Why Crosshairs Are Surprisingly Difficult for Game Developers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
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Patreon: www.patreon.co...
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Samoe, an old friend helped me make the crosshair montage: samoe.itch.io/
Videos referenced:
Garbaj breaking down how FPS bullets are odd: • The Slightly Odd Way B...
Shounic explaining The Original from TF2: • the original doesn’t a...
JakeyFFS Headglitching explanation: • What Is Head Glitching?
Bungie GDC talk: • The Art of Destiny's F...
Garbaj off-centered crosshair: • Off-Center Crosshairs ...
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Did you re-relese this vid?
Get that bag
@@bobertastic6541fr
How long does this last?
Better spot that flexi if you know what I’m sayin’
if you have to make the crosshair close to the barrel, you just have to comically increase the length of the gun to reach it
and they say game design is hard, cowards are simply afraid of proper solutions
Or just make the crosshair so big that it reaches the gun 🧐
Oh is that why snipers exist
I just imagine it's a puzzle game, where the gun can't clip through stuff, and you have to make it to the end of the level and shoot something.
That's why games put lasers in guns
I like that the sponsor spot is for a seemingly comfortable and usable office chair and not a “gaming” that tends to be worse for your overall posture.
Office chair superiority since comfortability is better than design.
Buying office chairs instead of gaming chairs is like buying men's shaving products as a woman. Basically the same thing but cheaper.@@gameringdudeguy1126
@@zeebeeplayzlove this interpretation, never thought about it that way but it’s so true. (And probably applies for other “gaming” products (mouses, keyboards, headphones etc…)
@owentucker6215 sometimes. Mics and headphones I say no, get a desk mic and some studio headphones (my reference headphones are my favorite part of my set up). Mice depends on preference, keyboard idk it's so hard to find a full size nowadays that I like; Mines so old its missing paint on all the major keys.
@@owentucker6215gaming mice and keyboards are actually benefitical, but headphones, desks, and chairs are “gamer taxed” the same way women’s shaving products are
"what could be so hard about it? it is just a lil image on your screen"
"oh wait, it needs to *work* ..."
not necessarily i mean look at tf2
@@Budd4Kuch3nwhich one?
@@Budd4Kuch3n whats wrong with titanfall 2?
@@keithkeiser4142 Team fortress 2
@@jeremiahrosa1329tom foolery 2
Im a game designer, and something you recognise with experience, is that when making a game, you have to pick and choose details to sacrifice so the game is actually possible to make; no game can get everything perfect, and so you learn to figure out what's worth spending time on to realise the idea you have in your head with minimal barriers to the player.
Personally, I like to make/play games where I can forget about the aesthetics and focus solely on the crunchy 'game' of the game. So I think about how a player will internalise a mechanic, and then let the details bend a little if they obstruct that - i.e, a player will think of the game as "when I see a player, i can point to them with the centre of my screen and shoot them, and they will only be able to shoot me back if they do the same". Players are a lot more forgiving when it works as they expect, even if it looks a bit off.
My philosophy is that being a game developer is basically being a magician. Rule #2 is "cheat!! Cheat like your life depends on it!"
Rule #1 is _"Don't get caught"_
It's all slight of hand and smoke and mirrors, the quality of a game is largely based on "How much shenanigans can I pull off without the player noticing" - the more shenanigans you achieve off screen, the better a game developer you are, and the more players like your game.
You're making a magic trick, friend.
@@MustacheMerlin see I've heard that before and I'm not sure I completely agree. Sure, some things you are forced to fake (see my comment above), but by and large, despite the common rhetoric that you are trying to create an experience for the player, I like to think of it as if you're creating a puzzle or toy that the player is trying to solve.
So by using common smoke-and-mirror tactics - for example reducing the number of enemies in a room if you keep dying to them - you are eroding the player's trust in your design and their own ability. If you look at the most basic games like chess, sudoku, even physical games like tag, you wouldn't consider making their rules uncertain in favour of a better experience, same with situations like flubbing rolls in D&D. It makes people feel like they are being tricked, and makes the game less like a game and more like a movie, where you are directing what the player sees
@@NedInYaHead Indeed ! One of the basic rules of good game design is that outcome can be predicted by the player. If the game’s rules are changed without noticing the player he’ll gradually loose faith in them, and overall it will lesser the fun. Hiding mechanics is okay, ie Uncharted’s first enemy bullet shot in a fight will NEVER hit the player, it’s just there to warn them.
If we truly had to make an analogy, I like yours better than the magician. A chef cooking and using the right dosage of the ingredients he has (plus the secret ones), would work too I guess
@@NedInYaHead See that's why cheat is rule number _two._ If you are cheating in such a way that you are "eroding the player's trust" or making the gameplay "unpredictable" then you are HARD breaking rule number one: _Don't. Get. Caught._
I'll reiterate what I said: the mark of a good game developer is how much shenanigans you can get away with without the player noticing.
Concrete example: Skyrim's follower NPCs are "annoying" and "buggy" and "constantly in the way" - that's largely because Bethesda likes to do everything "for real". (Note that Bethesda has a big reputation for releasing buggy broken messes - this is a large part of why) If you go nuts with the super speed boots and Lydia is now six towns over, Bethesda makes your NPC pathfind all the way across the map to you and physically walk six towns over to you. It takes forever and is very likely to fail when the pathfinding breaks and Lydia gets stuck on some random physics geometry somewhere or is otherwise killed by a monster you don't know about.
