What causes melee attacks missing or hitting through walls?

Melee hit detection uses an overlap that ignores line of sight (hitting through walls) or a hitbox mistimed with the animation (missing), so hits land wrong.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Melee Attacks Missing or Hitting Through Walls

Quick answer: Time the hitbox to the attack's active frames, check line of sight so hits do not pass through walls, and size the hit volume to match the swing.

Melee hit problems are timing and line-of-sight in detection. Here is how to fix them.

How to fix it

1. Time the hitbox to active frames

Enable the melee hit detection only during the attack's active frames (driven by animation events), so a hit lands when the swing connects, not before or after. Mistimed detection makes attacks miss or hit early.

2. Check line of sight

A pure overlap can register a hit through a wall if the target is on the other side. Add a line-of-sight check from the attacker to the target so a wall between them blocks the hit.

3. Size the hit volume to the swing

Match the hit volume to the weapon's reach and arc. Too small a hitbox misses targets the swing visually hits; too large connects with things outside the swing. Size it to the animation.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.