ST-CS-10-339-75
March 2002

SECTION VI

MAJOR ISSUES  (S)

1.  Distortions in the Fabric of History Space-Time?  (S)

There is some evidence which hints at the possibility the player position history makes mistakes. In the following video footage, it can clearly be seen than an absolutely impossible AWP shot occured.

de_dust, AWP	Firing frame

The image on the right is the frame less than 0.05 seconds before firing. It is particularly odd that not only was the target well clear of the essentially stationary crosshair at the time of firing, the target was moving away from the crosshair at the time of firing.

The question is, how did this hit occur?

The idea that this is a simple hitbox size/shape error should be immediately discounted. If it were possible to hit players so far off target it would perforce be common knowledge!

One possible answer is that player position history was deactivated on the server. (The cvar sv_unlag enables or disables this functionality.) This solution does not stand up to examination, because achieving hits with position history disabled requires manual leading; aiming at a point where the target will be when the information of the gun being fired reaches the server.

Clearly, no such leading occured in the footage. The target was not under the crosshair at the time of firing and was also not under the crosshair at the time of the hit.

(Note that since the server has to tell the client when a hit occurs, the client will also always have had time to be told by the server where the target was at the time of the hit, and this will always be under the crosshair).

If we assume hitboxes are not at fault and that player position history is active, there seems to be a possible conclusion; the player position history can get things wrong.

If this is the case, then players could be "spread out" over time in the history, effectively making them larger targets since they're occupying a larger volume of space-time.

This would explain the video footage shown in this page. It can be seen the target did indeed travel under the point where the hit occured. If the target was spread out in history space-time, he was still "occupying" that location when the AWP bullet passed through that point.

It is also concieveable players can be compressed in time, occupying a smaller volume in the history space-time, becoming smaller targets than they really are.

It is hard to understate the consequences of this problem, if it is in fact occuring. It may well also go some way to explaining the frequency of headshots in CS 1.3; if a target is spread out, the proportions of headbox to bodyboxes remains the same, but the absolute size of the headbox will increase greatly and it often only requires one headshot to kill.

To put it as an analogy; imagine a monster car, five times the size of a regular car. There is still five times as much car to shoot at as before, but it only takes one hit on the now HUGE petrol tank to blow the car up.