What's the story behind ZDoom's autoaim options?

[Phml]

Autoaim page on ZDoom wiki

Toggling autoaim on and off makes sense in a port with full mouselook. The intermediate options are a bit strange.

First, the wording itself (ranging from "always" to "never") can give you the impression alternate choices are about frequency rather than angle. At least *I* was under this misconception. "Max" to "off" would be more obvious.

Then you have the values themselves. Going from 35° to 3° right away on "very high", all options end up in a narrow range.

Is there even a point in having, say, 1° of autoaim? Unless I'm missing something, that's about a few pixels even at long range.

Does anyone play with intermediate levels of autoaim?

Lots of oddities there. Kinda curious about the history behind this particular feature.

[printz]

Partial autoaim makes sense when you play only with the keyboard and looking up/down would be harder to do than with the mouse. Some other games also have partial autoaim.

[plums]

I play with "medium" autoaim, mainly because in Heretic and Hexen some weapons work poorly with no autoaim, but I still like to be able to generally aim my shots with mouselook. I haven't experimented with the other intermediate options, I just picked medium because it sounded like a good compromise and seems to work fine.

[Gez]

As far as I can tell, ZDoom autoaim does not make sense.


Developers declined to comment, so, whatever.

[plums]

Huh, you're right. The morph ovum in heretic is one of the things that autoaim is good for, because it will send the egg shots towards enemies. But at low autoaim, it shoots them in an even spread, just like with no autoaim.

[Phml]

Thanks Gez. Really strange stuff.

The lack of autoaim for railguns has been puzzling me as well. A search for this brings up a few topics with answers along the line of the Skulltag railgun specifically being too powerful with autoaim. To me it seems like the power of a weapon should have no relevance in determining additional features for the generic function it happens to use, especially if that design is inconsistent with everything else.

I could see the argument that shots piercing through enemies breaks normal Doom rules anyway, but I'm having a harder time getting the logic behind walling off a type of weapon for keyboard users, when everything else in the port allows for keyboard only.

[dew]

Railgun is a newschool weapon surely intended to be used with mouselook. It'd be OP as hell with autoaim, so porting a Quake weapon into Doom and then ruining it with vanilla Doom's weirdo behaviour would defeat the purpose and keyboarders were sacrificed. It's not the only weapon-specific hack, BFG cannot be aimed vertically for sanity's sake.

[Phml]

"OP as hell with autoaim"

But what does this apply to? Multiplayer specifically, and (as far as I can tell) the Skulltag railgun specifically.

My custom weapon or any of the potentially infinite amount of custom weapons using the railgun function are not necessarily as strong as the Skulltag railgun; and even if they happen to be, monsters don't care about the player being overpowered (thankfully, otherwise the BFG would be gone before the railgun).

I don't think autoaim on a railgun is even that useful against monsters. Ideally you want to hit as many targets as possible in one shot, often that ideal trajectory takes a vector that doesn't quite hit either of the monsters where autoaim would aim (i.e. you're hitting the head of a monster at close range and the feet of a monster on a higher platform), so mouselook remains more efficient. But if you're a keyboard user you don't have a mouse, and on top of that you don't even get autoaim. Double whammy.

There's a compatibility option to disable BFG aiming, but by default you can aim the BFG vertically in ZDoom.

[Danfun64]

Phml said:

...(I)f you're a keyboard user you don't have a mouse...

I wonder how you made that generalization? Aren't there people who have mice yet prefer using the keyboard?

[Gez]

It's more that if you're used to playing keyboard only, then having to move your hand to a mouse to aim one gun is very cumbersome.

Or you can use the look-up, look-down keys but it's kind of slow to do that to aim vertically. Certainly not applicable in fast-paced combat like deathmatch.

[Phml]

I meant it as "if you're playing keyboard only, you don't have the option of mouselook".

[dew]

It might make sense to have a compatability (with what? heh) option for the railgun, I guess, but just enabling it all around sounds like a bad idea to me.

I also wish there was an easy way to switch off autoaim just for the RL. Nothing beats autoaim stealing focus when shooting rockets. All the bind setups I've seen were scary and easily breakable scripts.