The Invisible Walls of Dark Souls

Responding to various comments in one pinned comment here! - - - - - - - - - - From @inakilukac - "I DO HAVE QUESTIONS!!! 1. Lock-on system, does it use the high poly collision or the low poly one? 2. Enemies, which collision obstructs their view when trying to aggro you? 3. Your attacks bouncing on walls if you're too close, which collision does it use to determine it?" 1) Lock-on uses low-poly collisions. So in the example with the arrows getting blocked when trying to snipe the crow demons in the tower, flying right up to the outside tower so they're nearby, you can't lock onto them because of the low-poly collision blocking your way. Same goes for the hollow seen at 4:05. You can free aim throw a projectile at the hollow because of the lack of high collision blocking the window, but the low collision blocks your ability to lock on. 2) Low collisions also block enemy line of sight. 3) Melee attacks impact low collision instead of high collision. So the spot I showed in Firelink where your projectiles pass through, your sword will still hit it. :) - - - - - - - - - - From @bronze81 - "You can actually clear the invis wall by the burg merchant, at least in ptde https://youtu.be/TI5_Ak8_iSk (~3:50 in this video)" Oh my god, hahaha. I simply did not envision making it all the way up those objects without breaking any of them. Speed runners are scary. - - - - - - - - - - @scantyer Informed me of something much more egregious than the missing high collision in Firelink Shrine, something I didn't realize was already looked at by king bore! That area behind the Black Knight in the Undead Burg? An entire section of building is missing its high collision! It's WIDE open for throwing projectiles through it: imgur.com/a/cRP4AUP - - - - - - - - - - From @xormak3935 - "At the start of the depths, the archways don't just have the low-poly collision in mid-air but also the high-poly collision as it seems. Arrows get stuck in that same space that the player collides with. Very annoying when trying to snipe enemies from the stairs." I took a closer look and it's extremely cursed. There isn't high collision there, so your arrows should pass through. This doesn't make any sense because you're standing so close to it, though, so why wouldn't the high collision be loaded from there? It's because the ceiling of the hallway (including the archways) wasn't made as part of the hallway you're in, and it belongs to the set of collision for the Butchers' room instead (for no apparent reason). And despite being so close to you, it doesn't want to load the high collisions of the butchers' room until you're literally inside it. Go down into that room and find an angle where you can shoot back up through the arches, and now your arrows pass through correctly. lol, what a mess. imgur.com/a/6HuZWgy - - - - - - - - - - From @victorpilgrim - "1:17:10 i cannot believe you didn't mention the invisible trees of in the duke's archives garden" lol, I can't believe I missed this! So there's at least one invisible tree you can walk into: imgur.com/a/t6TTUsB With a quick look I couldn't find any others, but so far I did find two more floating trees that are too high off the ground to walk into (another skinny vine-like one like the other, and another regular full-sized tree). Funny stuff! The floating door wasn't the only thing they had issues with here, apparently. - - - - - - - - - - From @RucaBurankee - "41:29 "do you know any other place where this happens?" Does this count? https://youtu.be/qJ4uFUjhPz8?si=jD8WozfKik0rwQpS" Lol, no because that's not a kill plane getting you! But in a way that's more fascinating to me because you must be tricking the game into causing fall damage by doing that. I can't think of any other explanation, at least. I didn't know you could do that.

Some dev left a tiny spot without an invisible wall in an boss arena The community: Oh yeah, that's the Cheese McCheese spot 9000

I'll watch this for the next two days so I can avoid all spoilers 💀

The “fatty” message in The Depths, is now officially canon

Hi 3D modeler here, the flickering is called Z fighting and happens when two faces are in the same planar location I.E. the same spot at same angle, and the renderer gets instructions to display both at once but you can only put one pixel at a time so it kind of wigs out and flickers between both

do you feel like you are betraying your roots as a man named after walls that look like they exist but don't by making a video about walls that don't look like they exist but do

As a child I saw my father watching woodworking shows and in-depth how its made like documentaries on machinery and mundane stuff and wondered how in the world he could sit there watching this stuff. Now at that same age I watch hour long breakdowns on invisible walls in Dark Souls and 4 hour breakdowns on video games I have and will never play. I am become old, destroyer of long form content.

if I had a nickel for every overly detailed video about invisible walls I'd seen I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

I can not explain the level of joy I feel when I settle down for the evening after work and there's a new DS Dissected video out.

