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Der_Kaiser

Look up to the skies and see...

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Let's talk about freelook.

Obviously you could not look up or down in the original DOOM, and even though the game works perfectly fine without the "mouse freelook" I do remember thinking about that the first time I played Doom. Of course, I had not played any FPS at the time (not even W3D) so I wasn't naturally picky about the fact that you couldn't look up or down. However, I remember asking my brother how to shoot the imp standing on a ledge in that room with nukage and a zig-zag bridge in E1M1. The answer, of course, was autoaim...

Anyway, this has got me thinking... when was the first time people started using freelook on Doom? Did the original exes allow that somehow?


How do YOU play Doom? Do you like making maps that require looking up or down or do you stick to vanilla standards?

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Der_Kaiser said:

Did the original exes allow that somehow?


In a way heretic and hexen had free look and (i think) were on the same engine as doom.

I play doom with free look in gzdoom.

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Sometimes I play maps without freelook and I'm good with it. But with mods,I use freelook,because autoaim is often disabled. Also,is good sometimes change game style. I don't lock myself with Doom restrictions.

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MinerOfWorlds said:

In a way heretic and hexen had free look


Yeah of course they did! I haven't played any of them in years, but how could I forget those annoying flying red monsters?

MysteriousHaruko said:

Sometimes I play maps without freelook and I'm good with it. But with mods,I use freelook,because autoaim is often disabled. Also,is good sometimes change game style. I don't lock myself with Doom restrictions.


I agree, especially when it comes to mods.

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Something I was never really able to get over was that stretched skies always looked like shit in software so I always turned it off, and I never liked the spherical skies in OpenGL with the solid color fog on the north and south poles. I also didn't like the distorting of sprites when you look or down at them. So even though mouselook was an option, I always made a conscious effort to avoid having to look too high or too low so as not to compromise my visual experience. Its like seeing the puppeteers hands controlling the puppet. Pretty ridiculous I know, but I don't really like things that draw attention to Dooms flaws as a cost for cross-game comfort. I think the only way to permit mouse looking in Doom is to replace all the things that assume you wont be using it. Like replacing the sprites with 3D models or with vertical angled sprites and using skyboxes, and that's just too much tampering with the game for me.

So no mouselooking for me.

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I prefer playing without mouselook. Even with the modern source ports I just don't like how Doom looks or feels with mouselook. If I wanted to play a game built with mouselook in mind, I'd go back and play Quake 2 or the original Half-Life.

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I play a lot of other (modern) FPS games but in Doom I never missed mouselook and it felt weird whenever I tried it.
Also in general I don't like using any features or mods that change the gameplay / balance of a WAD and were not intended to be used with it.

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40oz said:

Something I was never really able to get over was that stretched skies always looked like shit in software so I always turned it off, and I never liked the spherical skies in OpenGL with the solid color fog on the north and south poles. I also didn't like the distorting of sprites when you look or down at them. So even though mouselook was an option, I always made a conscious effort to avoid having to look too high or too low so as not to compromise my visual experience. Its like seeing the puppeteers hands controlling the puppet. Pretty ridiculous I know, but I don't really like things that draw attention to Dooms flaws as a cost for cross-game comfort. I think the only way to permit mouse looking in Doom is to replace all the things that assume you wont be using it. Like replacing the sprites with 3D models or with vertical angled sprites and using skyboxes, and that's just too much tampering with the game for me.

So no mouselooking for me.


I pretty much agree 100%. Looking up and down in Doom basically negatively effects the original graphics in some way, which breaks my immersion into the game. So yeah, I only use mouse for turning.

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And here I thought this would be a Queen wad.

I usually just use mouselook, since I don't trust that autoaim will not screw me over when an enemy is on a steep flight of stairs.

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Jaxxoon R said:

I usually just use mouselook, since I don't trust that autoaim will not screw me over when an enemy is on a steep flight of stairs.


