Explaining The Janky Aiming In Project Zomboid

today I'm going to take you guys on a tour of targeting and project Zomboy put on your scuba suit because we are diving into the abyss before I can show you the true Horrors I have to explain how targeting works if you have watched my headshot video you'll know that zombies have three locations you can hit the head the body and the feet when standing you have very little control over where you hit but once a zombie is knocked down the closest one to your character is targeted eventually this will be changed to hit the part closest to your aim Point based on the death response to the video but for now keep that filed away in the back of your head for all your head smashing plans next I can show you that animations do in fact bring zombies in and out of your range there are idle animation for example sways back and forth just enough to do so but you'll probably never have to deal with that in normal gameplay what are you likely to run into is The Recoil animation from hitting a zombie pulling it out of your range if you mindlessly swing away at max range you'll end up missing some hits hitting prone zombies on the other hand has a series of differences that can cause you to miss even if you are paying attention for example when swinging at staining zombies as long as a zombie is highlighted you can hit it with the aim cone renderer on you can clearly see that the area you can land your hits is very different from the actual swing animations basically as long as the zombie is highlighted it can be hit however ground pounding knockdown zombies has two other requirements the most important one is that the weapon highlight has little or nothing to do with your range while ground pounding instead the range and size of the area you can hit seems to much more accurately represent the weapon model this discrepancy between the axle range and highlighted range is particularly annoying at your max range as it shows you are in range farther than you can hit even if you are aware you can only hit things perfectly lined up with your weapon the range it shows does not change or reflect your actual range when you hold down the dedicated ground attack keep on either the problem here is that the weapon highlight still acts like you are swinging at a standing zombie it's misleading the second requirement is that it doesn't appear you can hit a zombie's arms at least visually speaking when I take a swing at this down zombies arm it doesn't hit by the way I'm using this zombie health bar and damage numbers mod to make it easier for you guys to see what's happening if no damage numbers pop up then the zombie was not hit these differences are important because zombies who just jumped a fence or window and crawlers have this combination of problems when you combine these two different references with the isometric camera you end up with a third layer of problem one of the major flaws of an isometric camera angle is that you lose the ability to Target accurately part of the reason why the isometric cursor exists is to combat this but even the isometric cursor is not enough attacking standing zombies is extremely forgiving which works out well for the camera angle but attacking prone zombies is the exact opposite for example watch this attack my aim point is over the zombie's head not perfectly positioned but the bat isn't exactly one pixel wide yet there is enough deviation that I completely Miss now taking all that knowledge and putting it together you can see why so many people feel scammed when their ground attacks miss a lunging zombie there's nothing quite like the Betrayal of seeing the zombie go green swinging and missing only to get slapped onto the ground and devoured defense fighting is a game of arbitrary hitbox positioning due to the isometric camera angle not being a great way to see exactly where you are swinging and the helper aiming system not being much help it's worse than that though let's look at the anatomy of an attack when you begin your attack it checks that the target is inside your minimum range to decide if it should push or not and it also checks if the target is standing or prone to decide which swing to do then once the attack reaches a point where it should hit it rechecks if there is a zombie in range or not if you start your attack on a zombie that has begun to jump down with automatic ground attacks turned on it will begin a normal attack but sometimes that zombie is on the ground but the time your attack would hit meaning it completely wastes your swing because a normal swing can't hit a grounded zombie it will also waste your time by switching over to attack nearby standing zombies farther away than it needs to which can rob you of a free kill had plenty of time to do a ground pound here for example that's why I recommend turning off the automatic ground pound detection as it cannot make the decision of when to do a normal attack in all cases speaking of odd and annoying problems with targeting I have a couple Clips here from djax free to watch he's playing against sprinters and getting run down by two of them but that's okay because he can juggle them pause which zombie do you think he will push this has to be a trick question because his hands are clipping through the first zombie it must be that one right wrong he pushes the one behind it here's another clip which zombie gets pushed yep the back one and you'll notice he already knew about the push bug at this point so he moved his aim way to the side and it still screwed him I've got more of these but they're all basically the same what's consistent between all these clips there's two sprinters in range of his push and the front Sprinter starts its bite animation right as his push should be landing it's almost as if they become briefly untargetable during the beginning of the bite animation I want to say the push bug happens with all zombies that makes the question shouldn't it happen constantly with fast shambler since people fight them in massive hordes yet I only have one example of this here is Mr lamper UK fighting against fast shamblers and he goes to push one but the Highlight flickers at the exact moment the zombie starts his attack and he pushes the farther away zombie it's a little questionable if this happened due to the angle he was pushing or if it was the same bug as with sprinters momentarily making them untargetable I want to go with a push bug though as pushes really should Target the closest zombie and the closer one is clearly in range what's the worst part of this video now that you know about this aiming stuff you'll notice it happening all the time when you stare into the abyss it stares back

Channel: Retanaru

Views: 65,815

Keywords: guide, aiming, missing, lunging, fence, fences, fighting, project, zomboid, push, bug, bugs, pushing, misses

Id: r6oqRWNaDYs

Length: 5min 30sec (330 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023