Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
GamingMarine

Why Does Wolf4SDL's Controls Suck?

Recommended Posts

So, I'm not much of an old gamer (I'm still in my teenage years), and I'm used to the controls used by source ports like ZDoom and ECWolf.

Lately, I've been trying to handle Wolf4SDL's controls in order to play Mac-enstein (A TC that, well, ports the Mac version of Wolf 3D to PC, and Wolf4SDL is the only source port to have something like this), and, in my opinion, the source port's controls suck.

 

There's no option for always running, there's no other way to strafe than to hold down "alt", mouse look always moves the player around on the Y-axis, and that's all that I can think of the top of my head.

 

Sure, call me for not being a "true Wolf 3D player", but these problems can only affect someone like me.

Share this post


Link to post
3 hours ago, GamingMarine said:

Sure, call me for not being a "true Wolf 3D player", but these problems can only affect someone like me.

I'm also affected by such outdated standarts. Controls are important, and mistakes have been made in the genre's early years.

Share this post


Link to post

This is the cause of I started to use ECWolf. Also I hope they can add support of pre-wolf ID shooters.

On another side I think original Wolf3D is not that bad. Even vertical mouse moving, because in plain corridors this is not a problem. But in Doom 2 as example it have Chasm, and vertical mouse moving should be toggled off in this case.

Share this post


Link to post

That's how original wolf3d is controlled, and wolf4sdl doesn't change it. You cannot strafe and turn at the same time in Wolfenstein 3D.

 

ECWolf seems to me like the ZDoom of Wolf3D, adding unsolicited gameplay changes (such as the possibility to circle strafe), besides the more useful moddability enhancements.

 

A good way to play Wolfenstein 3D is mouse-only, no keyboard, though you may need sensitivity to be high.

Share this post


Link to post
11 hours ago, GamingMarine said:

So, I'm not much of an old gamer (I'm still in my teenage years), and I'm used to the controls used by source ports like ZDoom and ECWolf.

Lately, I've been trying to handle Wolf4SDL's controls in order to play Mac-enstein (A TC that, well, ports the Mac version of Wolf 3D to PC, and Wolf4SDL is the only source port to have something like this), and, in my opinion, the source port's controls suck.

 

There's no option for always running, there's no other way to strafe than to hold down "alt", mouse look always moves the player around on the Y-axis, and that's all that I can think of the top of my head.

 

Sure, call me for not being a "true Wolf 3D player", but these problems can only affect someone like me.

It's a textbook case of Not Invented Here. In my experience many Wolfenstein players dislike any modernization of the controls because they see it as a contamination of Wolfenstein 3D by Doom (and often Doom specifically). This is changing, but people are just coding it into their own Wolf4SDL builds rather than use ECWolf as a common platform. The idea of a standard set of features like Boom or ZDoom in this community is not popular over there.

Share this post


Link to post

Well, all the people who decide to mod by recompiling wolf3d.exe or wolf4sdl.exe are practically toying with programming. That's a great skill to practise.

Share this post


Link to post

I'm not too fond of wolf4sdl controls, myself. As with Blake Stone and the original Wolfenstein 3D, I find that there's this weird reverse mouse acceleration thing going on, in that the faster I flick my mouse, the slower I move. I've grown pretty accustomed to playing Wolfenstein 3D with ECWolf, and find it to be generally superior to playing Wolfenstein 3D any other way. 

Edited by Ajora

Share this post


Link to post
29 minutes ago, printz said:

Well, all the people who decide to mod by recompiling wolf3d.exe or wolf4sdl.exe are practically toying with programming. That's a great skill to practise.

Some of them toy with programming, some just copy-paste tutorials written by other people without knowing or thinking about coding. I remember when Project Weltuntergang came out with a cool motorcycle level, then the author released the motorcycle tutorial and a wave of shovelware mods came out with the exact same motorcycle.

 

29 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I'm not too fond of wolf4sdl controls, myself. As with Blake Stone and the original Wolfenstein 3D, I find that there's this weird reverse mouse acceleration thing going on, in that the faster I flick my mouse, the slower I move. I've grown pretty accustomed to playing Wolfenstein 3D with ECWolf, and find it to be generally superior to playing Wolfenstein 3D any other way. 

It's actually not quite "reverse acceleration", instead the turning rate is capped (I think it's similar or identical to the turning rate you get with a keyboard). It is incredibly annoying.

Share this post


Link to post
36 minutes ago, printz said:

Well, all the people who decide to mod by recompiling wolf3d.exe or wolf4sdl.exe are practically toying with programming. That's a great skill to practise.

Yes and it is a fun way to prevent bug fixes and remove support for other platforms that Wolf4SDL/ECWolf support because most of the forks don't have any source code releases.

 

Edit: Before ECWolf's release I hacked modern controls into Wolf4SDL because I can't stand the missing strafe keys. I still do this for Catacombs 3d and its successors.

