second the mousemovement is calculated like (1.) mouseX * sensitivity * m_pitch and (2.) mouseY * sensitivity * m_yaw. The default setting for m_pitch and m_yaw is 0.022. Now if you lower m_pitch or m_yaw, you get an ellipse instead of a circle for your vertical or horizontal mousemovement. So with lower m_pitch it will be easier for you to keep your cross-hair at head level. But as always: no pain, no gain, as on the other hand it will be more difficult to aim up and down (e. g. for compensating your cross-hair going down when crouching or proning or to aim at someone on a balcony or stuff like that).

How do I set up m_pitch and m_yaw?

Both settings depend on each other. As a rule of thumb ruffnux suggests to ensure m_pitch is at least 2/3 of what m_yaw is set to. So e. g. if you leave m_yaw at the standard setting of 0.022, set m_pitch to 0.66 * 0.022 = 0.015. Most servers will anyway include punkbuster-restrictions, that where introduced by clanbase at RTCW back in 2003. The reasons was to avoid players locking their cross-hairs to headshot height and so demanding more aiming skills. After restricting m_pitch to a range also m_yaw had to be set to a fixed range or value to achieve this goal. The reason is because you can also achieve a lower vertical responsiveness by (1) lowering your overall sensitivity and (2) compensating that by increasing your vertical responsiveness again with m_yaw to get back your original vertical sensitivity. The restrictions

pb_sv_cvar m_pitch out -0.015 0.015
pb_sv_cvar m_yaw in 0.022 or pb_sv_cvar m_yaw out -0.022 0.022

This means your minimum values on punkbuster-servers can be 0.015 for m_pitch and 0.022 for m_yaw. So on punkbuster-servers those values should be set up to:

set m_yaw 0.022
set m_pitch 0.01501

Are there other ways to tweak my vertical responsiveness?

Yes there are other ways. For example some mouse-drivers (Razer) will let you adjust your vertical and horizontal mouse responsiveness. Using some configuration hacks It was also possible for Logitech users in the past to use Razer-drivers with Logitech mice (see e. g. this article on Crossfire [thanks to oBs for the hint], “Razer Drivers with Logitech” on ESR or this guide):

Is this still possible – anyone tried it out?

Poll:

When your mouse pointer flickers or doesn’t run smoothly, maybe the refresh rate of your mouse it set too low…

What’s the mouserate?

To be able to move your mouse cursor on screen of course your operating system has got to know the mouse has been moved by you on the mouse-pad. This is done by polling the mouse for any input at the device it is plugged in. Basically you can use the standard PS/2- or an USB-port to plug in your mouse. PS/2 comes with a standard polling rate of 80hz (adjustable from 20 hz to 200 hz). USB comes up with a standard polling rate of 125hz (overclockable to 250hz, 500hz and 1000hz). Depending on your setup, you force your mouse to send data via PS/2 or USB to your operating system every 8 ms (= 125hz), 4 ms (= 250hz), 2 ms (= 500hz) and so on…

What’s the positive effect of a higher mouserate?

Your cross-hair may move more smoothly the higher the polling rate is set up. You will feel the difference from 125hz to 500hz. But you probably won’t feel any more difference between 500hz and 1000hz. A smooth mousemovement is essential in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, as you need to be able to aim precisely, you need to be able to target fast and you got to avoid any erratic movements. Sometimes it is just the little 1 ms of reaction time that is missing due to imperfect hardware setup and that thus makes you lose a duel. So you should set it up to 200 hz (PS/2) or 500hz (USB) if you don’t witness any of the possible disadvantages (USB) – like I do …

Any risks of a tweaking the USB-polling-rate?

Yes – there may be some! First: the higher the USB-polling rate, the higher your cpu-usage will be. Depending on your hardware this increase can be massive for each usb-device that is excessively refreshing data at high frequency. Further more common risks in combination with overclocking your USB-polling rate are damages to your hardware (e. g. your mainboard or your usb-peripherals such as your mouse if it can’t handle the higher polling rate) or stability issues with your pc. Tweak on your own risk!

