So we all know Sombra’s Hack is under pretty strict LoS rules to figure more out I spend the last two days making a Workshop mode to Test how her Hack LoS works.
First of here is a Clip I took:
So we all know Sombra’s Hack is under pretty strict LoS rules to figure more out I spend the last two days making a Workshop mode to Test how her Hack LoS works.
So first we need to clear a few things up:
This is the minimum Latency I can get with it being a Custom game and a bot.
A very very big part of all this is Perspective and Animation so when hack seems to go trough walls because her Pink laser things go though it it isn’t hack going trough walls because Sombra probably still has LoS just not to your main body where the animation connects too. Perspective also plays a role Sombra’s LoS check goes from her to the enemy so even if the enemy has no LoS Sombra can hack LoS as seen all to perfectly in 00:52.
Slowmotion is making it seem way more extream then it actually is so keep that in mind.
So now we can look at the Video:
So the really big thing I notice is that Hack has a way smaller Tolerance/Play when starting hack than to break it. Meaning You need to see a bit more than the half of the Hitbox to start hacking but to break it you can go behind walls till only your fingertips aren’t hidden and in some cases Hack still doesn’t break.
Then we have the case at 2:50 Where I really hack Lucio trough the wall the only explanation I find here is that his hitbox is weird and was somehow still in LoS even tho his model wasn’t.
But you can Test it for yourself with the Code: JS48P
(Instructions are in the Description)
While visually the hack lines can go through walls, I’m pretty sure when they made fixes a while back the intent was that the hack doesnt break as long as there’s a certain amount of the player visible. So at least for the cases of the Lucio at the beginning of your video, when the hacks complete he is still technically visible to you, but the visual effect of the hack does indeed appear to go through the wall. I think that’s more of an issue with the visual effect than anything else.
Yea most of these cases are infact only the Animation like I said in the main post both the Animation and the Perspective are huge parts of what make it seem like going though the wall when they are aren’t. Most cases are actually just here to show how big of a difference Perspective makes on where Lucio can’t see Sombra but Sombra Lucio. And the difference in play from Starting hack and breaking it.
But one case in the Video at 2:50 Lucio seems to be completely gone from any kind of LoS but hack keeps going trough. My guess it that it probably has to do with the different hitboxes of all Heroes that are usually bigger than the model and it being diffrent on each Hero probably makes it hard to find a setting that doesn’t have some errors in it.
This would be my guess as well. It’s actually extremely rare for developers to use the actual render model for any kind of calculation. The LoS checks on hack are no doubt done based on some more course grained hitboxes that are larger than the character model itself.
I’m glad you dug into this; I never tested in detail, but from your video it looks like they actually took my recommendation (from back when the cast time was first reduced and LOS was a big question).
To summarize my recommendation, which may or may not be an exact match to their implementation:
Take the collision bounds of the target in screen space (i.e. literally draw a rectangle on Sombra’s screen that encompasses Lucio, except the rectangle is invisible).
Hack can target only the center point of that rectangle to begin casting.
As long as any one of the 5 points (4 corners of the rectangle + the center point) remains in line of sight, the hack can continue.
You can end hack atleast.
Starting hack has much the smaller tolerance you need to have about 50% of the hitbox in LoS. Thats probably so you can’t start hack from a position the enemy is unable to shoot directly thank to perspective.