Share this post


Link to post

Marathon has a similar problem. Despite having a pretty advanced engine, it also has a turning speed cap. And shitty turning resolution to boot. Worse still, these limitations are rooted deeply into how the game is coded, so fixing them would require some major changes. Changes that no one seems to want inside the remaining community.

 

And there's only one source port, so no alternative.

 

I bet all of us are dissatisfied with Doom community from time to time, but it takes one look at something like this to realize how good we have it.

Share this post


Link to post

Right, Marathon has a very weird way to handle turning. Keyboard turning is limited by the physics simulation of the player. This has the consequence that the keyboard turning speed is determined by the active mod.

 

Mouse turning has an input limit for the current frame and it has an (optional) mouse “acceleration”/filtering system that uses an unorthodox formula.

 

Every time someone wants to improve the input systems there are cries about foul play from the keyboard players.

Share this post


Link to post

I use WASD, except A and D turn, E for use, left alt for run, mouse controls shooting and strafing. I actually hate dedicated side step keys and auto running in Wolf.

Share this post


Link to post

Marathon's turning takes ages for me to get right on every install -- and since Aleph One requires each scenario to be installed separately, that's a new setup every time.

Share this post


Link to post
15 hours ago, dethtoll said:

Marathon's turning takes ages for me to get right on every install -- and since Aleph One requires each scenario to be installed separately, that's a new setup every time.

You can copy your mouse settings into a text file for convenient access, and paste it into whichever config file you need to have control the same. The config is in [user]/AppData/Local/AlephOne. Annoying, but that's how the backwards-thinking Aleph One devs do things.

Share this post


Link to post

Apologies for possibly steering this off the original topic, but is Wolf4SDL being updated still? I remember it being pretty hard to find any centralised place to download it, the former official site being only accessible via the Wayback Machine.

 

My impression was that Wolf4SDL is a pretty conservative, accurate port but last time I checked it lacked the option to run at the historically correct 4:3 aspect ratio.

Share this post


Link to post
On 11/27/2017 at 3:01 PM, Manuel-K said:

Every time someone wants to improve the input systems there are cries about foul play from the keyboard players.

I think it was Blastfrog that once had me look at improving the controls, and at the time I was under the impression that the sentiment was that a solution was impossible without breaking demo compat thus they weren't interested in trying.  Certainly didn't hear of anyone crying foul for competitive reasons, but I wasn't involved with the game or its community so I could be wrong.

 

Actually implemented buffered turning and it worked surprisingly well.  Sure fast turns lagged, but it felt better and generally you're not making 180 degree turns so it usually only took an extra tic or two to match the logical yaw.  For one reason or another that effort got discarded (the specifics are not really important here), and I don't remember if I sent him the diff.

17 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

Apologies for possibly steering this off the original topic, but is Wolf4SDL being updated still? I remember it being pretty hard to find any centralised place to download it, the former official site being only accessible via the Wayback Machine.

I think the fact that you can't find the site pretty much answers your own question.  Mortiz Kroll was pretty slow to respond to my emails when I started ECWolf and by 2012 he sees to have disappeared.  The site moved to o2mail when his ISP got bought out, luckily someone in the Wolf3D community managed to find it.  After a year or so it seems the site got deleted.

 

To the best of my knowledge ECWolf is the only maintained source port of Wolf3D.

17 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

My impression was that Wolf4SDL is a pretty conservative, accurate port but last time I checked it lacked the option to run at the historically correct 4:3 aspect ratio.

It did largely do one thing and do it well relative to the time when all Wolf3D source ports were hardware accelerated and borderline engine recreations at best.  That said it appears much more conservative on the surface than it actually is.  I wish I had infinite time to maintain two source ports as it would be nice to have a vanilla accurate reference port a la Chocolate Doom.  (No, Fabien Sanglard's "Chocolate Wolfenstein 3D" doesn't count.  It's Wolf4SDL with an added "CRT emulator" and some ifdefs flattened.  It still contains the renderer and pushwall improvements among other changes.)  Alas I barely have time to work on ECWolf these days.

13 hours ago, Manuel-K said:

AFAIK the newest version is Braden's copy of the source code which can be found here: https://bitbucket.org/Blzut3/wolf4sdl

Just reuploaded the files that I have to the downloads page.  Not that anyone is looking for it here, but the Wolf4GW download seems to be gone (wolf4gw_freepush3.zip).  Found this repo though which the first commit sounds like it's mostly a raw dump of the zip: https://github.com/TobiasKarnat/Wolf4GW  This stuff is doing a surprisingly good job at being an exception to the "what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet" rule despite being fairly popular.

Share this post


Link to post
1 hour ago, Blzut3 said:

I think it was Blastfrog that once had me look at improving the controls, and at the time I was under the impression that the sentiment was that a solution was impossible without breaking demo compat thus they weren't interested in trying.  Certainly didn't hear of anyone crying foul for competitive reasons, but I wasn't involved with the game or its community so I could be wrong.

I remember Blastfrogs's suggestions being met with quite a lot of insults on the forums.

 

One example I could find quickly: https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/pull/52#issuecomment-274238401 I've read worse at another place, but I don't know where it was.

