PC How do melee attack collisions work?

[Jaek]

When I swing a weapon such as a club, the location on the enemy where I see it hit isn't where it actually connected.

I try hitting enemies in the face by having my cross-hairs on their face however I often end up hitting them in the body or missing them altogether.

It seems the melee distances I observe differ from the computed melee distances.

This also goes for the enemy attacking me. An enemy will attack me and I can visually confirm I'm out of reach and yet they score a hit on me.

I saw a post in google saying the behavior is due to the game using 'sphere casting' for melee collision. How does it work?

Can anyone explain it to me clearly and accurately so I can mentally visualize sphere casting while in melee so I know when to hit and when to dodge?

 

[Roland]

The only time I have ever experienced getting hit when visually I am out of range is when I have played online on someone else's server and there was some network lag.

When I play single player everything is very accurate. In fact, A17 made things extremely accurate to where if the crosshairs is not exactly on what I am hitting when contact is made I miss. A17 is more accurate to hitting where the crosshairs points than any alpha previous as far as I can tell. In fact, many have felt that melee almost feels as though you are shooting your club it is so dependent on the location of the crosshairs at time of contact...

Regardless, A18 will be introducing a new system so that as you swing your melee weapon it can clip and hit an entity at different points of the arc of the swing. So missing the head could still result in a hit on the shoulder if the shoulder was in the path of the weapon's arc.

I suspect that depending on network connection and your own specs no matter what method is used there will continue to be cases where you get hit by a zombie that seems visually out of range or that you miss a zombie that visually seems to be where you were aiming. Hopefully with optimizations those cases will diminish but they won't ever go away which is why we have the disclaimer for pretty much every game that "the online experience may vary"...

 

[Jaek]

The only time I have ever experienced getting hit when visually I am out of range is when I have played online on someone else's server and there was some network lag.
Regardless, A18 will be introducing a new system so that as you swing your melee weapon it can clip and hit an entity at different points of the arc of the swing. So missing the head could still result in a hit on the shoulder if the shoulder was in the path of the weapon's arc.

Fantastic and thank you, I can't wait for A18. Do by chance know how sphere casting is calculated?

 

[warmer]

To me, you hit where your crosshairs are. In my opinion, that is how I get headshots in melee and ranged every time. Granted, I miss occassionaly when the zombie is walking around like a meth head and jerking all over the place, but for the most part, I hit where I am aiming.

When you run into issues to me is ground attacks. Those tend to be the least accurate for me.