How do I raise the polling rates?

PS/2 settings from RaZiel

To tweak your USB-ports use UsbRate v0.5 from RaZiel (download). Make sure you disable the realtime feature as it may crash your pc.

To tweak your PS/2-port go into your mouse-properties menu or use the PS2Rate-Tool (download) and adjust it like the thumbnail shows.

Reboot to let the changes take effect.

How do I test the changes?

Use mouserate.exe from Oliver Tscherwitschke (download) to measure your actual polling rate. To do this, move your mouse around in circles and watch the output. Ideally the measures are constant or at least not changing massively each poll. This would eventually damage your mouse and besides it would not support a smooth aiming.

So… in the end?

Don’t expect to be able to boost your aiming skills by adjusting the polling rate. But this is just one of many stones in the mosaic you can use for little improvement. I personally use a Logitech MX 518 mouse via the PS/2 port. The samplingrate is set up to 200hz with input buffer length 100. RaZiel suggested an input buffer length of 300 (see thumbnail from Aiming By RaZiel-Tutorial). I tried out USB at 500hz once but it ate just too many of my cpu-resources plus it seemed I did not to get a stable polling rate, so I got back to PS/2 again with which I played for many years… and it still works fine for me.

Poll:

... acting headless?

In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory each playermodel gets 2 or 3 boxes drawn around itself. Those boxes are the hitable sweet-spots – the hitboxes. Hitboxes have always been a problem in Enemy Territory as they seemed to be not accurate enough, wrong or even missing. This especially concerned the head-box which registers headshots that do up to 50 damage and thus far more than body shots what makes them very desirable. Bani tried to fix the problem with ET Pro and he came up with new headbox-code b_realhead (see changes in ET Pro 3.2.0, May 2005), better antilag-code and other stuff; but the results still seemed to be everything but perfect. Let’s have a look at some screenshots of ET Main & ET Pro hitboxes in different situations and draw implications for our gameplay.

Back in the year 2004, [nw]reyalP did an intersting analysis on the hitboxes in Enemy Territory. He used a custom MOD (never released though I think) which showed the hitboxes all the time (so not g_debugbullets). Also he used the ET Main code not ET Pro as he had no access to it; but from speaking with Bani, who said there weren’t any adjustments to the hitbox calculations (remark: some boxes were made taller than in ET Main) he was sure that it would also fit on ET Pro – when b_realhead is not > 0. Most servers today got b_realhead = 1 running, so that the following screenshots would not mirror accurately the hitboxes for the head.

hitbox-offset: strafing left with nade

Note: with b_realhead = 0 the heads hitbox is slightly offset to a moving player model – it actually follows slightly behind the player model; and with b_realhead > 0 the head hitbox should stay on the model while moving. To check whether you play on a server with the ET Pros head hitbox code, just enter the console and type:

/pb_cvarval b_realhead

Looking at his screenshots that contained player models in different movement situations (standing, crouching, proning, swimming, …), one state of the models animation, using different weapons (smg, grenade, …) plus the resulting hitboxes-calculation, reyaIP pointed out several interesting things:

1. The player model head can be ahead of its hitbox in the direction in which the player strafes
2. The player model ducks down a bit while moving, but its hitbox does not follow the model
   
3. A player model holding a SMG has its head offset to the left (your POV), the heads hitbox does not follow

Click on the screenshots to make yourself a picture of this:

Besides the notes from reyaIP you can see other things, which have e. g. been reported in a forum around 2005: the heads’ hitbox while crouching is not nescessarily the forehead or helmet, but more or less the chin.

