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SirJuicyLemon

Fair way to play Doom on modern source ports?

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Hello guys,

I've been thinking (sorry if this has already been discussed several times) about what's the true fair way to play Doom on modern source ports.

This is not a discussion about which source port is the best one, just about the new features that modify the original gameplay.

 

I was playing Eviternity yesterday for the first time (and it's so damn good!) and I noticed something that I think it's really good for modern WADs of quality: crouching and jumping isn't allowed.

Honestly it kinda also depends on each one's perception of a good/fun gameplay. I think WADs like Knee-deep in ZDoom have jumping available because the maps were designed to have parts only reachable with jumping. Also Jumpmaze, a fun WAD to goof around jumping or to try your best to beat the time records while strafe-jumping.

 

From time to time when I play Doom on modern source ports for a while just for fun I usually have crouching and jumping allowed and use them in case of emergency but I feel ashamed to do because it's like a coward move to jump from a group of Demons just to save your own life (thing that you weren't able to do in the original Doom, obviously) so it feels like cheating.

 

Then again, there's a thing that usually differs from the original Doom but I don't mind at all and kinda doesn't feel like cheating, even though you weren't able to do in the original Doom: mouselooking.

 

To be honest, I don't feel ashamed to doing this because the original way to play with the mouse is kind of awkward (and no talking about just keys, I already had to deal with that as a kid) and if the modern sources have the feature of looking in all directions so be it, it's a comfortable advantage that I totally welcome. For me it isn't a great advantage that makes me kill more or makes the difference at shooting to be honest, it's rather just a convenient way of moving around.

 

I prefer to think that modern WADs have the freedom of balancing the game to their own good/fair perception of gameplay. If they disable jumping and crouching, as long as there is no area or secret area that requires you to jump/crouch to reach it, then it's good. Not sure if any WADs disables mouselooking (or if this is possible, yet I can't see why someone would do that) but I guess they should rebalance the quantity of monsters and other stuff that may impact on the gameplay experience. I'm no great WAD player, I just know a few, but it seems (or I believe) that most of the WADs have mouselooking considered.

 

What do you guys think? Mouselooking (in all directions), the old way or just keyboard?

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I tend to change depending on the complevel/intended sourceport. Everything playable on PrBoom+ I'll do it the old way, and have an olschool config handy for (G)Zdoom if they have goodies for them. On the other hand I'm never sure if a ZDoom wad requires or allows jumping/mouselooking. It's a bit annoying to tell at times, though nobody prevents me from switching configs once I realize I messed up.

 

Anyway I enjoy having different ways to play Doom. I love my oldschool controls but playing with a modern setup once in a while keeps things fresh.

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I'd say my thinking is relatively similar to yours, SirJuicyLemon. I play mostly in GZDoom, with mouselooking enabled (also use a small crosshair, which is another advantage), but never enable jumping or crouching, at least not on the wads I've played so far.

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i have mouselook and jumping always enabled. most of the time i am not using jumping, tho, but sometimes when i really bored, and want to go on, i can jump to get some pickup, or even a key. after all, if not jumping, i can give myself all keys, or just noclip, so why not. i want to have some light fun, not to impose Huge Challenge on myself (i prefer coding challenges ;-).

 

also, i have autoaim turned off, so it would be hard to play without mouselook.

 

and nowdays wad authors know about cheaters like me, so they love to put "block player" lines into windows and such. bastards! ;-)

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PrBoom+ using WASD with horizontal mouselook only. No jump or crouch and typically stay away from WADs that require either. If it isn't allowed in a speedrun, I don't use it. It just feels more legitimate to me that way. IDK.

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Jumping and crouching feel like cheating because they allow you to do specific things that help in certain situations, so i only use them if I've beaten a WAD a few times.

 

Mouselook though just feels like it's taking a feature that we didn't have the ability to implement in the early ears and adding it. It doesn't make you stronger or weaker in any capacity. I just enjoy personally the ability to really take in my environment.

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25 minutes ago, kohitsuji said:

Mouselook though just feels like it's taking a feature that we didn't have the ability to implement in the early ears and adding it. It doesn't make you stronger or weaker in any capacity.

Mouse aiming breaks Doom's balance and gameplay in significant manners. This is fairly obvious in when demonstrated in multiplayer where it enables several unintended exploits. Perhaps the most notable of these involves the BFG where players can completely cheese with the weapon by intentionally aiming balls directly at their own feet, causing all 40 followup tracers to fire near instantly and without warning. This exploit was severe enough that it warranted the introduction of one specific CVAR in the ZDoom engine family which controlled BFG mouse aiming and nothing else: https://zdoom.org/wiki/CVARs:Configuration#sv_nobfgaim

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warning! warning! this thread is very close to "purists vs others" territory! ;-)

 

yeah, mouselooking can change some balance. like, you may be able to see and kill turrets you should not be able to see and kill. but i'd say "meh". wasd controls and mouselooking is so convenient... (and i beaten doom, doom2, quake and a little of quake 2 without using mouse at all; no trolling!)