In contrast, Atreus from the recent God of War reboots is considered "one of the best companion NPCs ever" and "super helpful" and "well made" - and that's largely because the God of War devs cheat like crazy. Atreus teleports like nobody's business, the second the camera is off of him in a fight he can and will teleport to the other side of the screen, on top of a tree, to random enemies, whatever. He never fails to pathfind, he never gets stuck, he doesn't randomly accidentally die while you're not looking at him. Because "doing it for real" is overrated and a mistake.
Other examples of cheating include things like the _essentials_ that make a modern platformer game playable, things like Coyote Time, Jump Buffering, popping your head around a corner when you juuuust barely clip a ceiling collider, etc.
Going back to God of War - the game doesn't allow enemies that aren't on screen to attack, it's completely unrealistic, but otherwise the players complain that the game is unpredictable and unfair - so. Doing it for real doesn't guarantee that your players will trust you or that the gameplay will be predictable. In fact, cheating well is practically a prerequisite to making a game that acts in a way that's predictable to players - reality is a chaotic mess impossible to wrap your head around.
Mario Kart is another example of a game that cheats hard (specifically I know about Mario kart 64) - CPU karts far enough away from the player don't have collisions, follow a predetermined path, don't react to items, and ALL the CPUs can speed up or slow down at will to get to their target places. In fact, the game straight up decides which CPUs will win, depending on the character you pick, Mario Kart 64 assigns a specific CPU to be your "rival" and will slow down all the other karts and speed up the rival to ensure it's at the front of the pack competing with you. Eg, if you pick Mario, your rival will be Bowser.
Another common example of cheating is that most games give enemies big hit boxes and player hit boxes are a little smaller than their sprite. An extreme example - touhou gives _you_ a teeny tiny dot, and the enemy you're fighting might as well be the side of a barn.
Halo has aim assist and bullet magnetism and makes the first 8 meters of projectile weapons "hitscan" to reduce complaints about lag and "I shot him point blank!"
General rules of thumb:
Doing it "for real" is complicated, unpredictable, expensive, bug prone, bad for performance, and usually gets bad results.
Generally it's a good idea to cheat in the player's favor. That's called "game feel"
Game AI is probably the place you want to cheat the hardest. Don't trust pathfinding it does not work.
Good DMs fudge dice rolls. Bad DMs fudge dice rolls badly. You can't just cheat, you have to cheat _well._ A good magician does not appear to be doing a trick at all - they appear as though they really actually did just pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Lol, the "stiff and uncomfortable" chair is actually the same chair model I just purchased to upgrade from my uncomfortable and slightly lopsided old desk chair
damn, just got to this part and it's literally my own chair lmfao. it's nice, but the seat feels like it tilts forward too much
Hey it’s still a cool chair
Sight offset is an issue in the real world too. The sight sits above the bore of the gun. About 2.6" in the case of the AR-15. That means that at close range, your bullet will impact lower than your point of aim. It's fairly common for shooters to unintentionally shoot the barrier they're trying to shoot over.
Luckily in video games you can make the bullets and sights and your eyeballs all line up
@@jiaan100...which sucks. It was a sad day when Planetside 2 dumbed down the shooty offset, it made everything feel shitty especially the tank and turret guns
As someone who plays splatoon, like, a LOT, the reactive crosshairs are actually really detailed and well made! They're especially well done on weapons with charge-up, and especially weapons like Chargers (Splatoon's version of snipers) that get more range as they charge their shots, meaning the reactive crosshair becomes a way to track how charged up your gun is too, not only letting you know where you're aiming, but also how far your shot will go!
Also, as an aspiring indie dev myself, this video most certainly did save me a headache, I now know to simply not have a crosshair and make the bullets spawn randomly all over the screen to avoid coding a workaround!
I didn't know that, that's insanely cool, thanks for sharing :]
@@JayTheDevGuy Yeah! Splatoon 3 is an amazing game, despite its faults of map design. The UI and sound design are probably the best of any FPS or Third Person Shooter I've ever played!
@@JayTheDevGuy Splatoon also has a weapon type called dualies, which as you might guess, makes you hold two guns. When you're using dualies you get THREE crosshairs!! and both of the reactive crosshairs show exactly where your shots go!
@@nood1le Thank you noodonele, I am now 78 years old and still play Splatoon because it's an awesome game, you should try it some time!
@@MeloniestNeon Yeah it does seem uniquely fun. Just haven't gotten around to giving up my money to Nintendo yet. Which one should I play tho? Because I know there's sequels
A downside to lowering the crosshair is evident around the 12:20 mark, when you're ascending the Gravelpit tower. Your view of the ground below the tower is restricted by the raised camera, artificially obscuring the 3D space for no good reason. And given that your camera is only over the character's right shoulder, at certain angles it will be very difficult (if not impossible) for the player to angle the camera to see everything below them properly.
Sure, you're getting a great view of the skyline, but in a game that's highly vertical, you also need to account for looking downwards.
This.... isn't a big issue at all. In pvp shooters that have (or had) lowered crosshair people still prefer high ground. Hunt Showdown has camera on players chest so you expose your head before you can see enemy - but people still want to go on top of walls, roofs, mountains, ledges, balconies etc. It isn't as big of and issue you claim it is. Previous map hunts devs did gave more verticality than their previous maps and next map will have EVEN MORE verticality (altho they are now also giving players option to center the crosshair - but game has been up for 6-7 years and growing in numbers). Yes you do have to expose yourself quite a lot if there is someone directly below you but many times that isn't going to be the case.
