I have asked around in discord and a lot of people experienced these problems:
If I understand you correctly, that shouldn’t be bug but rather working as intended – just being able to see the enemy isn’t enough, there also needs to be a clear line of sight; if there’s some cover in the way of the bullets’ trajectory, then there is no such clear line of sight available.
For these cases, the devs have given us free aiming… when we know there’s an enemy right behind that light cover, but the same light cover is preventing us from snap-on or auto-targeting this enemy, this is exactly what free aiming is made for: allowing us to take the shot anyway, technically aiming at the cover, knowing it will be destroyed and some shots might still hit the target behind it, or at the very least, the target will lose its cover and the next soldier will have a clear line of sight.
I may not explained myself well enough. These two cases are separate incident.
You stand behind a cover, you have a red-line (LoS indicator) showing you can see an enemy. You click on Free aiming, the cover right in front of you blocked the whole view, and you cannot see the enemy I above.
You walked to a tile that there is no red-line/white-line (LoS indicator). You use free aiming. Free aiming allow you to see and even target body parts of that enemy (ie. the info box showing up).
This might be intentional, but it seems and feels more like a bug.
By saying clear line of sight, what does that mean?
It could mean there is absolute no cover? Less than a tall cover? Some cover? As a player, I am not sure if I should trust the LoS indicator or free aiming.
I’ve had this too. I really couldn’t understand why it wasn’t providing a target lock because the crab was just right there.
I see, that does indeed sound a bit glitchy the way you describe it now – I would put this down to the build being in pre-alpha stage and in this case not representing intended (final) behaviour.
Whenever you have a red line, i.e. the LoS indicator, you should automatically also have a “clear line of sight”, as in no obstructions at all blocking your shot – so I agree that when free aiming, your view from such a tile shouldn’t be completely blocked.
Please note though that I am not a developer, so I cannot say with any certainty what is and isn’t actually intended – I’m just going from what we’ve been told so far, and like I said, your experience does sound in fact like it is not quite working as intended after all.
I think this is caused by camera position in free aim not being the same as muzzle/gunsights position will be when the the gun is actually fired.
In the fireing animation, the soldier often moves first (stepping out from behind a corner, standing up from behind low cover or just changeing stance for balance). But the free aim camera positioning does not seem to take this movement into consideration.
I have seen this have the effect that a free aim MG burst, fired at a crabman in the tile next to the shooter, misses completely (even though the red and orange circles indicated that all shots should hit). (I don’t rememer if the crabman was diagonally or straight next to the shooter.) Aiming at the head with a machine gun while standing that close to the crabman means shooting at a very high angle. That angle seems to influence the calculation of where the rounds go. But since the gun (when fired) is not where the camera was when aiming, the high angle just means firing the burst into the sky.
I think the free aim camera needs to move when aiming in different directions (not just rotate), to account for the way the soldier would move before firing in that general direction. I guess that just not implemented yet.
I’ve had a third bug with this. Moving to a space with no line of sight indicator, going into first person aiming, seeing the enemy with no objects in the way but being unable to target them. Sometimes I even have an enemy out in the open that is closer than an enemy hidden and further away but I can only target the one further away that’s hidden. Even if I try to shoot the enemy that is closer with the greyed out targeting reticule it doesn’t hit. I can only guess that the enemy is not actually where the visual is. Like, the hitbox doesn’t match up with the enemy display. (it’s like shooting a hologram)
I noticed an enemy doing something like this the other day too. He would be crouched faceing left but when my soldiers fired on him he was suddenly facing right. Then once they’d stopped firing he was facing left again. Bit of a pain since he was a shielded one and it meant my soldiers just shot his carapace instead of his face.