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14 hours ago, Kira said:

I tend to change depending on the complevel/intended sourceport. Everything playable on PrBoom+ I'll do it the old way

 

Same here.

 

14 hours ago, Kira said:

On the other hand I'm never sure if a ZDoom wad requires or allows jumping/mouselooking.

 

Usually it is mentioned in the readme file. If not mentioned, then my general rule of thumb is that it requires jumping/mouslooking as 90% of ZDoom maps make use of it.

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4 hours ago, ketmar said:

warning! warning! this thread is very close to "purists vs others" territory! ;-)

 

yeah, mouselooking can change some balance. like, you may be able to see and kill turrets you should not be able to see and kill. but i'd say "meh". wasd controls and mouselooking is so convenient... (and i beaten doom, doom2, quake and a little of quake 2 without using mouse at all; no trolling!)

I actually find playing without mouselook comfier. It lets me focus on my footplay and decision making. Not a super fan of how the sprites display with mouselook too. Like I said earlier I do play with mouselook from time to time but I have my preferences set in stone now I guess (funny that I did start playing PC Doom with mouselook for a while).

 

Anyway I disagree that it's turning into a "purists vs others" rant. It's true that vanilla/boom stuff is a lot of the time not done with mouselook in mind, so it's bound to break stuff from time to time and it's worth mentioning. But hey, if we are talking non-competitive singleplayer then everyone does what they want, be it using cheats or merely having their own set of Quality of Life measures. Who is going to judge you but pricks?

 

tl;dr: *opinions opinions opinions* :P

 

Edit: forgot to say but playing without mouselook doesn't exclude wasd controls or equivalent (esdf etc). I do play with wasd, and I guess most doomers do nowadays. Hopefully there isn't any confusion about mouselook being a keyboard vs mouse thing instead of vertical vs novert as well. I realize we might be talking about different things here, though I'm just being extra careful now lol.

 

2 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Usually it is mentioned in the readme file. If not mentioned, then my general rule of thumb is that it requires jumping/mouslooking as 90% of ZDoom maps make use of it.

Yeah this is the attitude I have regarding this matter, and it does work most of the time indeed.

Edited by Kira

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I think most of you are confusing mouselook with freelook. Mouselook is when you use the mouse to look horizontally only. Freelook (or free aim) is where you use the mouse to look both vertically and horizontally. I learned this a while ago due to the fact that i was often confused as well.

 

For me personally unless it's specifically stated in the textfile, i use mouselook only due to the fact that you don't need to look up/down in Doom due to the auto-aim (also it's how i first played it and it's just what i prefer). But when i do have to use freelook and jumping/crouching, i put a small crosshair or dot on the screen as i think (?) freelooking disables autoaim in most sourceports so then it becomes more Quake-like to me. 

 

Odd thing is, when i play Duke Nukem 3D i always use freelook even though technically in that game you don't need to either. 

 

I suppose if a map is specifically made for ZDoom or GZDoom i can usually tell just from the description or pictures if it needs freelook or not (key word here is usually). But most people list if you need to use it or not which is nice as i think everyone should include whether or not your map was intended to be played with freelook and jumping/crouching in mind.

 

But tbh, the true fair way to play Doom on modern source ports? However the hell you want.

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30 minutes ago, CyberDreams said:

I think most of you are confusing mouselook with freelook. Mouselook is when you use the mouse to look horizontally only. Freelook (or free aim) is where you use the mouse to look both vertically and horizontally. I learned this a while ago due to the fact that i was often confused as well.

Oops you are probably right. Doesn't help that we don't have this discussion anymore with FPS.

 

So yeah, to clarify my way of playing Doom: no freelook unless I'm playing wads made for that. Otherwise my config is a classic wasd + mouse combo (with weapon binds all around the movement keys for faster switching).

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Maybe it is not the most fair way to play doom but I find the most fun in doom with a modern controller, because I have the feeling to control a fucking spaceship. This feeling is not present with others controls, keyboard only, mouse + wasp.
Here is my controller setup, of course with freelook off.1139371508_Controllersetup.jpg.fbbdad5a68c45f8b441a8332ce0cee60.jpg

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I like to play the original IWADs and those either related to, or trying to be old school in more vanilla ports like Crispy Doom or PrBoom+. More modern stuff I don't really care if I've got extra bells and whistles especially if the designer assumes I have them.