And finally quoted notes from reyaIP on the screenshots for proning-hitboxes, which we all like (2nd) best :

1. The head hitbox position is based on a fixed set of rules based on player view angles, but the player model is not. You can be looking in exactly the same direction, and the player model can be in very different positions with regards to the hitbox. Where the model is depends on what sequence of turns you used to get there. While this is true for all the animations, the effects are more extreme with the prone models.
2. The animations that happen when you turn (or look up/down) have multiple effects. When you start to turn, just the head turns. At some point the body twists, then the feet shuffle around, and the whole thing starts over. Very nice from an eye candy point of view, but horrible in for the hit detection. Like the standing animation, the prone ones change a bit depending on what you are holding, and are different again for moving.

So if the hitboxes for proning are the 2nd best ones, which ones do we like most?

Swimming is like standing

Believe it or not: according to reyaIPs analysis the player model goes into swimming pose while diving/swimming and the hitboxes stick to the ones from player models in standing position.

Conclusions:

Hitboxes in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have always been a problem and will always rouse discussions. Well I think we got to live with the boxmodel and know about its bugs or “specialities”. For example aim for the chin and not for the forehead when you got someone crouched in front of you. And don’t look for the player model in front of you but have in mind the hitboxes that probably lie behind it. It’s often annoying and frustrating but everyone knows about the problems and thus everyone plays with equal opportunities. You just got to make the best of it… Perhaps we just got to take it with humour – enjoy Just Pub #056:

Just Pub #056

Whats your opinion?

In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory you do not necessarily shoot at where your cross-hair points: like in real life bullets do spread. There are three dimensions where you should know the details to master spread and improve your accuracy and aiming: (A) the game engine, (B) your setup/configuration and (C) your way of playing.

But now to the insights…

(A) The game-engine and weapon-spread

In ET the spread of your standard weapons (mp40, Thomson, Luger, colt, Sten, …) is affected by 5 factors:

1. View: moving your cross-hair / looking around increases spread
   The more you move your cross-hair around, the more weapon spread you will get. In times you move your mouse, spread increases while in times you don’t move your mouse, it will decrease steadily. Player velocity does not have any impact on spread of unscoped weapons. You can see the size of your weapon spread by activating cross hair-pulsing for example:

   set cg_crosshairPulse 1 // activate cross-hair pulsating
   set cg_drawcrosshair 4 // cross-hair: little spot in center plus pulsating circle around it

   

   big hitboxes (jaymod): hitable behind a corner

   So be aware of the ET’s hitbox model (hitboxes are much bigger than the models which makes some cross-hair-movement unnecessary) and reduce cross-hair-movement to a minimum. Especially avoid erratic mouse-movements and trace as smooth as possible. RaZiel mastered the idea of aiming like this – have a look at his tutorial.

2. Shooting: continuous shooting increases spread
   Short range fights usually don’t last long and every hit is crucial, so in most cases you are forced to shoot continuesly and shooting bursts is no option. Long range combats often last longer. Shooting small bursts of 3 to 5 bullets each should be considered if you can’t start of the fight with doing massive damage to your opponent. Concentrate on short range duels to get the maximum out of you rounds.
3. Receiving Damage: getting hit by bullets increases spread
   When you get hit by your opponent, your screen shakes. This will hurt your aim. Further more the knock back will raise weapon spread (analysis/implications from overdrive). Both make it inevitable for you to do your best not to get hit – strafe with and without stamina, use obsticles as cover, crouch, prone, …
4. 

   spread

   Movement: crouching and proning decrease spread while beeing in the air dramatically increases spread
   [GORE]Hallelujah did an analysis on how movement affects weapon-spread back in 2003. He found out that spread in standing/crouching/proning-position is nearly equal, when you fire small bursts of 2-3 bullets. If you fire continuously, the spread of crouching and proning is still the same but in standing position it is much higher (see screenshot). Further more Madscientist found out in his analysis 2006 that crouching will reduce spread to 50% from standing position. Being in the air (jumping, free fall, strafing on rough terrain, …) will result in twice the maximum spread you get when shooting in standing position. And proning will give you maximum spread for the first second and then decays to half the spread as crouching does.