And now that this dev knows about this issue they can figure a solution around it. Maybe:
1) when player goes high enough the AI will stop aggroing and starts to patrol around, this way if they were directly below player before now they could expose themself
2) somekinda leaning mechanic could fix this too
3) maybe avoid making blocky high grounds and instead make platforms curvy/sloppy, this way there is no hard 90 degree angle blocking the bullet (needs to have quite forgiving platforming gravity/physics so that going near edge doesn't mean player starts slipping and eventually falls down)
4) edges of high grounds could be made of materials that are both see-thru and shoot-thru (somekinda magic class or somekinda metal net for example)
5) or maybe every building or hill is surrounded by somekinda fence so that AI can't reach stairs/ladders/paths to high ground, this way ai/enemiesshould never be directly below player
Maybe there are even more ways to solve this.
But these solutions already would make this small issue into none issue.
@@samamies88 Uh, what? Hunt: Showdown is a first-person game. The game that Jay is making is third-person. Their camera setups are completely different. And the problem I'm describing would never happen in a first-person game anyway, because the camera is already restricted to what the player-character would logically be able to see. But in a third-person game, the camera hovering above the player-character's shoulder automatically creates a disconnect between what the character ought to be able to see (or be unable to see), and what the player can see. The fact that the "centre" of the screen is lower than the true centre is an even further disconnect.
@@samamies88 And what you failed to mention with Hunt making this change, is the huge outcry of support in giving an option to center the crosshair.
"Works fine" doesn't change the fact that everyone hates lowered crosshairs. They can work fine, sure, and they can help fix head glitching, but that ignores everything about how it feels to play. When close enough to 100% of the games on the market center the crosshair, and the vast majority of FPS gamers don't even know head glitching is a thing, all you end up doing is creating a game that people have to meet half way to play. People have to accept that this game is just the game with the stupid crosshair placement. You need to make a game so good people will put up with it's annoying design, because no one is going to care that it was designed that way for a reason. It's why developers just center the crosshair, and deal with those issues. It's usually just extreme edge cases that bring about the issues with a centered cross hair in the first place, and probably wont be something most people even really notice.
What about all the Halo games tho??? They all have (or had) lowered crossbair. The critcally and fondly remembered one.
@@purplfish6248 Halo is a first-person game. The game that Jay is making is third-person.
I was not arguing about the issues of a lowered crosshair in a first-person game.
Learn to read.
I took down the original upload of this this morning because most commenters were distracted by my terrible audio balancing. Plus it's unforgivable that I did flowerhead's music dirty like that. This one is for real!
Thats why I saw the video an hour ago but the upload said 25min ago. Really good video btw keep up the great work!
oh lol i thought my perception of time was wrong.
@@realElo.2 same
Ahh I thought something like that happened. I was like 4 minutes into it before I saw "This video is unavailable" popup lol.
Anyways great video as always.
@@realElo.2 it is, i was gaslighting you, sorry
One thing I'd hoped you might mention was that in games like Red Orchesta/Rising Storm, you could aim down sights but where the bullets were coming from your gun was still a factor. So the height of the sights/scopes over the bore of the rifle meant that you still couldn't just barely peek over an obstacle, you had to make sure your weapon entirely cleared the obstacle.
TF2 actually doesn't have that simple of a crosshair/aiming system.
For projectiles at short to medium ranges it has an aim-assist. And hitscan weapons use the camera.
You can look at the video "tf2 projectiles have aim assist" by shounic where he goes super in-depth.
TH-cam analytics tell me that almost all of my audience also watches shounic lol, he's such a goat honestly
@@JayTheDevGuy makes sense - analysing the inner workings of a game that your game is based on is probably just as interesting to most of us
@@JayTheDevGuyShounic is making the devlogs Valve never got to make
Like Heavy shooting from his head rather than the barrel of his guns
For some reason I thought this was going to be a whole 14min video about how 1080 is an even number
...what?
as someone whos never devolped a shooter i would have NEVER expected it would be this complicated, i honestly just thought it was "putting a png on the center of the screen"
same man 💀
@@JayTheDevGuy i think ive done that with a lot of features, simplifying them in my head
Except sometimes it is if you wanna be lazy
I thought like you also san
All these extra mechanics discussed in the video are rather simple. Crosshair placement should be the least of your concerns
I absolutely love Splatoon’s solution. Not only does it show when your shots are being blocked by terrain, but it also shows when your shots are hitting for full damage. Which is important for a game with projectiles instead of hitscan and damage drop off.
Something I saw somewhere was that some game studio wasn’t sure why their game looked bad even after trying everything to make it look better. Then one designer brought down the crosshair, and suddenly the game looked better because you have more focus on the actual art of the game rather than random things, and similar to what you said, large open areas look a lot better without UI or a crosshair in the way
Counter-Strike switched bullet origin to the gun at one point and people revolted - but for a brief period, those of us that bound a key to switch between right/left hand had an fun little advantage. Another small detail about having the camera as the origin is: at least don't make the camera the top of the player model - we used to call this "helmcam", meaning that you couldn't even see the eyes of the player shooting you from behind a crate.
When the world needed him most, chonky Uncle Dane returned.
Edit: Hello everyone who liked my comment 😶 Y'ALL SHOULD JOIN THE PATREON!! WE HAVE CAKE!!
lmao what??
@@triplus198 2:31
we stan chonky Uncle Dane
choncle dane
Big Daneus
The title gave me a heart attack since I thought my 3D game would need to have changes made to the crosshair system that I kinda just slapped in. Fortunately, my game doesn’t have guns and is an exception to this rule, and uses the crosshair coming directly from the center of the camera for gameplay reasons
i love the fact that you put little secrets on the youtube searchbar
;]
The problem with lowering the crosshair is that if you need to shoot someone higher than you, your field of view will be up towards the sky rather than the ground (where enemies might be walking around). Making the field of view higher might fix the problem, but it makes the game more disorienting and causes more motion sickness.
