Freedom of aim in FPS's

Terminator whatever by Bethesda

Descent came out a year after System Shock which did it before

does duke nukem 3d also do auto aim even though it gives you full freedom? Cause that's awesome if it doesn't and will warrent me buying an n64 version of it.

The mouselook was a later addition. The original camera controls were pretty weird even by 1994 standards.

Yes, and also the console ports are fucking garbage why would you ever buy them.

oh, well because I want more games on my old consoles cause half of em are shit that I've accumulated over the years

Terminator: Future Shock was the first FPS to support mouse aim, albeit through moving a reticule on your screen to where you want to aim as opposed to mouse controls also being tied to turning your character, as if it were a lightgun.

System Shock 1 was the first FPS to let you look up and down, but at the time it didn't have mouse control support, as looking up and down had to be done with the keyboard.

The first FPS with true mouselook would be Marathon, though it being a 2.5D game you couldn't look all the way up or down.

Quake might've been the first game to support true mouselook in all directions, though Descent 1 might've had it beat. I remember stories of mouseaim-players in Descent being banned from certain multiplayer matches because of how well they performed against keyboard and joystick players.

What does it take to become a real dragon?

quakewiki.org/wiki/Sv_aim

What's neat is that it isn't just a toggle. You can set it to only auto-aim a certain a mount too. However I don't know if it exists in the original DOS version.

No surprises there.

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Then just get Everdrives for them.

What the fuck.

System Shock also let you aim (and interact with things) by moving the reticule around.

How old are you?

clearly young, but at least his taste isn't shit

haha I'm 23, just never got around to playing it.

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System Shock did so much more than Doom did at the time. Doom is still the better game when it comes to shooting shit though

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They were 3D. The fact that the projection method fucks up when looking up or down doesn't make something not 3D.

But System Shock plays like anus tho.

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anything before UT99 was trash

Wasn't the tech behind System Shock heavily based on Ultima Underworld?

I'm the same age. I actually feel sort of guilty because I always enable full x- and y- axis mouselook in Quake sourceports and sometimes in gzdoom when I'm playing gameplay mods that make the enemies more challenging like Project Brutality. Perhaps it's simply because I'm only so few years past underageb& and my first FPS game was Serious Sam: TSE. It's just something I can never get over, I simply MUST be able to mouselook in any direction I want.

None of these games were actually 3D. They just used tricks to look 3D despite the entire game being fundamentally 2D if you look at how the game was programmed. It's like how in Duke Nukem 3D the engine was literally so incapable of rendering 3D spaces that they had to employ really clever tricks to give the illusion of a real space. Like when you dive underwater in that game you're actually diving into a room right next to the one you're in.

You can see this very easily if you turn on the automap since you see the teleport. Or if you've made maps for the game. It's noticeable even in the first room of the game. When you jump down the vent at the start of the game you're actually teleporting to a room right next to the one you're in and it's completely seamless

I wasn't talking about mouse look, I was talking about looking up/down

Most games from the 90s play like anus when you go back and replay them

System Shock 1 was by a lot of the same designers as Ultima Underworld. They replaced the engine with a true 3D one though. Ultima Underworld was 2.5D but it came out before Doom and had things like varying heights and stuff to geometry before Id did it.

Interestingly Wolfenstein 3D was created after Carmack thought he could write a faster renderer upon seeing a tech demo of Ultima Underworld. Even though Ultima Underworld was a superior game in terms of technology, most people couldn't run it at the time since it was so advanced. By comparison Wolfy 3D could run on toasters.

Arguably Quake is a lot better to play nowadays than it was back in 1996. Most people couldn't even run the game in a relatively good framerate at the time. It was also looked down upon since the environments were smaller and less interactive than Duke Nukem 3D.

Nowadays you can run the game in a sourceport like Quakespasm, play it at whatever framerate/FOV you want and it plays great.

I was wondering why I never enjoyed vanilla quake as much. I've beaten Doom 1 and 2 multiple times and Duke 3D once, but vanilla quake has never held my attention long enough. However, Arcane Dimensions is the shit and anybody who hasn't played that mod is seriously missing out, the levels are fucking gorgeous and it's a goddamn masterpiece.

protip - maps and projection were 2.5d in games like doom and duke3d, but entities were tracked in 3d space. How the fuck do you think rockets worked when shooting upward? How about pipe bombs? Even the player falls down when there's no floor under him. That's a 3d spatial simulation, regardless of the hacks they had to develop in order to render a nice-looking map at the time.

