moments when doom cheats against you

Maes said:

Somewhat related to "strafing grazing", there's a (real) increased damage effect when using hitscan spread weapons (these include SG, SSG and BFG tracers) while circle-strafing an opponent.

The reason why this happens, however, is not some exotic condition deliberately coded to reward more "dynamic" players: it's merely a side-effect of the monsters' and player's hitboxes being not round, but square, so from certain angles they actually present an increased "surface" for the spread to hit, and the target "catches" more lead or BFG tracers.

I don't understand. So from some angles the "surface" is bigger, but how is that related to circlestrafing around? You could shoot from such an angle while standing too.

Memfis said:

I don't understand. So from some angles the "surface" is bigger, but how is that related to circlestrafing around? You could shoot from such an angle while standing too.

...while waiting for the monsters to present you with their "best" angle? You'd be dead meat by then ;-)

By circle-strafing, you're more likely to hit monsters from angles other than head-on, simply because you're constantly changing position relative to them. If you stay still, you will mostly be facing them head-on.

Maybe I'm mistaken and that's where the misunderstanding comes from, but I've always thought that bounding boxes look like this on the map's top-down view:

Like, no matter what the monster does, that square won't rotate. So by standing at any corner of the picture I would get the best angle and I wouldn't lose it if the monster started approaching me. No?

The only times doom cheats on me is on 'nightmare!'.

Memfis said:

Like, no matter what the monster does, that square won't rotate

Exactly. If they could bother with making the square rotate, they could just as well code in a perfectly round hit radius, rather than a rigid hitbox. And yes, geometrically speaking, the "sweet spots" are along the diagonals or corners of said square.

Okay, so then the pro strategy would be not just circlestrafing like crazy but aligning yourself diagonally while shooting with hitscan weapons. It isn't even hard I guess, in most maps you can always tell what's the sweet spot by looking at the level geometry and flats on the floor.

Memfis said:

Okay, so then the pro strategy would be not just circlestrafing like crazy but aligning yourself diagonally while shooting with hitscan weapons.

I'm sure that certain TAS robots...err....players will strive to do just that for every hit :-)

For more normal players, it probably isn't worth trying to play as stiffly and precisely just to get an extra pellet or two on target everytime, while risking exposing yourself by hesitating too long on a specific position. Excusable if you are ToD making one of his demos, though ;-)