Look up to the skies and see...

[Der_Kaiser]

Jaxxoon R said:

And here I thought this would be a Queen wad.

LOL That would have been awesome!


It's pretty cool to read everyone's reasons/stories as to why you use or don't use freelook. It's funny because I can empathize both with 40oz who said it was like "like seeing the puppeteers hands", and with Bauul's story because it also felt so freeing the very first time I discovered freelook.

Doom is such a versatile game, it's like the gift that keeps on giving. Like that other thread about playing Doom 4:3 or 16:9; with or without hud, freelook, classic look... No doubt one of the very best video game creations of all time.

[MFG38]

david_a said:

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.

Alright, my mistake then.

[Graf Zahl]

For me the matter is very simple:

If I had to play Doom with all those limitations in place I wouldn't play it anymore.
Autoaim is just crap, I want to shoot what I aim at!

[Da Werecat]

I actually use freelook with no autoaim in GZDoom, it's just that it comes with a price.

[SaladBadger]

I dunno why, but I'm just not that used to mouselook in doom. Its perfectly fine for me in every other FPS I like playing, but it just doesn't feel right in doom for whatever reason. I do use it when playing fancier ZDoom mods, though. I've gotten re-used to the quirks of autoaim at this point.

[Koko Ricky]

I always use mouselook because I enjoy precision aiming. Yes, some things are visually compromised, especially the skies, but it's not a big deal. I find it satisfying to aim.

[Spectre01]

I use free-look + smart autoaim that ignores barrels in GZDoom for all the reasons people have stated. If I play in GLBoom+, I'll use cosmetic vertical aim but stick to the standard autoaim mechanics because that's how it works for demo recording.

[Nevander]

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.

But what if the map uses skyboxes and thus looking up actually looks good?

[kb1]

scifista42 said:

http://i.imgur.com/VgbD92E.png

http://i.imgur.com/GLpwyvc.png

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

That's a GL rendering bug. In software the sprites don't change angle like that. The GL engine should apply a reverse angle to the sprites to correct that issue. Think about Heretic - it looks fine with freelook.

[MinerOfWorlds]

kb1 said:

That's a GL rendering bug. In software the sprites don't change angle like that. The GL engine should apply a reverse angle to the sprites to correct that issue. Think about Heretic - it looks fine with freelook.

Gzdoom does have that but you have to turn it on.

[Arctangent]

kb1 said:

That's a GL rendering bug.

what

[printz]

Arctangent said:

what

Well, pretty much it's a hard to solve limitation of the things that be. We really should play Doom 3 or the newest Doom instead of trying to look like them with all this GL rendering.

[Arctangent]

printz said:

Well, pretty much it's a hard to solve limitation of the things that be.

what

printz said:

We really should play Doom 3 or the newest Doom instead of trying to look like them with all this GL rendering.

what

[Deleted_Account]

Who?

[Master O]

Look up to the skies and seeeee...
I'm just a poor boyyyyy...
I need no sympathy...
because I'm easy come, easy go...
little high, little low...

Anyway the wind blows doesn't really matter to meeeeee...
to meeeeeeeeee

---

Wait, wrong thread. ;)

[Doomkid]

Arctangent said:

what

I think bug was the wrong word to use since, well, it's not a bug.. That said though, it's strange that the "looks most like the source material" option isn't enabled by default. I'm always seeing new Doomers playing through wads on youtube and everything looks like a cardboard cut-out sinking into the ground, far more so than with billboarding and sprite clipping adjusted, anyway.

[Arctangent]

It's probably because neither of them are really excellent choices, and having y-billboarding disabled helps reaffirm what pitch you're looking at.

The only real solution to it is to use models, which have their own share of problems anyway.

[printz]

Why hasn't anyone made 3D models which really look like the sprites? I can totally see the Cyberdemon being based on a 3D model that was snapshot at key frames. Why not try to reproduce that model?

[Bauul]

printz said:

Why hasn't anyone made 3D models which really look like the sprites? I can totally see the Cyberdemon being based on a 3D model that was snapshot at key frames. Why not try to reproduce that model?

Better than models would be voxels. Whatever happened to that voxel project from a few years back?

[Doomkid]

Arctangent said:

It's probably because neither of them are really excellent choices, and having y-billboarding disabled helps reaffirm what pitch you're looking at.