I like Quake a lot because the game continuously encourages you to play the game over and over again faster

Once I noticed that I would just play each level like I was speedrunning it, it gave me such a huge rush to replay Quake. I often just play through the first or second episode of Quake whenever I buy a new mouse or keyboard just to break it in since it only takes like 15 minutes and you immediately realize if you like it or not.

Also play Quake 1 on it's harder difficulties. You occasionally get trolled by enemy spawning during it. Like you first fight the Shambler on normal difficulty towards the end of the first episode. But on Nightmare you fight him in the 2nd or 3rd level iirc

Once you kill the first shambler you see, if you keep walking past where he spawned another one teleports infront of you out of nowhere

It's very Romero-like design in that regard.

iirc entities in Doom were technically "infinitely" high in terms of how tall they were. It wasn't til Heretic that this was fixed and entities were given an actual definition. Since in that game you could use a flying powerup and fly over enemies.

Not a lot of people know that Quake is now one of the easiest games to make custom maps for

Can't be bothered downloading chocolate doom to confirm, but even then they still had a height position value, otherwise your rockets would not auto-aim upward to hit an enemy standing on a higher platform.

doom.wikia.com/wiki/Z-clipping

Dark Forces let you look up and down in vanilla but I'm pretty sure it was intended that you'd bind that to keyboard keys rather than the mouse. Between that and the other advances it made it was a major technological leap over Doom for a game released in 1995.

Some of the levels are better than others, tho. I like the ones where you have simply sprawling geometry and good sense of exploration, but some of it is just regular tube.

No, Doom has a Z-axis. DN3D literally lets you fly. It's 3D.

Also this.

Doom is 3D. Basic understanding of the term makes this obvious. Monsters being infinitely tall is a gameplay quirk. It doesn't make it not 3D. Virtually every game has collision boxes that don't directly match the game model for optimization reasons and Doom is just the most egregious example.

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Look again. He asked both, but it seems only Romero responded, or Carmacks response isn't represented.

If you wanted to play it true vanilla then you would have to limit the fps to 35. Source ports legitimately make the game better and there is no shame in using them to the fullest.

Why ask the programmer when you can read the source code?

Position has an X,Y, and Z.

Vanilla Doom map structure is far from being full 3D through. With this engine a room over room sector is not possible at all. Therefore the 2.5D description is more accurate and reflects the mapping limit instead of just calling it as plain 3D. Unreal 1 is more close to 3D then vanilla Doom is and Unreal 1 doesn't need a small off-map sector that acts as a height variable for tagged lines as this is the case with ZDoom. So the mapper can recreate all Doom maps in Unreal 1 but only a few or none at all is it possible recreating Unreal 1 maps in Doom

If this Doom map which is one of those Community Chest map pack is recreated in Unreal 1 the mapper can easily punch a hole on this terrain "bridge" with no additional tricks by using a CSG boolean operation.

Why can't I break this horrible fucking habit?

If it has a z-axis, it's 3D. Doom has a z-axis. All other features are irrelevant.

Tweak your mouse. I do the same because I can't find a sweet spot where the max speed is fast enought but the small movements were tiny enought to make small changes.

Just gonna reply that that's a stupid way of thinking, height-maps are not the same as 3D.

Can you have one monster on top of another? Or a corridor that passes above another corridor? If you can, it's 3D, if you can't, it's not 3D, it merely looks 3D.

It's no different than usual graphics that aren't 3D at all, just a drawing on a monitor, but a lot of clever tricks to give you a sense of perspective that doesn't really exist.

It's 3D. Objects have x,y,z coordinates. Enemies above or below you can be blocked by terrain. Projectiles can pass over and under things.

You don't need to support everything possible with 3D to be 3D.

That's not sufficient. You can have 56 coordinates for an object if you wish, it still doesn't mean anything if they aren't used.

Not according to what is said here:
The only way your shots can be blocked is if there's terrain between you and your enemy. Projectiles aren't capable of passing over or under things since "things" have infinite height as well for that purpose.

No, you just need to make it meaningfull, to use the third axis as an axis of freedom, not merely a variable. It's only a 3D game if you can MOVE in that dimension and this applies to you, projectiles and enemies but doesn't seem to be the case with Doom.

I find myself doing this when the mouse sensitivity is too high. The way I find the perfect spot is when I can 180 back and forth very reliably and comfortably as well.

They are. If they weren't used they would have been optimized out and the game would run much better on old PCs.

