who also plays with keyboard only

i cant use the mouse it just doesnt feel right lol

I know gggmork plays with keyboard, and he is very good. There is another talented player who does, but I forgot who it was.

There is another talented player who does, but I forgot who it was.

There is many. :) Ryback, vdgg, SAV88, Eugene Kapustin... Also Anima Zero and Xit Vono used to be keyboarders.

Oh wow. I always wondered why a lot of demos I've watched had that kinda funny way of turning, I guess they were keyboarding.

I'll use keyboard from time to time, but I usually use a mouse.

My main Doom box is keyboard only.

I used to, but it hurt my wrist and I realized that playing with a keyboard just feels clumsy.

Used to play with keyboard only, well, 10 years ago... that was back then when I didn't know about strafing to left and right and for dodging stuff I had turn left/right + move forward... not that it really matters as I always had iddqd on.

Yeah, mouse all the way. Preferably with high sensitivity for fast turning.

I use keyboard, as I only have my laptop with a touch pad instead of a mouse.

I played with the keyboard for nearly 10 years, and even finished HR and Absolution with pure keyboard controls. In the meantime, I played modern shooter games with WASD + mouse but for some reason I never thought that they could be applied to Doom as well, so I maintained a kind of doublethinking in that respect.

One of the reasons I played with the keyboard for so long was that the one time I tried to play with the mouse under DOS, I did so without remapping the arrow keys to something else (single-handedly inventing WASD in 1994 would be cool, but I didn't pull that out). Of course it was incredibly awkward to use, and the mouse had a ridiculously high sensitivity that sent me doing 3 spins with the slightest tap.

I quit, reset the controls to the apparently much-saner keyboard-only layout, and never looked back...until much, much later.

In any case, playing with the keyboard was not bad, at least for single player. It's better than playing with a gamepad, for one, and you can straferun and shoot with some training (it was much easier with pre-Windows 95 keyboards though, which had the ALT key right next to CTRL, and in general CTRL+ALT+SHIFT were in a closely packed triangle). Turning speed was essentially a two-speed affair (walk-turn or run-turn) but you got used to that, and adapted combat patterns accordingly.

Ofc, I wouldn't use keyboard-only controls in deathmatch, unless I was playing in a certified keyboard-only league, just as I wouldn't play with a modem outside of a modem league.

valkiriforce said:

I use keyboard, as I only have my laptop with a touch pad instead of a mouse.

Same with me.

Processingcontrol said:

Same with me.

Heh I find myself doing that sometimes, and I still have the right "instincts" for switching back to the keyboard fully developed :-p

Playing Doom with the keyboard was quite like playing a typical driving game of the era, and those did turns just fine without fancy mouse or analog controls, unless you were a complete squarebadge who couldn't wrap his head around it.

valkiriforce said:

I use keyboard, as I only have my laptop with a touch pad instead of a mouse.

I only have a laptop, but somehow I managed to adapt to using the touch pad just fine. I use it for almost everything (both Doom, and other games). As far as Doom goes though, I will go back to using the keyboard every now and then.

I'm actually going through a phase of using the keyboard right now - and no I don't mean because I'm typing this post! :P

My set up doesn't really allow for comfortable play with a mouse so after many years of faffing with controllers I've finally moved over to keyboard. The biggest reason for the change is consistency. It seems to me that a lot Doom ports handle joysticks differently which means having to mess around with different configurations for different ports which gets pretty annoying. For the longest time I used a dual analogue controller and pretty much only played ZDoom but I missed Choco Doom et al.

Now, I have my keyboard set up the way I want it and I can go from game to game without fucking with my muscle memory. It also helps when jumping back to Wolf3D, Blake Stone etc... :)

I only ever use keyboard, it's all i've ever known,

I agree that playing with a mouse doesn't feel right, I was extremely suprised to see how many people use it.

you can strafe with the keyboard

i have the aim and jump for skulltag/zdaemon on key board to me doom was meant to be played with keyboard

ryuusen91, can you please use punctuation in your posts?

It's annoying reading sentences put together without periods or capitalization.

I use keyboard only, and that works nicely in all Doom engine games. In Quake, it's also doable, but some maps are more difficult (Ziggurat Vertigo), and I wouldn't even attempt DM like this (need mouse for rocket-jumping precision).

