What is up with ducking in shallow water?

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Shadow Tyrant

L69: Deviant Member
Aug 7, 2009
69
3
No doubt you've encountered this: You take a dip in a shallow pool, and try to duck to put out a fire/get farther underwater/whatever, but instead of crouching, you bob up and down repeatedly for no apparent reason.

I was just wonderring why this is and if there's any way to stop it? Deeper water is the obvious solution, but aside from that, is there any way to stop this from happening in my map?
 

Trotim

aa
Jul 14, 2009
1,195
1,045
I doubt there is a way to stop that from happening unless you take out all areas where this could happen by lowering or raising the geometry.

As far as I know it happens because the water is shallow enough for you to stand AND swim in (you get the swimming animation but can still taunt). If you then duck, your height is reduced and you sink deeper into the water, where you can't stand/duck anymore and it makes you swim/stand again (there is no underwater ducking).
 

Stormcaller3801

L5: Dapper Member
Jul 5, 2009
249
28
Yup- there's a few spots like this in 2Fort, where the bridge meets the sewers. The water's just deep enough that if you crouch, it flags you as being in water deep enough to swim. But you can't crouch when you swim, so you immediately stand back up- at which point you're no longer swimming, so you can crouch again. And thus the cycle goes on.

Best answer seems to be that you need to alter the height of the water, or whatever surface you're standing on that lets you bounce. I'd guess that there's no way to fix this on the models themselves- you'd just be changing the depth at which it counts you as in water and can no longer crouch, which means it'd just happen somewhere else on the map. I suppose Valve could tweak Source so that the flags work differently, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one given it's a fairly rare thing that only occurs in a few locations on the official maps.
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
aa
Jul 31, 2009
1,590
410
Yeah, I ran into this trying to add some shallow fire-extinguishing pools. Only solution seems to be to avoid that particular water height, the real fix will have to come from Valve.