Things only have infinite height for blocking movement between enemies and players. It's an optimization and lack of time thing because otherwise things get wonky if you have players walking on enemies and it becomes hard to make things work right (and if you don't it's easy to cause desyncs in MP or in demos). Plus you get the problem where players can't look down to shoot what they are standing on and can therefore easily get stuck. Everything has a normal height for everything else. Projectiles go over or under enemies. A large enemy will be crushed by a falling ceiling before it gets to small enemies. Short rooms can be entered by small enemies but not large. You can't go through a doorway until the door has opened enough to let you under.

But you can clearly move in that dimension. If you fall off a ledge, you can't just get back up by walking the other way. You need to find stairs or an elevator. If "ability to move in the z direction" is your requirement to make a 3D game then Doom is more 3D than Mass Effect.

Completely wrong, projectiles are one of the few things in Doom where the Z coordinate is taken into consideration.
Actor/Actor collision and hitscan weapons are both infinitely tall. But ceiling height and projectiles take in both player and monster Z coordinates.

Hitscan weapons aren't infinitely tall. That's autoaim.

The 3rd axis is used but not for actual movement or rendering. The whole game is 2D and the height is just an effect built from that map.
That's actually why you can't look up and down beyond a certain level, because the effect that creates the height starts to distort the image far too much when you do so.

It has restrictions based on differences between z-levels. What about it? The game restrics movement between 2 points if their z coordinate diverges too much but that's still not really 3D movement anymore than a state machine is.
I'm actually surprised you didn't mention the elevators or moving platforms instead, those would be better examples but then again they are the same, just changing your current state in the z-axis.

I'm not a mapper or anything similar but reading specifically "a room over room sector is not possible at all", it seems clear it's not true 3D. It's a 2D image rendered with height and every entity has a extras variables for height and z-position that are used for projectiles or to avoid large entity sprites from clipping through the ceiling (the likely reason they can't go into lower ceiling rooms and gib if forced to).

Interesting case, although still no more 3D than tabletop games handle flying movement by setting a dice near the miniature with it's current height. It's still a variable, it's still used for collision, but it's still not 3D visually speaking.

I'm pretty sure from the last time I played it that you only needed to have your target roughly lined up in the center of the screen and his height wouldn't matter, you'd still hit him if you fired.

doom is a 3D game with engine limitations. calm down you nitpicking dweeb

Skynet I believe did so, a lot of people complained about it back then.

This, you beat me to it.

I immediately liked that about the game, and everyone else I knew complained about the fact that there was no hand-holding over it.

Pre-faggowind/zenimax Bethesda was a pretty decent company that made some interesting games.

Which makes three dimensions you dummy. Rendering technique and map format limitations don't stop Doom from being a 3D game.

why can't you have sector over sector, then?

Pretty much this: a point you keep overlooking.
There's nothing that makes Doom a 3D game save for quirky projectile physics (if it was 3D they'd apply to hitscan as well) and the rendering faking height pretty well.

This really shouldn't detract from the quality of the game, it's still a pretty impressive trick for the time to create depth out of a 2D image, but one shouldn't get carried away and atribute it greater depth than it really has.

Or are people that insecure about games back then having the equivalent of aim-assist we have today?

Duke Nukem 3D has the option too.

I didn't start using the mouse until SiN forced me to.

Two distinct areas of the game are being conflated in the 2D / 3D argument: rendering and action. A game can occur in 2D and be rendered in 3D (eg. SMT: Strange Journey and many other dungeon crawlers), or can occur in 3D and be rendered in 2D (eg. Dwarf Fortress). The fact that a z variable exists in gameplay at all means it's not just 2D, but since it's only partially utilized means it plays in 2.5D. The rendering is 3D, regardless of the assets beyond the maps having no real depth. So I would submit that Doom plays in 2.5D and is rendered in 3D.

That looks pretty swanky, but despite its limitations, Doom Builder still takes the ease of use award.

Full retard.

That's due to the projection method.

Yes, the game autoaims up or down since Doom doesn't have vertical aiming. There is a distance limit and enemies can be angled far enough above you that it doesn't track him.

see: youtube.com/watch?v=4GJ-gzna_dE

How is it only partially utilized? Because it doesn't have jumping? Then hundreds of modern FPSs are 2.5D.

Because, as you've posted, it only relates to projectiles which is a limited portion of gameplay.

It also relates to movement, where you can fit, getting crushed, etc.

The issue of actors not being able to be ontop of each other is one line of code that doesn't check for height. It's just as easily fixed/finished in both source ports and in other versions of the Doom engine like in Heretic and later Doom-based games.

doom.wikia.com/wiki/Z-clipping

Not an argument.

Yes, the method that picks a 2D image and renders it in 3D.

Makes sense if the angle is enough that they need to be rendered in your screen to be valid. It would be stupid if you could shoot what you can't see after all since it would go both ways.