I was always under the assumption that higher fov lead to less motion sickness, not more.
@@rileyblair7273I mean, I definitely get more motion sickness the more my fov climbs past 100 for prolonged period. It only really helps when it's increased while I'm moving fast and decreased when I'm not. Playing Minecraft on Quake Pro makes me even more nauseous than the nausea effect does for example.
@@rileyblair7273it 100% is i can’t play r6 because despite the game being decently fast the fov is so bad. I need to puke 🤮
as a developer who is newly trying to do 3d game stuff, this was really a great video. i probably would've been exactly that developer thinking "why does this feel so bad" without any tangible idea of what is wrong. also i love your video's avatar style
Thank you!
the ONLY shooters i've ever played were the portal games, so i didn't know many of the intricacies you highlighted. near the middle of the video i was thinking "why not just bring the gun in line with the camera when you shoot?" and then that turned out to be what games do! i LOVE the irony of the gun coming back around to center screen i think that's perfect.
i also feel like the crosshair lying when you're shooting "from the hip" or equivalent is. fine? that's *supposed* to be a hard thing to do, requiring some mental effort! definitely feel like its the correct move over drawing imaginary bullets (unless you're going for a much more casual game.)
was not expecting the lowered crosshair tho! that really blew me away. all the shots you used to show it off looked so beautiful- it makes me actually want to play fps games hehe
this is such a lovely, insightful video jay
try ultrakill :)
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If you’re wondering why the crosshairs feel slightly “off” when you lowered them, it’s because of rule of thirds. A third of the way up the screen is as much a focal point as halfway up the screen. So, a crosshair one third of the way up the screen will feel pretty natural. Any lower, it’ll start to feel just a bit off.
I'm glad you immediately went out of your way to add an option for a centered crosshair after deciding to lower it. For me it's one of those things where it works in most contexts _except_ a typical desktop setup, which is where I spend most of my time, and I think it has to do with how there just isn't so much distance between myself and the monitor.
It becomes really uncomfortable over time (I started to feel it just watching the footage in this video even but I soldiered on since the dev process interests me) and it _has_ obliterated my interest in certain games that I'd have otherwise played if there were an option to center the crosshair, artist's intent be damned, so the fact you did it without even needing feedback first is great to see.
Yeah, I was happy to see the understanding for that in the video too. I'm someone who really dislikes off center crosshairs because they make me a bit motion sick.
I'm way too accustomed to having the main position of my monitor that I look at most of the time in games being the center. So the cross hair serves a dual purpose for orienting myself as well. And the off-center one makes me feel like I'm tilting my head back and looking down my nose any time I'm focused on the crosshair.
While I can appreciate all the reasons it makes some challenges easier for developers, I still appreciate seeing that boring floor, and I don't mind simply.. looking up to see environments.
It really annoys me to see some games adopting off-center crosshairs and having no intention to add centered ones, and no understanding for why they can often still be the best solution.
I personally prefer the earlier solutions to the problem shown in this video. Like the "x" in your weapon's line of sight or even some sort of diagetic crosshair like in the game "the hidden".
Hey! Just a heads up, if you are wanting to do the Fortnite style'd crosshair so youre not always staring at the edge of the screen, its pretty easy!
All you need is a decal on the player actor (hidden), do a line trace from gun to crosshair point, if blocked, show the decal on hitscan's impact location, and it's normal for rotation! If you do a texture on a plane instead of decal, make sure to add an offset forward (so its not half in the wall).
But honestly, everyone in the industry somewhat struggles with this, you're not alone! Design isn't about making something work, but making it work in a way where it comes naturally to the player. Just look at things like "coyote time", "jump input variable", and the fact when you ADS with guns in FPS games, it will clip through your face! Which is why player only sees an FPS model while everyone sees a separate, thirdperson model! Slapping a camera to the head of a thirdperson model genuinely gives me motion sickness in a shooter. Bobbin like crazy, waving the gun around!
I love me some good embodied camera. It feels so lame to point down and see nothing, like I'm a floating pair of arms, let alone all the shadow animation jank.
Not saying it's easy, there's *so* much cheating you have to do to make it work well, but i love every single dev who pulls it off.
@@SimonBuchanNz Well the method i like to use is grab the thirdperson model and animations, remove everything but the torso and legs. Then just place that behind the camera.
But that also means you gotta set up IK, might be distracting or outright in your way when you need to shoot down at things on the floor, and would have to outright remove shadows casted from the player models in FP.
There is the alternative of "true firstperson" where you slap the camera to the face of the thirdperson model. But its usually so janky and tedious to work with, usually looking bad in the end anyway.
@@FizzyMutt yeah, there's a lot of wild compromises to make no matter what.
That reminds me how in Powerwash Simulator, in the time lapse replay that is shown after finishing a level, until an update just a few months ago, that video used the FPS model even though the video was from a fixed camera location. It was really funny to watch my guy stick the powerwash nozzle halfway through his head/chest!
@@FizzyMuttwhat about having a "normal" third person model that's invisible, but cast shadows from that one for the FPS player to see?
hooray, congrats on getting sponsored!
WE SELLIN OUT TODAY
@@JayTheDevGuywhen is the 10 foot wide chonky uncle dane marketable plushie coming out
"TF2 Heavy shoots the bullets from his eyes" is a meme and I love it. He has his emotional support minigun to keep him happy as he expels boolet at his enemies, and when you think about it, isn't that all someone can really ask for in life?
how cool is to follow your development journey AND learning stuff about game design and game development at the same time
A few things to note, 1: real guns "appear" in the middle of your view generally when aiming. 2: real guns like the problem you have when with your game doesn't shoot precisely where the sight is pointing even ignoring for inaccuracies in the gun. The gun sights are mounted on top of the gun (usually) so that means that when you are close to the target (barrel against the target) you are shooting .1 - 2 inches below where the red dot or sight is pointing. I was at a shooting match where a guy blasted the barricade he was standing behind because his dot could see the target, but the gun couldn't.
