prBoom (Mouse moves player)

What is this called and how do I turn it off?

Either turn mouselook on; or set vertical mouse sensitivity to the minimum.

You probably have vertical mouse sensitivity on. You can take it off by going to Options -> Mouse Sensitivity. 

So that's what causes it. Why do ports have that on as default? How many people actually use it?

I call it "vertical mouse movement", as it is character movement caused by manipulating one's mouse along its vertical axis. (Though some get confused by that phrasing, so I can't say it works especially well.)

2 hours ago, Death Egg said:

How many people actually use it?

I use it, to the point where not having it is rather jarring. On occasion I might lift my left hand to take a drink or scratch an itch, and during these occasions it's nice to have some control other than turning. Presumably it's on by default because vanilla had it on by default, and so a player seeking to understand a default-intended control scheme would notice it instantly. It's not exactly hard to turn off (obfuscating GUIs aside).

This is getting off-topic, but one bit that bothers me when using ZDoom is how little the vertical mouse movement actually thrusts the player. Even maxing out the setting (in the GUI, come to think of it I haven't tried manually adjusting the value) doesn't nearly account for the speed achievable in vanilla. I guess it's so players have the ability to move more finely than keyboard presses allow, reducing on redundancy? I can't think of a situation where that's significant, though.

20 hours ago, Death Egg said:

So that's what causes it. Why do ports have that on as default? How many people actually use it?

Here, I use it all the time. Little forward/backwards movements with the mouse coupled with strafe left/right keys makes me much more manoeuvrable and nimble than controlling all movement with keys on one hand.

18 hours ago, CapnClever said:

I call it "vertical mouse movement", as it is character movement caused by manipulating one's mouse along its vertical axis.

Reasonable, given the well-known name of the memory resident that DOS users made to suppress it was called novert.

I don't think of vertically on a two dimensional Cartesian plane. Moving something further away from you does not intuitively mean up for me. I used mouselook in Boom and after turning it off I figured it would just negate the setting. I guess I can't think of a better name for it. Mousemove? At any rate I'm glad I got it figured out. I enjoy Boom much more now.

3 hours ago, everennui said:

I don't think of vertically on a two dimensional Cartesian plane. Moving something further away from you does not intuitively mean up for me.

I guess it's because when you move the mouse further/nearer on your desktop, the pointer moves up/down :)

I mean your mouse has two axes of control which are usually referred to as horizontal and vertical, even though in the latter case you're just moving it forwards and backwards. This is a slight abuse of language, but reasonable to do, as literal "vertical" movement i.e. lifting the mouse up and down off its surface, doesn't move the pointer, so isn't something you generally do, so let's slightly abuse language and use "vertical" to mean something useful instead of wasting it on something literally correct.

(To go along with "vertical" there's a nice word "lateral" for sideways motion but forwards/backwards I couldn't come up with better than "longitudinal" which doesn't really fit.)

Anyway then Doom has two axes of motion and one axis of rotation (or two axes of rotation if you're using a sourceport with look up/down) so it's natural to identify the mouse axes with the corresponding axes of motion/rotation in the game. Thus horizontal mouse movement is strafe, and vertical mouse movement is forwards/backwards.

3 hours ago, everennui said:

I guess I can't think of a better name for it. Mousemove?

This is fine. I usually call it mousewalk, mouse walking (with or without the space).

On 19/3/2017 at 1:30 AM, Death Egg said:

So that's what causes it. Why do ports have that on as default? How many people actually use it?

Only anal-retentive ports have vertical movement as a default. Thankfully, there are other ports that care about usability.

And to save you some trouble, in prboom+ you cannot disable infinitely tall actors, so a Cacodemon a mile up cannot block your movement. Also, If you try to drop off a ledge and there are monsters below, you may not be able to.

On 21.03.2017 at 7:30 PM, VGA said:

Only anal-retentive ports have vertical movement as a default.

You mean like GZDoom?

I don't remember GZDoom having it on by default and I am too lazy to test. Well, if anyone wants to continue this discussion please tell us which ports have vertical mouse player movement by default.

I had to check as well, but it does have it on.

I think it'd be easier to say which ports deviate from vanilla-like default controls. Unfortunately, I can't recall a single one off the top of my head.