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If you have BFG Edition you can always try Classic RBDoom 3 BFG

With this port you can play all 3 games similar to how they were in their original release (hence Doom 1 & 2 have by default the original configurations)

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I used to use jump to get to places I wasn't suppose to and crouch to avoid projectiles but I was younger (and very excitable by these features in ZDoom so it makes sense). Nowadays it is blatant cheating since the game wasn't designed with those functions in mind. I want to say if it's a G/ZDoom map then it's probably fair game, even if jumping or crouching isn't required to complete the level, but then again I haven't played many maps designed with the port in mind, just gameplay mods.

Mouse look also didn't exist back then in Doom obviously, but in a way you do complicate things and make it a little harder on yourself by having to rely on manual aiming and crosshairs to deal with threats higher than you, instead of just worrying about movement management and having the enemy get auto-aimed so long as it was in view. But, you can still aim much higher (and lower) than you were suppose to, giving you more advantages over the enemy. Personally outside of GZDoom I don't like to use mouse look, but it's a player preference that varies person to person. Some swear and die by mouse aiming, others prefer to just turn and shoot with the mouse.

Now my personal pet peeve with modern source ports is when they make static objects (like decorative stuff) solid and blocking projectiles, like monsters' fireballs and player's rockets and plasma shots. Yeah, Heretic did make their static objects block projectiles, but that was Raven. Outside of GZDoom (Doomsday is an exception I have to live with) once again I respect the original behavior for static objects to have projectiles pass through them so they do not act as cheap cover for the player (or block player's rockets and plasma for enemies behind them). I used to love the static object cover by default, but I got burned badly using PrBoom+ once and thinking I was safe behind the big brown tree when a fatso was letting off. I had completely forgotten that this was the original behavior!

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On 2/21/2019 at 2:29 PM, CyberDreams said:

I think most of you are confusing mouselook with freelook. Mouselook is when you use the mouse to look horizontally only. Freelook (or free aim) is where you use the mouse to look both vertically and horizontally. I learned this a while ago due to the fact that i was often confused as well.

 

Oops. U r right about this.

 

On 2/21/2019 at 2:29 PM, CyberDreams said:

Odd thing is, when i play Duke Nukem 3D i always use freelook even though technically in that game you don't need to either. 

 

Fun Fact: Freelook was added in Duke3D very late into development near shareware's release. Players asked for the feature after seeing it in a game called "Terminator: Future Shock" and devs then added it due to popular demand.

 

So while Duke3D had Freelook, it was technically designed without it in mind. Apart from making things easier, Freelook turned Mini battlelords (battlelord sentries) into a joke as u can easily use Shrink gun and aim at their feet to shrink and kill them in 1-shot. Without Freelook, aiming at their feet is very difficult while he pummels u.

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On 2/21/2019 at 2:29 AM, CyberDreams said:

Mouselook is when you use the mouse to look horizontally only.

I believe that is calling "turning".

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51 minutes ago, Grazza said:

I believe that is calling "turning".

Shall we use "mouseturning" to avoid any confusion from now on? :D

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3 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Fun Fact: Freelook was added in Duke3D very late into development near shareware's release. Players asked for the feature after seeing it in a game called "Terminator: Future Shock" and devs then added it due to popular demand.

 

So while Duke3D had Freelook, it was technically designed without it in mind. Apart from making things easier, Freelook turned Mini battlelords (battlelord sentries) into a joke as u can easily use Shrink gun and aim at their feet to shrink and kill them in 1-shot. Without Freelook, aiming at their feet is very difficult while he pummels u.


Did not know that, very interesting and rather amusing. That would also probably explain why up was down and down was up before Atomic Edition allowed you to change that, because freelook wasn't the norm in FPS but joysticks still had a place in gaming.

I honestly didn't know that it trivializes Battlelords, I usually just shoot them center-mass a time or two and most of the time they will shrink. Since learning this was a thing it makes getting rid of them way less painful. Since they are not fun to fight.

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8 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

when they make static objects (like decorative stuff) solid and blocking projectiles, like monsters' fireballs and player's rockets and plasma shots

vanilla doesn't have that? yay. i remember about vanilla bug that makes pillars a very bad cover in map07, yet i was pretty sure that in vanilla decorations were always solid for projectiles.

 

p.s.: i won't remove that from my sourceport, tho -- i am too used to use trees and stalagmites as cover.