In reality, we call this problem 'sight-over-bore,' or 'height-over-bore.' The AR-15 (/M16) is infamous for this issue. The sights are significantly higher than the barrel, and it's possible to miss your target because of an obstruction between the barrel and your target that is short enough that it doesn't appear in your sight-picture.
P.S. By "in reality," I meant those shooting guns. The issue of line-of-sight not matching line-of-bullet is an issue in both video games and reality.
It's clearest to me that crosshairs are lying when playing in third person. In first person, it feels pretty natural, and when I accidentally shoot the rock that's slightly to my right or below my camera than I think "oh, duh" or "ugh I thought I was far enough away from that" but in third person, my bullets seem to not go quite where I aimed them and I end up shooting things I thought were out of my way a lot more often. I assume it's similar to the TF2 footage you were showing.
And maybe the reason I feel that way more often in third person is simply because it makes the angle between gun and camera **that much worse**, and most games don't do like Fortnite and smoosh their character's weapon as close to the crosshair as possible.
And I definitely feel like you're right about ADS being an indirect solution to the gun angle problem. I expect to accidentally shoot things a little off of my crosshairs sometimes when I'm not ADS. I only expect to have that happen while ADS if the obstacle is close to me and relatively close below the crosshair/camera, since the gun's barrel is obviously below the sight (for most guns).
I second this. TF2 placing a huge gun in the corner of the screen that launches projectiles toward the crosshair makes it very obvious after your first mistake that the projectiles are real and come from where your viewmodel is.
I kinda wish valve did the same for hitscan to solve the age-old issue of heavies & snipers deleting you with their "eye lasers" while their gun is completely hidden. Doesn't need to be perfect, just a slight downward offset that behaves similarly to how projectiles auto-correct their aim at close range.
I tend to choose to have a ray cast or projectile spawn from the camera for first-person shooters, but it can become much more complicated for third-person shooters.
My solution: lean into the verisimilitude.
The player is controlling their crosshair much like an irl shooter might - the crosshair has a number underneath or alongside to show the intended range of the crosshair, and the mouse scrollwheel is used to change the intended range of the crosshair. With the right crosshair, you can also use this to estimate distance (or you can include a rangefinder in the HUD or elsewhere). It rewards lining up a careful shot, but is close enough to allow a general guide for quick responsive fire.
I'm combining this with leaning into the penetrative power of modern firearms - with the exception of particular weak projectiles or particularly well-armored surfaces, a rifle round stands a very good chance of penetrating a surface and doing serious or lethal damage to the person hiding behind them (hiding behind a thin plaster wall won't save you from modern 5.56mm or 7.62x39mm). You'd be surprised how dangerous even a lot of pistol rounds or shot can be through a car door, a windshield, a sofa, etc.
8:56 I felt like this can be also supported by how recent tactical FPS (such as Ready or Not and even the recent CoD titles) included "canted" sights such that puts your aim at the center without ADS (ala the old "Doom Clones" that has the weapon at center) as a way to not deal with the angle difference, but still have to contend with aiming differences from the viewpoint vs the barrel (though that could also be from the trend of John Wick films promoting the kind of "gun-fu" as it admittedly looks very novel at the time)
Canted sights are a real thing that are supposed to provide an alternative to the magnified sight mounted on a weapon, usually you're looking down an actual sight when you use them though. The canted aiming option you mention in Ready or Not and CoD is intended to be used with a laser sight and is useful in that you get the benefit of ADSing without the weapon obstructing your view. So it's an interesting mix of stuff from the real world mixed with unique gameplay implications.
The solution I normally like is when the game provides a laser sight. That way the projectiles are honest to the gun, but I get to see when the shot will be blocked. It also helps with depth perception, especially when there is a dot at the point of intersection.
This makes more sense for 3rd person shooters than first, as you are more likely to have the gun far off-center, or moving around the screen space, and then you don't need to arbitrarily lock the camera to the gun, or a specific angle.
Also when an ally has a laser, either in multiplayer, or an NPC it helps me understand where they are relative to me, and what they're looking at.
"The crosshair disconnect" is one of many reasons why I _loathe_ third-person games. Every new one picked up comes with the same game of 20 Questions for "so how does the game handle _this_ scenario?"
I'm mostly annoyed many games just aren't honest about it.
I'm fine if it clearly tells me that I won't actually hit there.
I also appreciate old RE4's aiming laser, there's no a pretense about aiming with the camera.
its really annoying in titles like dead space remake, where there is actually a significantly different impact in how you play the game.
In the original, if you aim at a necromorph that is approaching you, it effectively walks along the laser. Your aiming inputs are effectively relative to the gameplay happening. In the remake, you shoot from the camera (which also looks way lamer), and when a necromorph is walking towards you, you need to constantly correct your aim for their movement lateral to the camera, alongside other aiming inputs.
It feels absolutely awful when you compare them side by side.
Its hilarious that every old title that originally 'fixed' the crosshair disconnect problem, has now been remade to re-introduce this problem.
@@johntravoltage959 I feel that modern designers Ironically would feel introducing actual aiming lasers into the game would feel too artificial.
...but it just completely works.
