The hitbox visualiser mod for Tempest, released by Shiro, has revealed the cause of a strange Paladins bug known as heavy walls. The issue has plagued the game since its inception, but its cause turns out to be surprisingly simple.
First, rooftop physics
Paladins surfaces have a special boolean property called m_bCanBaseOn. When a surface is set to False, rooftop physics are enabled, preventing champions from standing on it.
The visualiser highlights surfaces with rooftop physics in grey. On Stone Keep Classic, the roofs shown here are correctly flagged: champions cannot stand on these surfaces.
Why some walls feel heavy
While exploring the highlighted surfaces, we were surprised to find walls marked as rooftops too. That made no sense: champions can’t stand on top of a vertical wall.
But in every case we investigated, the walls with this rooftop setting were the same walls players describe as heavy.
Heavy walls are walls accidentally programmed as rooftops.
Sometimes this happens because an object, such as a tree, is made from a single piece of geometry. Instead of flagging only its top as a rooftop, the setting gets applied to the entire object. Other times, it appears to be a straightforward mistake.
Brightmarsh: no heavy walls found
Brightmarsh is the map we’ve confirmed without heavy walls — possibly the only one in the game. Here, the rooftop setting appears on rooftops where it belongs, rather than across vertical walls. It’s a carefully made map, and a fan favourite for a reason.
A decade-old bug, explained
The bug that has plagued Paladins for ten years comes down to a simple programming error: some walls were given rooftop physics. Based on what the visualiser reveals, correcting the flag could take only a few hours.
