Distance unit

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A distance unit (often shortened to unit) refers to an arbitrary unit of measurement that calculates the in-game, position or size of objects.

Overview

Many aspects of video games are reliant on distance to perform specific interactions, ranging from how a character moves, physic engine interactions, to how scenes are rendered. A common practice in 3D games is to correlate units to a real-world measurement (e.g. 1 unit = 1 meter), which is commonly done with games that are based on the real-world in order for level design, movement, physics, etc. to accurately/predictably be replicated.

Starting in Super Smash Bros. Melee, a unit would be defined as 1 unit = 1 decimeter, or 1 unit = 0.1 meters. The original Super Smash Bros. also uses a common distance unit but it is different from later games. Smash 64's unit is roughly 30 times larger than a unit in the other games, though it is currently unknown if it is correlated to a real-world unit or not.

Applications

Hitboxes and hurtboxes use units to define their position and size. The majority of character attributes are measured in "units per frame", such as jump height, run speed, air speed, falling speed, and so on—very few attributes use a different system, such as weight.

Super Smash Bros. Melee introduced the concept of glancing blows. A glancing blow is activated when a hitbox and an opponent's hurtbox overlaps by 0.01 units or less (0.1 units in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and onward).

The Training stage in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has a background that uses a grid. This grid is intended to have each line be 1 unit apart, however this correlation was performed on the squares between the grid lines and ignoring the size of the grid lines themselves. The texture for the grid uses 15×15 pixel squares with 1 pixel wide grid lines, resulting in the grid lines being 1.06 (16/15) units apart.