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illYay1337

Quake 2 Character Movement

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Hey so i recently decided to replay Quake 2. I downloaded quake2xp so I can play on Win 7 no problem and have CD audio playing by putting the music in the music folder on my hd.

Anyway I noticed the character movement is sooo off. Sometimes you move a little to the side when walking forward or backward. So I thought, wow Quake2xp is pretty shitty so I downloaded Quake2 berserker, another source port. Exactly same movement problem.

So I fired up Quake 2 in software mode since that seems to be the only way I can run vanilla quake 2 on windows 7 just to see what happens. The character speed when running feels a bit slower but other than that it's the SAME buggy movement. What the HELL!!!

Why is Quake 2's movement so weird?!?!?! Anyone else feel this? Is it my control settings? I just configured standard WASD and mouse look controls.

Now that I think about it I vaguely remember having this problem back when I played it long ago. I just kinda ignored it. I thought: "weird oh well"

To see what I'm talking about:

Basically, fire up level 1. Face the drop pod. Move over a little to the right. Turn about 20 degrees to the right. Move back and forth. Notice how you slide to the right a bit.

Also go through the glass on the side and in to the vents. Try walking back and forth down there. Notice how there are times when it feels like you slide sideways a bit when walking straight.

My first thought as a game programmer is that this is due to precision problems but not even Doom had this problem and everything was programmed with integers and not floating point types. Quake 1 doesn't seem to have this problem. How does Quake 2 have this problem?

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It might've been a design choice. In multiplayer its fun to kind of "bounce" around, like the heavy weight carries with the character thus making firefights more enjoyable. Sin is similar. I think also because the game is slower than the first Quake, I heard something about movement being "weird" with lag in MP..

In contrast, others like Daikatana and SoF had pretty tight movement compared to Quake 2.

Backing up that theory of being a design choice could simply be because Quake was rigid with player movement as it wasn't as developed. Obviously id took a tighter approach with Q3.

Have you looked in the source code at all? KMQuake II's movement is mostly identical - I'm sure you could tweak it though.

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Quake 2's player movement has always been bad. After some time you get used to it - I only played it thoroughly in multiplayer not single player.
Quake's movement in contrast is ace - feels pin point.

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LOL so in Quake 2 you walk like a drunkard? I didn't notice it when I was playing it.

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It's pretty weird how consistent it is. It's like if I stand in a certain spot on the map and move a certain way I will always veer off sideways a little.

I guess if this is intentional then I'll just play and not worry about it heh. I was really put off at first spending hours looking for the proper source port. I'd gladly play in vanilla quake 2 without all the crazy graphical improvements if I could just get CD music working without the disk in the drive like I can with quake2xp...

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I've never noticed anything like you're describing. I play vanilla; works fine on modern hardware as long as you limit the OpenGL extensions passed to the exe (modern cards support so many that it overflows).

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Heh, I've been working (on and off, mostly off) on my own Quake2 source port for a long time and never noticed this, but it is definitely there.

Looks like movements are slightly biased towards the (-1, -1) vector. If you turn around and do the test, you veer to the left instead of the right, and if facing certain angles (135 degrees : check with viewpos command) the effect seems to disappear.

Perhaps it can be explained by the server rounding down the player movement vectors towards infinity instead of rounding them towards zero.

P.S. this would not have been intentional.

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andrewj said:

Heh, I've been working (on and off, mostly off) on my own Quake2 source port for a long time and never noticed this, but it is definitely there.

Looks like movements are slightly biased towards the (-1, -1) vector. If you turn around and do the test, you veer to the left instead of the right, and if facing certain angles (135 degrees : check with viewpos command) the effect seems to disappear.

Perhaps it can be explained by the server rounding down the player movement vectors towards infinity instead of rounding them towards zero.

P.S. this would not have been intentional.


Interesting - which changes have you made + which direction is your stuff headed?

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_bruce_ said:

Interesting - which changes have you made + which direction is your stuff headed?

It has been on the back-burner for a long time.

It's mainly a Linux port, using SDL (can make Windows binaries with a cross-compiler though). Kinda like ioquake3, but I'm not that serious. The most significant thing I've done is probably the 32-bit software renderer. I have also converted the code to C++, statically link the game and rendering code, fixed the gamma handling.

In-progress things are: new sound code and colored lighting in the 8-bit renderer.

Wishlist stuff are: ensuring CD music works, OGG/Vorbis support, MD3 and MDL model support, and a split-screen mode. Oh yeah, a decent scripting language (and porting all the game logic to it).

