This guy has been playing empires lately and I've been wondering if he's found a way to abuse the mod. Last time the spectators didn't catch on what he was doing, but on District it was pretty evident how it was done. He crouches behind objects and shoots "through them" as if he was standing, abusing the cover like that. You can spot the bullet traces starting way above his head if you're not blind as a bat.
I remember having a weird problem sometimes where the crouch animation got stuck halfway so I would be holding crouch but like still standing almost upright. I feel like I was shooting at crouch level though, so that might be unrelated.
I believe this is a problem with all source engine games. Its especially obvious with Heavy and Soldier in TF2. Bullets are fired from the centre of the screen. Not from the characters point of view, nor from the barrel of the weapon. So if the centre of his screen is above the box, he can shoot over it. Simples. Even if the character model can't be shot. This is a problem with the way source FPS games work sadly. However the opposite is also true... You can be headshot when you believe you are entirely behind cover and are obscured from your attacker. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they can't see you. The third person models and first person models are radically different. So I would classify this as an engine exploit. But since it's built into source, I'm not sure if we can do any thing about it. I haven't taken a look at the .zip file though... So I may be barking up completely the wrong tree. Does this explain the behaviour? @YouzY Edit: the camera is not in the models head position, it's at a fixed offset from the models centre.
This is a pretty old exploit. Actually think I've banned the guy in question before for doing it. There are some other players that come to mind that have used it in the past.
Your demo file seems to be empty when I load it up in Empires. (instructions for playing .dem files) I've tried to reproduce this with sv_cheats 1 and sv_netlag 2000, but I don't think that prediction is the problem. I think cutting off the crouching animation is the problem, and I'd like to see two people in a server reproduce this with hitboxes visualized, to see what it looks like when you repeatedly tap the duck key while behind a box or unbuilt wall, and whether your hitbox crouches in such a case. In any case, you can indeed shoot.