id hacked their own game?

[Maes]

When watching the built-in demos, I always wondered how the player managed to turn so quickly (I was a keyboarder for several reasons, don't ask). I figured it had to do with using a mouse, but because I hadn't thought about single-handedly inventing the WASD config in 1994 and couldn't play with arrows + mouse, I just forgot about it.

Ever since I discovered mouse gameplay several years after, there was no going back (again, for several reasons there was a period where I played other FPS with WASD + mouse but Doom I played with the standard key mappings, don't ask me why).

In any case, because I recently set up a vanilla DOS box, I noticed that the maximum mouse sensibility selectable from the menu was not enough to achieve those extreme turning rates seen in vanilla demos, so I hacked the config file to exceed it.

It worked, but does that mean that id too used hacked default.cfg files for their built-in demos? Didn't they just think of increasing the sensitivity range in the game menu itself since they must have caught this shortcoming back in the 0.99 versions?

Or did they use other methods? (mouse driver tweaks etc.)

[Coopersville]

I recently set up a vanilla DOS box, I noticed that the maximum mouse sensibility selectable from the menu was not enough to achieve those extreme turning rates seen in vanilla demos

Are you using a laser mouse? I find analog mice were a lot more sensitive.

[Maes]

Coopersville said:

Are you using a laser mouse? I find analog mice were a lot more sensitive.

Optomechanical ones, you mean ;-) They are still as digital as any other type.

In any case, yeah, I tried several different types, including three different ball mice, an MS optical mouse and a laser mouse. Without overflowing mouse sensitivity, none of them turns any faster than keyboard turning.

I do recall though that certain mouse drivers had a "virtual acceleration" mode, e.g. response was made non-linear by the mouse driver itself and the more you moved in one direction, the driver made the response artificially faster. All of the mice I tried (with the same DOS mouse driver) gave perfectly linear response though.

[Gez]

Maes said:

Optomechanical ones, you mean ;-) They are still as digital as any other type.

The page you cite talks about analog mice that used potentiometers and could be plugged in a joystick port.

But other than those, yeah, all mice are digital.

[Maes]

Gez said:

The page you cite talks about analog mice that used potentiometers and could be plugged in a joystick port.

I doubt you could use those as an everyday mouse replacement on an IBM-PC though ;-)

Either way, it seems id demos were either recorded with mouse sensitivity hacks, or with "accelerated" mouse drivers (I recall these were a bitch to control though, as turning was non-linear and could go from a crawl to an involuntary, instantaneous 180).

[Xeriphas1994]

Maes said:

since they must have caught this shortcoming back in the 0.99 versions

Are you sure?  They didn't notice straferunning at that time either.

[Maes]

Yeah, but that doesn't really enter into the mouse sensitivity issue. Or at least I don't see how it could.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Mice and also their drivers are very different in their resolution. I think, if id had encountered any resolution issues, they certainly would have changed the slider to support a wider range. Unfortunately, they didn't.

[Xeriphas1994]

Maes said:

Yeah, but that doesn't really enter into the mouse sensitivity issue. Or at least I don't see how it could.

It's not related in a technical way, no.  The general point is, people assume for some reason that the id programmers were highly skilled players who pushed the controls to their limits (as the COMPET-N players did).  But we have no way of knowing that, and maybe they weren't.

[myk]

Well, quirks like strafe running need time to be discovered or tested. The id guys were likely editing the CFG before the game was finished and Romero, at least, was actually quite an intensive player.

We could ask Romero, as he recorded the demos. He might remember whether he had some mouse driver that gave greater flexibility or whether he simply used a higher value in his CFG. It's also possible that they knew that on DOS the sensitivity would be rather low on most drivers or their default settings but decided that would balance the mouse somewhat in respect to keyboard movement.

In Windows 98, the default serial mouse driver gives the mouse in DOS a degree of acceleration which makes sensitivity 9 a suitable setting if you can get used to the acceleration, as a 180° turn can be done easily with a mere flick of the wrist.

[RestlessRodent]

Whenever I played EXE (on DOS and 98), the mouse drivers gave me a good turn rate.

[Pirx]

perhaps they thought that writing a mouse sens number in the config was easier than changing the menu (which crashed iirc if the sens slider went outside the screen)? or they thought that lower sens is enough - not necessarily correct for such a fast game, especially in dm. generally it seems that people use to have a higher sens on average back then than now, with slower pixel shooting games not requiring fast flick shots.

[myk]

Torr Samaho said:
perhaps they thought that writing a mouse sens number in the config was easier than changing the menu (which crashed iirc if the sens slider went outside the screen)?

At least they would have added a note in the manual indicating this option and made it bugless. A high sensitivity will also push the sensitivity lever to the right of the slot (which looks glitchy) and, as you note, if the lever is drawn off the screen Doom closes with an error.

[ReFracture]

Whenever I find myself playing Vanilla doom it's usually through dosbox running novert.com and my sensitivity is at '30' which is good enough for me and a low enough value for it not to crash if you open the options menu.