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I've never noticed anything weird. To me, Quake 2 is the essential deathmatch, since it's the first I played and the one I've pretty much played the most of. It seems just fine to me, and most good deathmatch games seem to play a lot like it, so I dunno.

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andrewj said:

It has been on the back-burner for a long time.

It's mainly a Linux port, using SDL (can make Windows binaries with a cross-compiler though). Kinda like ioquake3, but I'm not that serious. The most significant thing I've done is probably the 32-bit software renderer. I have also converted the code to C++, statically link the game and rendering code, fixed the gamma handling.

In-progress things are: new sound code and colored lighting in the 8-bit renderer.

Wishlist stuff are: ensuring CD music works, OGG/Vorbis support, MD3 and MDL model support, and a split-screen mode. Oh yeah, a decent scripting language (and porting all the game logic to it).


Sounds swell!

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I played the hell out of Quake 2 and the mission packs and every SP map I could find back in the day and have never noticed any of this weirdness. [edit] Then later on my ISP actually ran a Quake 2 server so I played a quite bit of DM for a change and that wasn't weird either. :p

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Found this thread while getting the same odd behavior in Kingpin, which uses the Quake 2 engine. Does anyone know more about this bug because I'm unable to try adn fix it using a sourceport as one doesn't exist for Kingpin.

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On 11/9/2011 at 2:38 AM, andrewj said:

Perhaps it can be explained by the server rounding down the player movement vectors towards infinity instead of rounding them towards zero.

P.S. this would not have been intentional.

This is what I heard about this weird phenomenon. How bad it happens seems linked to fps. A player was explaining the only way to walk a perfectly straight line in Quake 2 is when facing the "point zero" of the map. He's looking for it here (33:45): 

 

Here's a post from the video's dude with some more Quake 2 weirdness.

 

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Quake II character movement, in a nutshell:

 

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

HUUH

 

(That said, interesting about the "sliding." I hadn't noticed that before.)

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Yeah, huuh-huuh all the way and you soon will get used to it! To me the Q2 movement feels smooth and dynamic.

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This is why I've always wanted to play the first two Quake campaigns in the Quake 3 engine as the movement/control is far superior.

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6 hours ago, Kills Alone said:

This is why I've always wanted to play the first two Quake campaigns in the Quake 3 engine as the movement/control is far superior.

Quake 2 I can see it (though double jumping on ledges is fun) but Quake 1 I would love a "Quakeworld physics mode" in sourceports like Quakespasm. We could have very exotic SP maps if it happened.

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6 hours ago, Kira said:

Quake 2 I can see it (though double jumping on ledges is fun) but Quake 1 I would love a "Quakeworld physics mode" in sourceports like Quakespasm. We could have very exotic SP maps if it happened.

Yeah i agree that Quake 1 feels great (if that is what you are saying). Quake 2 feels different, although the gameplay is slower paced compared to Quake 1 imo. Still tolerable, or at least it was the last time i played it. Quake III is great as well :)

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Quake 2's movement is pretty solid. Though I still liked quake 3's movement more

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47 minutes ago, CyberDreams said:

Yeah i agree that Quake 1 feels great (if that is what you are saying).

Well I meant vanilla SP and Quakeworld play differently. The latter has less friction on the ground which allows the insane speed + air control we see on multiplayer footage (and some speedruns?). As a result most players will never do anything too crazy when playing against monsters except maybe a short sprint to cross an intersection or something. A few QW physics SP maps would allow for a fun niche of difficult content I think.

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17 hours ago, Kira said:

Well I meant vanilla SP and Quakeworld play differently. The latter has less friction on the ground which allows the insane speed + air control we see on multiplayer footage (and some speedruns?). As a result most players will never do anything too crazy when playing against monsters except maybe a short sprint to cross an intersection or something. A few QW physics SP maps would allow for a fun niche of difficult content I think.

Yeah true. I also read that NetQuake and Quakeworld feel different as well. I've only played multiplayer against bot's that i setup myself in QuakeSpasm so i have no idea what that would be considered (possibly NetQuake code?). I can't even remember what bot i used haha! They were fast as shit though!

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@CyberDreams Maybe these were the frog bots. They are quite impressive. QuakeSpasm has an optional logic for something QW similar I think (just the behavior when you combine some keys, I don't remember the specifics), but not the whole thing I reckon. So maybe you were at a disadvantage against them :P

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