These are my keybindings:
SPACE : fire
ESDF : move
J : turn left
L : turn right
I : use (door, switch...)
K : special port features, like 180-degree turn (prboom)

I have use keyboard to play doom when I was a child. But the keyboard sucks, it doesn't leds the run good and circle strafe is also a shit to do with, for example killing a cyberdemon takes me 3 minutes. So when I got prboom-plus-2.5.0.8 in my PC, I start to play it with mouse and I found that it was very sensitive, the whole game become much easier. Here are my keyboard buttons for playing doom:

Forward: Up Arrow
Backward: Down Arrow
Turn left: Left Arrow
Turn Right: Right Arrow
Strafe: Alt:
Fire: Ctrl
Activating: Space
Weapons Switch: Numbers at upper side of keyboard, same as one I use today.

Only way to play.

I do.

I play with WASD keys, left and rigt arrows, E key for use and CTRL for fire.

I'm faster in keyboard than the mouse. Playing with the mouse feels weird.

Let's make a more interesting question then: is there any inherent advantage/disadvantage to any particular control scheme, which can be explained by pure hand-eye coordination and human hand/arm mechanics?

My educated guess: mouse is simply unmatched for the speed and the direct "mind mapping" it offers to turning, being able to be both:

• Precisely position controllable
  
• Precisely speed controllable.
  

assuming of course it has been tuned. The fact that most players use it with their dominant right hand means that most of the control precision goes to precise directional turning and firing, making it even more deadly.

The keyboard, at least with classic arrows + CTRL/ALT/SHIFT layout is a bit of a different beast: it puts forward/backwards movement and a semi-fixed turning rate at the dominant hand, and firing/strafe/run toggling at the weaker hand. Controlling Doomguy feels more like controlling a vehicle in Battlefield 1942 or a racing game, and most tactics and player behavior tend to be modified towards that direction. It's not a bad scheme, and other than the loss of fine turning and difficulty (but not impossibility) of performing circle strafing as you need to learn a special alternation maneuver by toggling the ALT key. Other than that, I can't really think of any real flaws in the scheme, and I suspect that it might actually come advantageous for certain speedruns, since turning is subject to less "noise" from mouse input.

TBQH I never tried an arrows + WASD-like scheme, so it might actually work better, although it sounds too similar to a Mode 2 RC TX ;-) ("Rudder" and "Pitch" controls on the right, "Aileron" and "Throttle" controls on the left).

Use a gamepad.

I used to use keyboard only until I started to play the game online, I found I needed the extra precision offered by the mouse setup to stay competitive. And then since most other PC games I play require mouse usage (TF2, Minecraft, etc) I just find it easier to keep the same setup throughout all my games.

To be completely honest, any time I've tried to use the mouse (which happens from time to time), I have died a terrible death.

When I was play-testing my cesspool.wad map, I could successfully beat the map with the keyboard only. I tried using a mouse and I was killed to death.

I think the advantage the keyboard-only style has is that it is much easier to align your trajectory and maneuver cramped spaces full of monsters. You sacrifice this when using a mouse for reasons I cannot explain, and the advantages that are conferred from more precise aiming with a mouse don't really outweigh the keyboard in my opinion.

The mouse is more powerful than the keyboard, but it is also more complicated to use. I'm not saying its difficult to operate a mouse, but it can be the difference between life and death when you are surrounded by 232492 monsters. Its much easier to think about what you are doing when you only need to move your fingers and not your entire hand.

That being said, I use a mouse in every other FPS. In fact, I was ranked 21st best player in the world for Battlefield 2142 a few years ago.

i HAVE to use the mouse. here's my layout.....
Move forward - w
move backward - s
strafe left - a
strafe right d
jump - e
crouch - c
use - space bar
And i use the mouse to look and aim. its works brilliantly for me, this wee layout allows superfast reaction times, try it :)

I also have Q binded as the 'freeze' command, F for 'fly', G for 'God' and X for 'noclip'. use these rarely when i just want to mess about **

I used to, back when Doom originally came out

Nowadays, mouse and keyboard for life.

I can do both depending on the situation. When I'm dooming on my laptop, my configuration is:

Keyboard setup:
WASD (forward, back, strafing)
left + right arrow keys (turning)
up arrow (fire)
E (use)
number keys (switch weapons)

and on my desktop, which actually has a mouse:

Keyboard and mouse setup:
WASD (forward, back, strafing)
Mouse 1 (fire)
Turning but no freelook. Autoaim on.
E (use)
number keys (weapons)

Not too different. Keyboarding is actually pretty easy once you learn to coordinate your WASD and arrow keys hands. Circle strafing is just as possible as it is with a mouse.

I did... when I was playing the shareware on a dying Windows 95 computer. Mouse support was there from the DOS executable (though not very well, what with vertical movement being unsuppressed), so I don't see any reason to not use it.