Have you considered playing non-shooter third-person games?
that intro was *so* well done. and i love your art style and would def want to know more of your process of making these. it feels so cool to see a developer that's truly invested in both the art and the dev side as well.
seriously though i went back and rewatched the intro like 4 times. as a mostly-artist-partially developer i know that sometimes the stuff that gets spent a ton of time on only ends up being a few seconds in the final cut, and i just want you to know i thought it was incredibly cool
In a war game, using binoculars alongside an Iron Sight MG is always better than only having the MG. Having the default be hip instead of aimed is always better in terms of scanning for enemies farther out. FPS games that are quick-paced or have closed-in maps are better aimed as default simply because the reaction is better than awareness in such cases which is the case for old games.
In my personal opinion, Ghost Recon (particularly Breakpoint) handles this best for both first and third person. The weapon will physically point towards where your crosshair hits (via the waste), and it also has the same X system as Fortnite. This way you'll always know where your bullets will hit, and the bullets will come straight out of the barrel and go directly towards the crosshair (with some bullet drop of course), instead if having the bullet come out in an unrealistic direction.
since the game's in the video, I just wanna mention that in ultrakill, while I'm pretty sure the real bullets still come from the camera, the gun you're holding does actually try to aim itself to the same spot your crosshair is aimed at.
this becomes even more visible when you turn on aim assist.
The low crosshair makes me incredibly motion sick just to watch. The centre of my monitor is positioned at eye level because to make my neck not hurt sitting at my desk playing games, and having a lower crosshair means i am looking at a different point on my screen most of the time which greatly messes up my neck after a long enough period. Additionally, it means I can see less of what is happening on the screen because the top half of the screen is away from where my eyes are looking. That requires more rapid eye movements and just feels bad on my eyes. Aiming the crosshair vertically also becomes a challenge, and I can see you failing to do it yourself in the footage of your game you used. When you are walking around your crosshair is pointed at the ground a lot, because you are still using the centre of the camera as the point you are looking at when moving around. That means you have to adjust your camera position back and forth between aimed at the ground for sight, and aimed upwards for shooting. Sight should not have to be compromised for shooting, and at 12:09 you can see how you transition from looking forwards with the crosshair on the ground, which give you sight of the things around your character, to looking up in order to get the crosshair parallel to the floor in order to shoot far enough. It also compromises your camera and you can see it clip into the ground a bit because your cameras is aimed upwards and is therefore now low to the ground and you cant see where the terrain it might hit is. In normal camera position that piece of terrain would have slid nicely under the camera, because the game world is designed around the size of your view not the size of your character whether you did it consciously or not.
Overall there are just a ton of drawbacks to the way you implemented it, which can mostly be summarized as "people look at the centre of the screen because it lets them see the most of the screen, and a low crosshair takes your sight away from that point while requiring you to additionally change the camera angle to even further limit what you can see.
i'm currently actively fighting against unity's new input system, wich has a dozen new methods, events and stuff. My deepest ambition is to PUSH A BUTTON and that button turns a boolean value TRUE, and FALSE when the button is released. just a single button. not even a full control. And yet, the machine fails to understand the human. my disappointment is immesurable, and my day is ruined
solo self taught game dev is personal hell
@ericocypriani2308 bool FuckYou(int UnityFuckedLevel) {
if (UnityFuckedLevel > 5) then {
std::cout
yes I did seriously just write a c++ function to tell you how badly f##ed you are.
update: I forgot a capital letter
may god give you strength in overpowering through the herculean task of working with the new input system 🙏
i wish to one day tame the beast such that i may achieve basic key up/down functionality
Love your stuff, as an aspiring dev myself, I’m bogged down by the simplest of things, like literally just wsad keys, needing to ease velocity, normalize vectors, etc. it’s insane how much work was put into the smallest and simplest things in the gaming industry over the years.
ps, thank you for your video on 2d sprites in 3d worlds, it helped me and inspired me to make a game jam game that did pretty well on the rankings for that jam!
That intro with a lot of different crosshairs from popular games is amazing! 🔥 Love your videos, I hope to play your game one day
I adore your little roly poly sprite rolling around just doing his thing. The energetic jump he did made me so happy to look at!
(Meanwhile hardcore realistic shooters, which just tell you to go do yourself when you ask for a crosshair)
No crosshair, no problem
@@kshitijvmall If the bullets go straight, there aint a problem
@@pseudo.Random-KF hardcore realistic shooter : ballistic trajectory go burrrrrrr.
Im so happy that negative review joke is now outdated, lets just hope those tf2 bots never come back
13:15 - 13:21 Didnt expect to see myself there, just like I didnt expect you to start becoming one of my 3Dtuber inspirations. Update on that plan on becoming a 3Dtuber btw... ehm... I have made a unique style now, but I'm still struggling with modelling my character, even if I have the general design thought out. I just thought of sharing again since I wanted to comment about BEING IN THE VIDEO 'technically' :D Also I watched the 'original' version of this video too, but thought I could contribute to the algorithm by watching it all again. Very good video, recommending it to a friend I think will like it :)
welcome back random internet stranger :]
Idk how to put this but when you use any sort of device that launches a projectile irl it doesn’t just like follow a cross hair rather it functions on its own trajectory not only that they are altered by gravity, air resistance, wind direction, wind speed, and at far enough of a distance the Coriolis effect, and so on and so forth. Woosh
9:50 whenever I feel like modern discourse is a shid show, I see posts from a decade ago like this that make me go "ok, we're making progress".
How have I not seen this channel before? This is right up my alley, I love channels like noodle and Funke. Guess I have a new channel to binge
Nah, adsing is not centering the weapon in the screen like quake, because 50% of your screen isn't blocked by the weapon model in quake. I much prefer "broken" crosshairs over blocking a swathe of important screen space.
YO THE INTROS EDITING IS INSANE! Youre super underrated!