Considering every entity in the world is a sprite with a fixed height, it would be important to keep it in check and prevent entities from entering spaces too small for them simply to avoid cliping through the ceiling as it would either look terrible or even break the illusion of depth (not height) depending on how they are rendered.

But this would be about solving graphical issues with code, not about using the z-axis for gameplay reasons, those would come as a neat side-effect.

Actors and projectiles only. Those are entities that can indeed exist above each other and rendered in the right positions for such a thing.
What you can't have is a corridor going over another corridor due to how the maps are created and rendered.

Plenty of modern FPS don't give you the option to jump (Bulletstorm being a good example) but they do feature corridors going beneath others or walkways, catwalks, and similar things.

You were a very common phenomena of the time, and I raped many of your ilk in deathmatch, esp in duke 3d.

You said the 3rd axis can't be used for movement. That's trivially wrong and the first stairway encountered in E1M1 proves it.

No, it's a method that renders a 3D environment and translates that to a 2D screen.

wat? Enemies exist even if you aren't looking at them. Are you 6 months old or something?
You know what its called when you track a separate dimension from X and Y that measures height? Yes, that's called the Z axis. Doom tracks Z axis, you can check in the code. How do you think flying enemies function?

Who gives a shit? This is an arbitrary metric that has nothing to do with whether something is 2d or 3d. You are choosing it for no reason other than that its a restriction of the engine that actually exists and isn't conjured up by your misinformation.

No it doesn't. If the map is a 2D heightmap and is rendered in the z-axis according to the specified height, going up said stairway is not different at all then running down a corridor.
In fact, have you checked what your horizontal speed is when going up? The same as walking forward.

dukenukem.wikia.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Perspective_correctness
There's a reason Doom can't have slanted walls or slopes, it's a 2D map rendered in 3D, but it's not a 3D environment at all. It merely looks like it.
This is much like saying that Diablo 2 was a 3D game because the trees in the background had a paralax effect.

But if you can't see them, it wouldn't make sense you'd be able to shoot them nor would it be fair for them to be shooting at you. The angle restriction seems to exist more to limit hitscan to something that can be seen, it's not an argument against or for the game being 3D.

No, it's not. It's not an axis at all if movement in it does not obey the same rules as movement in X and Y do. There's a difference between variables and degrees of freedom.
By being rendered in a position relative to their height and the map and being able to change that position, yes. Still doesn't matter as it has no meaning, your projectiles still home in on them and hitscan hits them regardless, as long as you can see them.
Besides, you're still hammering on entities, who do use a z coordinate when you're told that it's the maps who aren't 3D. They do not support 3D at all, they fake it and have a neat way for enemies\projectiles to simulate something similar, that's all.

Anyone that cares about the actual definition of 2D\3D or level design does give a fuck.
And you're discarding it because it dismisses some idea you had about a game you love. You're more biased than me if anything.

It's a limitation that prevents more intricate level design with verticality for instance or true mouse aim or even jumping, that ends up not even making sense due to how the game is rendered.
It's a limitation that matters so much pretty much every other game in the same engine tried to improve on it. Check that Duke link I gave you about a level where they can place 2 floors one over the other and the player can rotate 720 degrees without seeing the same thing, something that's impossible today.

You really gotta ditch those nostalgia googles, the game had auto-aim by design, it wasn't real 3D but it was very impressive that they managed to fake it that well and pioneered the engine that made great games afterwards.

:^)

A 2d heightmap. So, a 3d map?

Yes, and? Same thing happens in Half Life and plenty of other games. In fact it probably happens in more games than not.

The environment encompasses 3D space. You move within 3D space within it. It's defined as a simplistic extension of 2D, but it's still 3D.

Diablo 2 characters do not have X,Y,Z coordinates. They have X,Y coordinates. It's really quite simple. There is no actual height in D2, just terrain that blocks movement and/or projectiles.

The fact that you need an angle correction to aiming means the game is 3D. In a 2D game you can't fuck up and shoot high/low.

How is it faking when things have X,Y,Z coordinates? You might as well just say that the game is a 1D shooter that fakes the 2nd dimension really, really well.

The definition of 3D is 3 dimensions. You exist in 3 dimensions in Doom. John Romero, an actual level designer for Doom, agrees that the game is 3D. . Why are you even trying to claim otherwise.

And yet you can add true mouse aim and jumping to Doom with 10 lines of code. You can't take any 2D game and make it 3D with 10 lines of code. Ergo Doom is a 3D game that merely has some limitations to level design.

Let me also point out that Doom WADs are still far better than custom maps for pretty much any other FPS in existence.