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Yeah, DOS, Chocolate, Crispy, every variation and derivative of Boom (well, mostly?) obey the original behavior of decor objects.

E: What I wonder is, what are people's opinions on an enforced or unrestricted 21 lost soul limit from Pain Elementals? Do many maps nowadays still utilize the limit? Or was that a 90's thing?

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eh, Lost Souls... one provoked PE can cover a whole place with its skull vomit. i believe that PE was designed with that restriction in mind, so the restriction should be obeyed.

 

yet i must confess that i just removed PE vomiting at all in my sourceport. i know, i know, cheating and all that. meh.

 

p.s.: at least sourceports should limit a number of skulls one PE can launch. once PE launches its 20-25 skulls (make it random), it should stop doing that (until launched skulls are "alive", of course).

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13 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

E: What I wonder is, what are people's opinions on an enforced or unrestricted 21 lost soul limit from Pain Elementals? Do many maps nowadays still utilize the limit? Or was that a 90's thing?

Only clearly intentional example I can think of is The Pit right now, so my headcanon is that there was an in-universe physical law to allow The Pit to exist.

 

I must confess playing in complevel 2 releaves a bit of the stress of letting PEs float around, therefore it's not hardkore gaming enough and bad!

 

But for real, I don't notice this phenomenon often in complevel 2. The Pit is a specific case I guess because you are very likely to run into impotent and sterile PEs as a default state.

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2 hours ago, ketmar said:

yet i must confess that i just removed PE vomiting at all in my sourceport. i know, i know, cheating and all that. meh.

 

Forgive me for asking (as I have not tried k8vavoom for some weeks now) but WHAT THE HELL do u mean by removing PE vomiting. What do they do if they don't spit souls. Are they just sitting ducks. Also I really hope this is disabled by default as it seem like a extremely dumb feature.

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they just flying around and yawning. it looks fun. ;-)

 

and of course, it is turned off by default, i am not that crazy. ;-) this is too much game-breaking to be forced on unsuspecting player.

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16 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Oops. U r right about this.

 

 

Fun Fact: Freelook was added in Duke3D very late into development near shareware's release. Players asked for the feature after seeing it in a game called "Terminator: Future Shock" and devs then added it due to popular demand.

 

So while Duke3D had Freelook, it was technically designed without it in mind. Apart from making things easier, Freelook turned Mini battlelords (battlelord sentries) into a joke as u can easily use Shrink gun and aim at their feet to shrink and kill them in 1-shot. Without Freelook, aiming at their feet is very difficult while he pummels u.

 

Interesting! I knew that Terminator: Future Shock was the first game to include Freelook since i had read about that when i looked up all of Bethesda's games at one point (i also knew someone who actually had Future Shock and i did try it a little bit when i was younger) but i had no idea about the Duke Nukem part. Thanks for the info! :)

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12 hours ago, ketmar said:

eh, Lost Souls... one provoked PE can cover a whole place with its skull vomit. i believe that PE was designed with that restriction in mind, so the restriction should be obeyed.

 

yet i must confess that i just removed PE vomiting at all in my sourceport. i know, i know, cheating and all that. meh.


It is an interesting limitation, it could've been for reducing slowdowns/crashes, or it could've been for balance reasons. I wouldn't call it cheating if its original behavior, that's like saying abusing the Z-axis with rocket splash damage to hit enemies above or below you is cheating when the monsters are cheating by blocking and scratching your feet or eyebrows. :P
 

12 hours ago, Kira said:

Only clearly intentional example I can think of is The Pit right now


I ask so because in Hell Revealed 1, there was a neat 'trick' at the beginning of one map where you see a couple Pain Elementals but they seem to be 'sterile'. It's deceiving however because not long after tripping a linedef a buncha Lost Souls somewhere in the void get crushed and this causes the Pain Elementals to become harmful. I figure with this being such a probably niche and unsatisfactory limitation that most maps are designed with infinite lost souls so a PE is actually threatening anywhere any time. Or y'know, a wall of PEs in a slaughtermap or some shit will look really silly if they can't do anything.
 

9 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

What do they do if they don't spit souls. Are they just sitting ducks. Also I really hope this is disabled by default as it seem like a extremely dumb feature.


They lack a bite unlike that of the Cacodemon, but most limit-removing source ports will have you opting in to enforce the lost soul limitation. It's only obeyed and restricted in Chocolate Doom I think. But yeah, I'm kinda split on it. I make up for their harmlessness in my CYAN-DOOM mod by giving them a melee state and giving them a_explode when they die. It kinda offsets the repercussion of souls coming out because they may die in the process, but it's fun to have what are essentially flying explosive barrels.
 

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