I liked Kid Icarus Uprising's in-world reticule approach
one of my favorite parts of the game you are working on is the fact that you can stack companion cubes on your head
Very cool and all, but honestly, as an aspiring game designer myself, I feel like that middle of the screen gun is kind of the superior solution to this problem.
I agree. If you aren't going for realism anyway (shooting accurately only with aiming down sights - which puts the weapon in the middle) then just embrace it. Your game makes no sense; it's a game. It's not Escape from Tarkov. Just put the weapon in the middle and you just made everyone happy - the player and the developer.
@SiMeGamer I mean no need to be harsh like that about it, games are still good either way tbh
@@JosRocks410 Yes, but I find that some games just do it because it's the thing and not because it fits their game. Especially newer devs.
This was really nicely done, and the little drawing you is fantastic.
Dude is literarlly thinking about how to make crosshair as useful and honest as possible, while I can't program a calculator with interface.
But on a serious note, I have been enjoying watching your videos. I hope you will continue enjoying making this game and youtube for as long as you need, because its easy to get burned out. Wish you luck.
Even when you’re aiming down sights, in theory the camera's line of sight shouldn’t exactly match the bullet’s line of travel.
After all, the bullet is fired through the gun barrel, not the sights.
I wonder if there are any games that actually respect this difference. Games where you can have a shot be blocked even when you have a clear line of sight while ADSing - because the inch or so between the sights and the barrel is enough to make the difference between missing or just barely hitting an obstacle.
I imagine most games instead use some variant of the “actual aiming is done from the camera” approach during ADS.
A lot of realistic military shooters do this. Look into Arma or Ground Branch for example, as I personally think those 2 have the coolest implementation since the first person perspective uses the world model of your character, I believe the term most use for that is "true first person". Really cool stuff.
I really appreciate that you took time to make good subtitles, thanks!
I've always hated crosshairs, ever since I was a kid. I turn it off in all games that allow it and in general tend to favor games that don't have it at all (like more realistic oriented shooters).
To me it defeats one of the main purposes/enjoyments of shooting: the complex three dimensional geometrical and physical "calculations" your brain does to determine where the projectile is going. If you shot a bow and arrow before you know what I mean: there's no crosshair or easy way to tell were the arrow is going except for this instinctive knowledge of physics we carry as hunter gatherer animals, and when you get good at it it's fascinating and very satisfying.
The Red Orchestra/Rising Storm franchise doubles up on the hipfire being difficult/unpredictable by having a "free aim" system where your gun moves freely on the screen instead of just your camera, and since the bullets come out of the barrel, and that barrel points all over the place, knowing where that shot will land is difficult. This is frustrating for beginners yes but it: 1- slows down engagements since everyone has to aim down sights to hit each other (no running and gunning) and 2- is Extremely satisfying once you master it and it becomes a great tool to your advantage as you'll be quicker than anyone else on CQC
Yay it’s up again
baby driver pfp goes hard
Great video! Lots of detail, really well polished, and even had it's emotional moments (I cried when you killed Wall-E at 11:30 )
4:53 sponsor end
Thanks bro
@@Wutsizbukkit
i think that the lowered crosshair IDEALLY would be a slider, not just a low/centered option. i like the lowered crosshair, but i would want it to be a bit higher than where it is in the footage you showcased here.
i am very excited for this game!
12:03 what happened to get tf2 all those negative reviews?
in short: valve let haker bots overun the casual servers for about 5 years straight
in long: valve let haker bots ovrerun the casual servers for about 5 years straight so 2 year ago the vomunety got together for a big media movement cald #savetf2 wich did leed to some posetiv change but ultimatly faild to adres the core bot problem so now thers a new more agresive movement caled #fixtf2 wich included a review bombing. but good news is valve actualy has fixsed the problem and casual has ben bot free for like a month now
Valve abandoned the game for nearly 10 years and it became unplayable at times due to bots and other issues
Great video! I experienced this problem while working on a first person shooter in Unity. I wanted to have the projectiles firing from the end of the gun but I also wanted the gun to be off-centered. It turned out to be a huge headache so I gave up and had the projectiles firing from the camera instead like the Minecraft example that you showed.
I also experienced an example of a developer just not caring about this problem earlier today while playing GTA Online. I had parked two insurgents side by side and was using the machine gun on the top of one to shoot enemies with. I wondered why the guy I was firing at just wouldn't die and then I realised that all of my bullets were going straight into my other insurgent even though my crosshair was clearly above it. 😒
11:59 You know the bots are gone, right?
Valve has been actively banning cheaters, bots and bot hosters for around the past month
fun fact: there's a second layer to the medic's syringe gun projectiles. The projectiles fire at a point near the right side of your crosshair where the gun is usually on one's screen, but other effects like minimized viewmodels move the syringes on the player's screen as well, but not the syringes on the server. The player can look like they're connecting all their shots, but the server will show them missing by miles.
Also I wanted to add that I love the original doom game's viewmodels that appear at the center of your screen instead of to the side
What is the game at 0:30 during the montage, that has a battery icon in the lower left, a red background, and a flat white circle as the crosshair?
High Hell
@@JayTheDevGuy (:
I'm surprised you didn't talk about the _other_ "cross"hairs from Splatoon, like the arrows for rollers.
at 10:27, the captions say corsshair
also at 12:42 the captions say ‘meme-fille dupdate’
I love the Internet for these niche subjects, makes you go out of the room with way more knowledge than you would think.