I try to play without mouselook these days unless a weapons/gameplay mod demands it. There is something of an advantage vs. disadvantage when using autoaim, the former is that you never have to readjust your view to deal with enemies on high or low planes, allowing you to focus solely on movement. The latter however means that depending on how low/high or far away an enemy is the autoaim isn't guaranteed to perform every time flawlessly and you'll be in unfair circumstances where the enemy has a definite advantage over you because you cannot see them enough to allow autoaim to target properly.

Turning mouselook on removes the latter problem but also requires more hand to eye coordination in the heat of battle, of which if they're very heavy could compromise movement options if precise aiming is necessary to deal with difficult, out of normal effective range targets. It complicates the simple movement and function of Doom, and you can tell it was never designed around it, so long as you could see a monster you could shoot it (usually). And then there's the obvious problems with skewed sprites and bizarre sky boxes (or a lack thereof).

I will say, the largest freelook has for an advantage is being able to see exactly where you are going below you, as the lack of mouselook can make precise landing on low platforms more difficult without the assistance of an automap (or a few loaded savegames).

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40oz said:

Something I was never really able to get over was that stretched skies always looked like shit in software so I always turned it off, and I never liked the spherical skies in OpenGL with the solid color fog on the north and south poles. I also didn't like the distorting of sprites when you look or down at them. So even though mouselook was an option, I always made a conscious effort to avoid having to look too high or too low so as not to compromise my visual experience. Its like seeing the puppeteers hands controlling the puppet. Pretty ridiculous I know, but I don't really like things that draw attention to Dooms flaws as a cost for cross-game comfort. I think the only way to permit mouse looking in Doom is to replace all the things that assume you wont be using it. Like replacing the sprites with 3D models or with vertical angled sprites and using skyboxes, and that's just too much tampering with the game for me.

So no mouselooking for me.

You can set billboarding to XY. This causes sprites to look the same to you, no matter the pitch. And monsters look fine to me this way: they look like they're bending back to watch me. Cacodemons and projectiles definitely look better with XY billboarding. About the only thing that's less salvageable is the column-like decoration. But that's just decoration.

I really wish someone would make top-view rotations for sprites. I long had the misconception Doom has them...

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I generally prefer using mouselook for a variety of reasons:

-I like having a little more freedom for movement in general than to be limited to turning my view left or right only.
-I like exploring the architecture of a map. This, of course, depends a lot on how detailed such map is to begin with.
-I make strategies based on platforms and monsters I see above or under me, and that helps me out a lot when I decide where to land as I generally dislike landing on top of a monster. This isn't Wolfenstein 3D, anyways.
-I generally don't mind the circular skyboxes or skewed sprites, since most of the time I don't aim up or down too much for me to even notice. In the case of skyboxes, many maps aren't even open, and some just have a single window, so I can't see much.
-I prefer practicing my aim for online games with Doom. This is also why I turn off autoaim.

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I get used to mouselook thanks to Quake, and since it I couldn't play Doom without, so I used Legacy and then Zdoom for this.

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Due to the 2D sprites, mouselook in Doom makes the game look terrible and unimmersive. Tried it once and the first ledge I came to convinced me, that they had a reason for not making mouselook default. Generally, any game that uses 2D assets is painful to watch when someone uses mouselook. The only exception to this was Z.A.R., which I think not many people know about. It is the oldest 2.5D FPS where mouselook makes sense and is actually needed. The occasional use of PageUp and PageDown in Heretic, Hexen, Duke3D and such cover all your needs when manually aiming at long distances. Keyboard with autoaim is completely sufficient and adequate for playing those games and it "feels" better.

Using mouse is for completely 3D games like Quake or Unreal, not sprites.

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To my understanding, ZDoom was among the first source ports to implement mouselook. Not sure if it was the first, though.

I like to play Doom both ways, depending on how vanilla I want my experience to be at any given time. Generally I'll have mouselook enabled on any port that supports it, but then, pretty much the only ports I use for playing are Chocolate Doom and (G)Zdoom. And as has been said above, a lot of ZDoom-based gameplay mods disable autoaim, so mouselook is essentially a must with them.

