Hitbox

A hitbox is an invisible shape commonly used in video games for real-time collision detection. It is often a rectangle (in 2D games) or cuboid (in 3D) that is attached to and follows a point on a visible object (such as a model or a sprite), though circular or spheroidial shapes are also common. It is common for animated objects to have a set of hitboxes attached to one moving part each to ensure accuracy during motion.^[1]

Hitboxes are used to detect "one-way" collisions such as a character being hit by a punch or a bullet. They are unsuitable for the detection of collisions with feedback (e.g. bumping into a wall) due the difficulty experienced by both humans and AI in managing a hitbox's ever-changing locations; these sorts of collisions are typically handled with much simpler axis-aligned bounding boxes instead. Players may use the term "hitbox" to refer to these types of interactions regardless.

References