Man, I haven't seen any of your other videos so I thought the sections with... Uncle Round? Were a quick demo you slapped together explicitly to explain your point about crosshairs and camera angles. No, you actually seem to have taken people's advice on not wasting too much time on your protographics seriously! Honestly, GOOD ON YOU! I'm no dev, but it's always weird to see people perfect their graphics before their gameplay and it's like "what? Why?" Thanks for not putting the cart too far before the horse, good to see someone who takes core mechanics, gamefeel, and polish seriously!
Just being informed about the reason of off-centered crosshairs makes me embrace them with open arms, even though I'd never actually get a game with such a crosshair.
This the first video I’ve watched from this channel, very good stuff! Can’t wait to watch more, and I love the little guy that you play as in your prototype. So cute and proper
This is why I don't like 3rd person over the shoulder games but love Resident Evil. You can interact with everything to your characters right, but not your left, and where your character is shooting doesn't match up with the cameras perspective. This entire issue is fixed with the fact in Resident Evil you use a laser sight and interactions happen directly in front of your character, not relative to the center of your screen. Im glad someone else sees why crosshairs in games can be very complicated more than people realize.
What the fuck is this level of production for such a small channel. Great work, man. Even cut the usual video essay bullshit. Subscribed.
:]
I'm so glad cutting the intro is what compelled you to comment something nice LMAO
I'm glad to see the engineer game with uncle dane ball is still in full development. Love these videos
As someone who doesn't play many FPS games, I had never given much thought to cross-hairs but your video has absolutely blown my mind open. Cool video
This video was a lot of fun. I listened to it on my way to work and i found it was really surprising how some games works with crosshairs and invisible bullets
This looks like a production made by a Million Subscriber Creator but when I checked you only had 34k. Good luck on your TH-cam journey 👍
I just started working on my first fps game 2 days ago, and I hadn't even considered what I would do for the crosshair until I saw this video. I am the random indie dev you saved from a headache. Thank you.
This is basically the same reason holographic sights exist for guns and planes, and lasers are used on guns. Having your head move relative to the LITERAL CROSSHAIRS on WW1 fighter planes meant that the bullets just wouldn't go where you thought you were aiming, because your line of sight was at a different angle to the gun's line of fire. Using a holographic sight instead puts that dot at infinity and that basically forces it at the same angle as the gun - if the dot is on something, it will hit that thing. Meanwhile, lasers get used to visually draw the line along the barrel, meaning you don't need to be looking down the gun at all to see where it'll hit, and that's why they get used so heavily in close quarters, where you often have to have your gun at the ready instead of next to your eyes.
As a new developer I ran into this exact problem and had difficulty making it feel right but this really taught me a lot. This was actually very helpful for me
A recent great example of accurate weapon aiming is helldivers, which also seems to be baked into a procedural animation system. It feels good to move and shoot 24/7 thanks to that honest implementation imho. Definitely what I plan to do for my looter shooter attempt
Hey, just wanted to say i appreciate you taking the time to subtitle the video yourself! Makes videos like these perfect for showing to my brazilian dev friends
Tried making an fps once. If I remember correctly, I made guns fire bullets from the center of the camera
I love the idea of an off center crosshair, i had never seen/heard of that before. Makes the game feel more casual and shifts the focus on to admiring the graphics or level design compared to that of actual aiming or the competitive aspects of the game. Gives it a more casual vibe instead of just another competitive shooter. I hope that’s the kind of game you’re going for. Looks cool, keep up the good work 👍
Can't wait until the door video. As someone who has spent so much time programming doors, to the point I have a sign on my desk that reads "Bloody Doors" It's an interesting topic in how something seemingly super simple can be absurdly complicated when accounting for every scenario.
I'm so used to broken crosshairs that such a thing is just a matter of adapting to how the projectile flies when playing, and this happens pretty much without thinking about it
This is also, like, how real life gun scopes/sights work. The bullet doesn’t come out of the sight, so if you’ve got something in the way of your barrel but not in the way of your sight/scope, then you’ll hit whatever’s in front of the barrel instead of what’s in the sight
i love your game already. the movement animations and the fact that you just shot wall-es is hilarious
really love the lowered cross hair, it feels right having it be closer to the player modle and on the same level as them while keeping the original look from a few videos back, feels wrong for the uncle to be any bigger
love your videos, hope you keep creating!!!
I think Helldivers 2's crosshairs are different enough to bring this up, but I like how they did it: the line of fire is directly tied to the model of the gun as these other examples, but a central balance mechanic in terms of how guns perform is how quickly the gun lines up its model's direction with the intended line of fire. In fact, there's an armor set that has a passive to make this better across the board because it's so important. Also, instead of only telling you when you're going to clip, like Splatoon and Fortnite do, you *always* see where the gun is pointing if it collides with something within a reasonable distance in 3rd person mode. So, not only do you get an indicator when things won't fire the way you expect, but you can see in real time as it adjusts to where the game thinks you're intending to aim, which actually makes some fights easier to do in 3rd person than 1st.
I'll never get over the chill simplicity of these videos. They're not too overly technical, but they remain informative. It's like when you talk to a friend and you learn a bunch of crazy new stuff out of nowhere while you're doing whatever.
It’s simple, make two raycasts, one for camera and one for gun that’s held. If the raycast for the gun collides with something other what the crosshairs pick up, animate the gun position to shift to where both raycast aim at the exact same object.
Never sacrifice gameplay fluidity for trite technicalities like, “oh no, the gun don’t point at what the crosshairs do.”
I made a sight for my FPS game, after choosing the shooting in the direction of realism (bullets from the weapon and not the camera), had to redo all the animations of holding the weapon, that would be the weapon looked approximately where you need, and at the same time was visible on the screen for the player.
Realistically holding the weapon "at the hip", caused the problem of the player not seeing their weapon