Hearing that the pillars in the depths aren't protected by an invisible wall is the worst news I've heard all year. I truly am a fatty and the message was right

With the strength of Illusory Walls, they challenged the Invisible Walls...

The collision on that one root in the Great Hollow made me what to burn that whole tree to the ground

The first time I fought the iron golem, I was incredibly nauseous from the screen shake, then suddenly he just did a backflip off the arena and died. That was surreal. I was very confused until I eventually had it happen again and noticed that he just got teleported upward due to the collision issue.

Dark souls dissected is the best series on YouTube fr

35 minutes in and seeing the reasons behind the Taurus Demon fall, the lower undead burg skip, the titanite demon blocker, and the invisible arch you can hit your head on is insane, these are such iconic parts of the game to me.

35:37 LMAO, I love it when you drop the sudden humor in the middle of a serious explanation, man 🤣

On the topic of the enemy-only invis wall in front of the Everlasting Dragon, in Zullie's "Killing the Unkillable" video, she points out that when you kill the Everlasting Dragon, it also plays the "boss defeated" sound (though with no accompanying "Victory Achieved" popup). Another bit of evidence for the Everlasting Dragon being intended to be fightable at some point.

man, its such an honor to have my name in one of these videos! this series inspired me to start modding DS1, and despite how much experience i have with it, every one of your videos teaches me loads of new stuff. i do have a few things to add, though! for the bridge to sen's, it is actually possible to miss the kill plane and fall out of bounds if you jump over the left railing from the stairs leading out of the undead parish bonfire. the out of bounds area is pretty weird and its easy to fall into the void from there. for the iron golem, its not that the falling animation is allowed to bypass the enemy wall, but rather, the enemy wall is simply disabled through the event that handles him staggering. for ceaseless discharge, the reason why they were confident enough in his pathing to leave out invisible walls is because his pathing is completely unique and only goes between set regions. most events in the game world are controlled by event scripts, written in a proprietary language made by from software called EMEVD, while specific enemy pathing like this is usually handled through ai scripts, which are written in the lua programming language. ceaseless uses the obscure lua events system, a holdover from demon's souls. in that game it handled all world events, but in DS1 it only handles things like ladders, bonfire warps, some network related stuff, etc. ceaseless is the only enemy to directly interact with this system in the entire game. the reason why his desperate jump always happens even when controlling ceaseless is because there's a region that will force the jump animation if he steps inside it, regardless of whether or not his arm is out. the reason why he just spams the fire blast when his arm isnt ripped out is because the region that ceaseless paths to in order to get to the area that forces the jump animation is simply excluded from the list of potential points he can navigate to when his arm is still in. so he never has the chance to navigate there and thus, he never does the jump. a prime example of the extremely janky, unpolished, last minute hacks you would expect of a rushed area like the demon ruins.

27:30 - Funny you should mention this; back in PtDE, I invaded Upper Burg and couldn't find the host anywhere. It was fully cleared, so I figured that the host was either very good at hiding and moving unseen, or that they'd skipped to Lower Burg. I assumed the latter, did the skip myself, and still couldn't find the host as well as not being able to get back to Upper Burg through the open shortcut. After a while stuck, I sent them a congratulatory message on GFWL and left a spare White Slab behind the shortcut fog wall.

It's interesting seeing how many walls there are in the Undead Burg, because that zone always felt wrong. It's one of the most memorable levels in the game, which means we're intensely familiar with its weird boundaries. It's full of places where it looks like you can take some kind of weird shortcut, but can't. It's all the more perplexing to go back to Boletarian Palace in Demon's Souls, which feels like an equivalent first level for a lot of reasons, because that zone expects you to cross over small barriers to meet Ostrava, etc. I think a lot of people who played Dark Souls first missed the fact that you can climb over small ledges in Demon's Souls for this exact reason. Not only is it a weird obscure mechanic that you'd only learn out of desperation when something seems inaccessible, but the Undead Burg trained you to see those kinds of barriers as impassible.