 

“Raising the limits does kinda screw those of us who try to play with the keyboard. Not that we were that well off to begin with.”

 

“The slider is even worse than the original patch! It still disadvantages keyboarders in net games (because what competitive player will leave it set to 50%!?) but now there's another slider.”

 

“I wonder how many keyboard netplayers are left. I don't count, since I don't play competitively at all anymore. And we almost certainly aren't getting any new ones...

 

I've racked my brains over this, and I haven't thought of a way to handle this where everyone wins. Keep the limits where they are, and the 360-noscope generation† will feel like they've got a brick on their mouse. Raise them wholesale, and the keyboarders' tiny sliver of a chance against mousers becomes even tinier.(…)”

 

1 hour ago, Blzut3 said:

Actually implemented buffered turning and it worked surprisingly well.  Sure fast turns lagged, but it felt better and generally you're not making 180 degree turns so it usually only took an extra tic or two to match the logical yaw.  For one reason or another that effort got discarded (the specifics are not really important here), and I don't remember if I sent him the diff.

 

According to the discussion of GitHub they tried it and discarded the changes.

 

“Oh wow, my experimental idea was a cure way worse than the disease. Mouse felt like a mattress. Made of Jell-O. I now think that any kind of (de facto) simulated mouse input beyond the immediate frame is bad.” ;-)

Share this post


Link to post

Simulating the fact that you're turning like a boss without actually turning like a boss sounds suspiciously like schizophrenia. I'm not surprised it didn't fly.

 

Quote

360-noscope generation

I'm finding it amusing how they're branding this issue as old VS new. There was someone on their forums who compared it to walking into a vintage car club and telling everyone to get on with the times. Except Doom came out earlier and had adequate turning even by modern standarts. It's not really about being stylishly old, more like being programmed with zero foresight.

 

And the keyboarders - I mean no disrespect, but they're an absolute minority among the gamers. Though I'm not surprised they still have an influence in Marathon community.

Share this post


Link to post

I wonder how well it'd work to have a Doom-style turn rate modifier ( Doom-wise it's tied with the run button, but that's not necessarily necessary ), with maybe two for extra precision. Keyboard play is naturally at a disadvantage with aiming due to the lack of analog control, but being able to utilize four different turn speeds could mitigate that a lot.

Share this post


Link to post
14 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

Simulating the fact that you're turning like a boss without actually turning like a boss sounds suspiciously like schizophrenia. I'm not surprised it didn't fly.

Well if the constraints are "the tic command format shall never change," then there's not really anything else that can be done.  Certainly several orders of magnitude better than hard capping the controls in my opinion.  Well I certainly understand the Jell-O comparison, but I'm not a latency sensitive person, so I personally found that I was able to make quick turns and end up at the desired angle no problem.  Would probably be even better if the camera pitch/yaw was detached from the player similar to how GZDoom handles mouse input above 35Hz, but not sure since that would mean you can potentially end up firing into a wall unintentionally.

 

But if the issue is keyboard players not wanting to switch to the mouse in competitive games then they're intentionally keeping their community small, and the only way to change that would be to just fork the project and let the players decide.

Share this post


Link to post

There's also the issue of mapping for Aleph One, as mapping tools up until recently weren't available for Windows or OSX, forcing users to either use an old Mac or set up Sheepshaver and hope you knew what you were doing.

Share this post


Link to post

I don't think the Aleph One community is interested in anything changing. They're a very small and closed group, often hostile toward one another as well as outsiders. Despite the glaring flaws of some of the engine behavior, they like it just like it is and don't even see it as a problem.

 

I most certainly did not fit in on their forums, and I'm not terribly interested in going back. I don't hold any ill-will toward them, they're enjoying themselves and there's no problem with that.

 

I do think that Marathon really should be brought to more people though, perhaps with a fork, a new community could form that ideally would resemble this one more.

Share this post


Link to post

I had a thought in the past about how useful it would be to have a dedicated 2.5D community. It would focus on all 2.5D games instead of just one game (or a selection of games on the same engine, like we have here). Come for the popular stuff, stay for all of it. Could potentially bring some of the more obscure titles into the spotlight.

 

If not for any such ambitious undertakings, it would be interesting to maybe take a well-populated community and organize some mapping jams for lesser-known games. Give people a few weeks to familiarize with the current game of choice, provide links to tools and documentation, et cetera. I think it's a good thing to get out of your comfort zone from time to time.

Share this post


Link to post

I would certainly be interested in a pan-retro-gaming community. Not just old FPS games but also like RPGs and such. It'd probably be full of horrible people eventually though. 

Share this post


Link to post

I once frequented a Russian community of this kind. Good times, until the amount of people screaming OLD IS GREAT NEW IS SHIT and the like started to prevail over people with more nuanced and interesting opinions.

 

It wasn't very mod-centric though. When it came to objectively useful content, its main focal points were collecting abandonware and making guides/patches to help with playing older games on modern systems. Probably still are.

 

The risk of dying out or turning into a cesspit is always there, unfortunately.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×