5. Experience-Points: light weapons level 4 and covert ops level 3 decrease spread
   When you receive light weapons level 4, your weapon spread will reduce by 35%. (Note that it is level 4 and not level 3 like the manual says as [GORE]Hallelujah points out). Further more covert ops level 3 reduces spread by 35% for the Sten and the FG42. Interestingly this spread reduction seems to be transportable on the standard-weapons and also combineable with light weapons level 4 for maximum spread reduction (see analysis again from [GORE]Hallelujah). You should be aware of that to be able to evaluate your own aim and that of others on the server (e. g. if you join a server with players who have many XP).
6. Your weapon choice: the MP40 (Axis) seems to have slightly less spread than the Thomson (Allies)
   

   Spread: MP40 vs. Thomson

   Ifurita from planetwolfenstein did an analysis some years ago in RTCW on how many rounds a weapon is able to fire per second. He found out that the MP40 has a slightly higher firering rate than the Thomson (~ 6 vs. 5 rounds per second). You should now probably expect compensating the Axis advantage by having more spread. On the contrary: from the screenshots he made you can conclude that the MP 40 also has slightly less spread when fired in small bursts from 3 to 5 rounds. Of course all on the condition that the analysis is a.) correct and b.) also applies on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

(B) Your Config

1. Mousepad/-underground: Make sure your mousepad is clean and you just a minimum friction between pad and your mouse. The more friction, the less smooth will be your mousemovement.
2. Sensitivity: a sensitivity of zero would reduce weapon spread due to crosshairmovement to zero of course. But that wouldn’t be practical. Low sensers have got some advantages considering weapon spread. So they usually also do more headshots than high sensitivity users. I use a sensitivity of 5 in connection with pointerspeed 6 of 11 in windows xp which is very high, but manageable. See the Aiming by RaZiel-Tutorial for finding your sensitivity.
3. FPS / Frames per second: As overdrive states in his article, FPS increases recoil and your mouse will react a lot faster the higher the frames per second. Keep your FPS high, but as stable as possible at the same time. I have a quite old computer and thus I use com_maxfps 76. In most maps I can archive a stable FPS like this.
4. Mouserate: the higher, the smoother your aim can be. Basically you can chose between USB and PS/2. RaZiel stated 2003 that for him PS/2 worked better than USB, because with his Logitech Mouse he het a.) a higher mouserate of 200hz and b.) a more stable one that with USB (120hz). Overdrive stated 2006 in his article, that nowadays for most mice USB would be more suitable than PS/2 and that you can archive 450, 500 or even 1000hz. I myself use a Logitech MX518 with 200hz and inputbufferlength 100 on PS/2. With USB I could only get a maximum of 120hz. To check how often your mousedata gets refreshed check mouserate.exe from that RaZiel-Package (Tools-Folder).
5. FPS > mousrate: Madscientist found out about the phenomenon that spread due to cross-hair movement will decrease when you got more frames per second than mouse signals per second. This sounds logical as some for some frames the game engine cannot register any mouse movement which results in decreasing spread. Turn spread can be even reduced to zero (!) when FPS is twice as high as the mouserate. So if you put your mouse on USB with standard polling rate of 125hz and you have constant 250fps – … lucky boy!
6. Mouse-DPI / -Dots Per Inch: the more dpi, the smoother your aiming can be. But be aware of a little bug in the quake-engine that causes negative acceleration with high DPI.

(C) Your way of playing

(soon)

Note: if you want to play the game completely without spread, just check out the server under 85.17.39.194 which Madscientist set up (2006 – still active?).

RaZiel was a famous Return to Castle Wolfenstein-player years ago. Many people today still count him to one of the best RTCW players ever. Luckily he wanted to share his recipes for improving your aiming and tactical finesse with the community, so he wrote a tutorial to the end of 2003: Aiming by RaZiel.

