A designer for Fortnite, Nick, has taken to Reddit to discuss the recent changes they made to remove “Ghost Peeking”. To explain what ghost peeking is, it’s where players are able to shoot enemies over stairs without exposing themselves, therefore making it impossible for the opponent to get a shot on their attacker.
Nick has shown why this has happened in the past and what they have done to ensure this issue does not arise again:
Hey guys, let’s talk about “Ghost Peeking”.
When crouching up-hill, you can sometimes fire over cover without actually being seen by your target.
Here, I’ve enabled some developer debug to show what’s happening:
The yellow line is a trace from the center of your camera. The green line is supposed to be the bullet trace.
So why is that happening?
Our animation system does some adjustments to the character to make sure that the feet are always positioned nicely on slopes, like this:
Unfortunately, in some cases this can sometimes lower the character mesh down far further than we intended. Oops!
In 5.10, we’ve included a fix for this issue so that any time you can shoot someone, they will be able to see you, and shoot you. This is what it looks like now:
New character height
If I can shoot you, you can head-shot me.
Let us know if you’re still seeing any issues with “Ghost Peeking”, and we’ll continue to see if we can improve in this area!
Nick (Designer)