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Mouselook, yeah.

Freelook, no. It makes the game so much harder for me, as if it was never meant to be played with looking up or down. It's fine for Quake and other 3D FPS games, but not Doom. Sprites don't look "realistic" anymore because now you see them as they truly are: flat images. But occasionally I turn it on for stuff like looking down to the place where I should jump to and looking up at something big. Other than that, mouselook always, freelook when needed.

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I like to user some limited mouselook (zdoom). It's a pain in the ass sometimes to rely in the autoaim to try to kill that sniper at 23476 meters away

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"I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy..."

All freelook, all the time. Hate not being able to look around and see the wonderful architecture some people can come up with

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I play Doom without freelook, because I think it breaks the immersion and is not as pretty as only moving horizontally the mouse, like many of you guys already said.

The only occasion I use freelook in, is when I play a new map that requires it or with some gameplay mods like Brutal Doom due to the damage variations from body part to body part. Generally, I prefer vanilla.

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I think some people have too high standards when it comes to sprites, they always look like cardboard cutouts no matter how you view them, they are flat through and through and you can tell that even when you aren't looking at their edges from above/below.

However when looking at the sky, and sometimes the walls then yeah, I do agree a little there and it can look a bit funny but even then it is only minor.

I play with mouse and free look, as others have said I like to be free in movement and it just makes the gameplay more fluid.

They made the game very customisable, and I like how this is one of them. To me because of that, there is no "Meant to be played" in any way other than how you want, so play with or without....That's part of it's versatility.

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Xegethra said:

I think some people have too high standards when it comes to sprites, they always look like cardboard cutouts no matter how you view them, they are flat through and through and you can tell that even when you aren't looking at their edges from above/below.

But looking at them from above/below makes it much worse.

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Not that much though, I think people over play it. While it would be nice to have top/bottom sprites, it's not that game breaking otherwise.

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Well, to me, the Zombiemen in the 2nd picture definitely look MUCH worse than the Zombiemen in the 1st picture.

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MFG38 said:

To my understanding, ZDoom was among the first source ports to implement mouselook. Not sure if it was the first, though.

No, I don't think so. Mouselook and jumping were two features that everyone seemed to immediately want to implement in Doom from day one of the source release. DOSDoom was the first port released and I think it had mouselook pretty early on. The fact that Boom didn't have either feature in April of 1998 was somewhat controversial (ah, the old days of Doom purist arguments).

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scifista42 said:

Well, to me, the Zombiemen in the 2nd picture definitely look MUCH worse than the Zombiemen in the 1st picture.


And in real gameplay it is only brief and not really that much of an impact. I know people want them to look as good as they always can, I'd like them to look better at such angles too but ima take gameplay over graphics on this one, it is only a minor wobble in the looks.

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You are arguing over something that is a matter of taste. For you and some people it's fine. For others it's a total dealbreaker, no matter how brief. What more can be said about it.

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I remember very clearly the first time I discovered freelook. I was playing Doom Legacy and was combing through the options (I was about 10 at the time I think) and saw mouse freelook.

I distinctly remember turning it on, and gingerly reaching out and pushing the mouse forward just an inch. I actually jumped up and down in amazement and joy when the view shifted upwards.

I was so excited I ran into the kitchen to tell my mother, who naturally had absolutely no idea what I was talking about or why this changed EVERYTHING, but she was a good sport.

To say it was revelatory was an understatement. I'd played Doom for years dreaming of what it'd be like to look up and down, and suddenly here it was. I didn't give two hoots if the sprites didn't look that good or the view warped, it was just so freeing.

So suffice to say, I generally play with freelook!

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rdwpa said:

You are arguing over something that is a matter of taste. For you and some people it's fine. For others it's a total dealbreaker, no matter how brief. What more can be said about it.



Yeah I know, but that is what these topics are for, to exchange how we feel on it.

I'm not trying to change anybodies mind, they can play how they want. We all do at the end of the day.

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