Download Aiming by RaZiel here (97.5mb; contains some docs, videos, tweaks, patches, analysises and configs)

Although the tutorial is quite old and targets RTCW-players, things haven’t changed that much and the lessons are also relevant to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory-Players. This one is a must-have for every ambitious player.

Some excerpts from the content:

Folder Examples:
It contains some videos with scenes of him playing plus an explanation what he did and what you can learn from the specific video. To give you an idea, here we go with the low-quality version from YouTube.com:

Note among other things how his crosshair nearly always sticks to head-level… Thats the aim we need. In the package you will find the videos in high resolution.

Folder Sensitivity:
Beside a registry-fix that will kill your Windows(R) mouse-acceleration if it’s activated, you will find a guide on how to improve your aiming. A low-quality-preview from YouTube.com to get you an idea:

The tutorial centers around eliminating most friction between your mouse and your mousepad/-underground and then adjusting & finding the sensitivity thats works best for you to precisely aim at a small spot while strafing with or without using stamina. Note how smoothly his crosshair wanders with almost no vertical movement. (I will come to the relevance of that point in another article.)

Aim sponsored by Pronto Classic

I myself use a wooden table as mouseunderground from the beginning on. Before I start to play I often use to polish the underground with Pronto Classic furniture spray to minimize friction. As I am a high-sensitivity player, I never will get that ultra-smooth mousemovement and thus that RaZiel-poweraim. But the key to success I believe is to find your personal setup and style, stick to it (and not adjust your configuration every time you loose) and improve it by practicing alot. And: The games hitboxes luckily are big enough, so that it would be overdone to be able to track a small pixel…

Wolfenstein: Enemy Terrritory is a very fast game. In close combat often the player wins who hits first, so timing is crucial. While your opponent gets hit it will be much harder for him to aim at you or rather hit you because his screen shakes and you start off the fight as it were more health for you.

Headshots usually do 40/50[*] damage while bodyshots do less. Further more you got to know that the first shot usually hits where you aim at – without any weapon spread!

These two things we combine to the following rule:

Always point your crosshair at head-level where an opponent will most likely appear (or in the middle of two points when the likelyhood of an opponent popping up there is euqal) while you wander through the map.

Note that it doesn’t matter if you are searching for opponents and thus are moving forward or if you are escaping a firefight and are running backwards – your crosshair will stay always at the point where the head of your next opponent will most likely appear, so you minimize the way you got to move your crosshair until aiming directly at your opponent. I sometimes point the crosshair in the middle of two points if the likelyhood is equal for an opponent to pop up from the right and the left side. Avoid uneven and difficult terrrain in order to keep your cross-hair in place.

*Tip: use grooves to be on head-level

In many maps you can additionally use markings on the wall to keep your aim always on track (e. g. grooves on the walls inside buildings, see the thumbnail* or video-example**). Don’t look on the ground except for reviving, placing a mine, stealing an uniform and stuff like that or if you expect an opponent move along beneath you. Be prepared at corners where opponents often camp and enjoy the corner-camper calling you a wallhacker when you got him. Also include obsticles like crates in your pre-or “as if”-aiming when nescessary. First it may be hard to pursue this rule but after some time you will see you benefit because this makes sure two important things for you:

1. you are the first one of both giving damage in the duel
2. you probably initiate the fight with a headshot giving maximum damage

But: Instead of aiming for the forehead of you fictive oponents model, you should go a little deeper (have a look at W:ET’s hitbox-model). If your opponent hits you first – for any reason – from the front, your screen-shakes will make your cross-hair move up (see the analysis from madscientist under “shakes”). So if you aimed for the forehead in such a situation, you not a single bullet probably would have hit.

[*] damage given per headshot may be lower than 50 due to helmet protection on (usually -20% = 40 damagepoints per headshot), long ranges etc. Please find information on how many damage each weapon in ET gives here.

**Video-Example: Use markings on the walls to keep your cross-hair on head-level