Hitbox

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Global Offensive hitboxes

A hitbox is a representation of the hit detection system used by the Counter-Strike series.

Overview

Different hit regions represent the different areas of the body, such as the head, which influence the damage of a shot.

In early Counter-Strike games, the boundaries for the individual hitboxes were outside their respective body parts, making the hitboxes larger than the actual model. Starting with the September 15, 2015 update of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive however, the boundaries for the individual hitboxes were placed almost entirely inside their respective body parts by incorporating capsules instead of boxes.

Hitboxes in Counter-Strike: Source can be displayed using the console command sv_showimpacts 1 when cheats are enabled. For Global Offensive sv_showlagcompensation 1 shows the hitboxes. However, due to the complexities of the networking code, this may not accurately represent how hits are actually determined, particularly in Source and Global Offensive where the networking code is more complex. More recent versions of the Source engine have disabled the sv_showhitboxes command.

In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive only, if a single bullet passes through several hitbox areas with different damage multipliers, then it will inflict the highest amount of damage in the different damages. On the other hand, in Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, bullets will not pass through several hitbox areas and thus the damage inflicted will be only at the first hitbox area the bullet hits.

Hitbox Multipliers
Location	Damage
Head	400%
Chest & Arm	100%
Stomach	125%
Leg	75%

Buying Kevlar only protects the player's Chest & Arm and Stomach areas. Buying Helmet extends the protection to the player's head. The legs are never protected.

Lag Compensation

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An example of lag compensation.

Networking delay can negatively impact players' game experience. One moving low ping player may see themselves having moved inside cover, while another high ping player sees them still outside of cover. Even at low ping, the basic network structure causes an average of 30-40 milliseconds of action delay on other players' view.

To remedy the lag, lag compensation is implemented to improve the experience of high players. Without lag compensation, in the above example, if the high ping player fires at where they see the low ping player, the server will not register a hit because the server instead sees that the low ping player has moved inside cover. With lag compensation, the server factors in latency on the tick the high ping player fires, and checks an earlier tick to see if the player hits the low ping player on that tick. This gives an advantage to high ping players, as low ping players may take damage even after they moved into cover.

However, lag compensation does not compensate if a player fires first. This gives an advantage to low ping players since their shot is more quickly transferred to the server and the server registers it first.

With or without lag compensation, interpolation of animations causes small amounts of delay.

Gallery

Comparison old hitboxes and new "hitbubbles".