It makes everything look paper thin in a horrible way, to my eyes at least - it seems to further age the game's appearance in an artificial way. Enabling Y billboarding makes it essentially look the same as it does in software with freelook enabled. Not perfect, but definitely less paper thin. That's just my take on it though.

[Da Werecat]

Voxels are hard to animate, and, to be honest, they look much chunkier than sprites.

printz said:

Why hasn't anyone made 3D models which really look like the sprites?

I don't believe you can achieve 100% authenticity, but I guess you can go close enough. Whether it's a good thing is another story. Besides, the way Doom animates its actors is pretty bad for models.

Doomkid said:

I think bug was the wrong word to use since, well, it's not a bug.. That said though, it's strange that the "looks most like the source material" option isn't enabled by default.

When you look down and monsters all look like they decided to take a nap isn't that much better. I really didn't like this in Powerslave EX.

[Magnusblitz]

I play with mouselook and full freelook, with autoaim turned off. Just too much time spent playing other FPSes and getting used to that control scheme to suddenly switch back to keyboard or no freelook.

I do agree that having the sprites stay 'true' makes them look paper-thin and terrible, so like printz I simply use the Y billboarding and keep them always 'right side forward'. It looks fine 99% of the time, honestly - Doom gameplay-wise is still a mostly horizontal game, so I'm not looking up or down more than a few degrees that often. The only thing that really becomes problematic is trying to hit monsters far below you, especially if they're revenants and their sprites are taller than their actual hitbox - gotta remember to aim at their knees. And sometimes really tall sprites like the tech pillars can look a little weird depending on placement.

Really the only problem is the skies... either you have to turn on stretch skies (which means you often don't get to see half the sky) or you get bad tiling problems.

[Gez]

scifista42 said:

http://i.imgur.com/VgbD92E.png

http://i.imgur.com/GLpwyvc.png

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

Yeah, but that angle is quite extreme.


I like mouselook because it allows to have a better look at complex architectural details.

[roadworx]

i used to play with freelook on, but i dunno...eventually i just kinda switched over to not having it on. i just like it more that way, fore some reason.

[Maes]

printz said:

Why hasn't anyone made 3D models which really look like the sprites? I can totally see the Cyberdemon being based on a 3D model that was snapshot at key frames. Why not try to reproduce that model?

What about Doom Ascension? They are pretty damn close IMO.

But modeling and animating 10 different monsters (20 if you go Doom II ) is too much of a task for 1-person teams, as all those who have attempted it learned the hard way. And Doom Ascension is easily the best of them, having gone at least as far as having the basic Zombies and the Imp (maybe the Demon, too?). The problem is, once you have made those...what engine will support them? I think Ascension was targeted at the Doomsday Engine, but as that port was never big to begin with, and is even less relevant today, the future/purpose/motivation for continuing it are all questionable. So unless those models become re-usable for GZDoom or something, they are pretty much useless.

Without doubt, someone else somewhere else will start his 3D modelling attempt from scratch, and the first model will doubtlessly be the Imp, once again. It's really sad seeing all this hard work simply getting forgotten, resetted and starting from square zero again and again.

[snapshot]

I prefer mouselook, I can't stand not being able to see what's under my view.

[Da Werecat]

Maes said:

What about Doom Ascension? They are pretty damn close IMO.

Since the website is dead, I can't consult the screenshots anymore, but at the time I was under the impression that Ascension models were closer to "good" than they were to "faithful". Which I'm not sure is a one-dimensional scale, but sometimes I feel like it is.

[hex11]

I never wanted freelook, but some wads have annoyances like chaingunners or revenants perched on a high ledge that you have to take out somehow because they're controlling the area you need to pass through. If you're unlucky, the autoaim can result in your rockets just slaming into the wall, instead of hitting the desired target. I guess something like they added in Heretic would have helped to influence the autoaim so it's more accurate. Probably it could have been done for Doom 2, or at least Final Doom.
Anyway I just play Doom the vanilla way, and if I want full 3D then I play Quake.

[42PercentHealth]

I use single-axis mouselook in ZDoom. I used to use freelook, but I mostly play vanilla-style WADs from yesteryear. Some of these become too easy to "cheese" if mouselook is enabled, and I'd rather complete the challenge the way the author intended it to be completed.

 

However, I have no objection to running over monsters' heads if I become cornered. So I acknowledge that I am a hypocrite.

[Csonicgo]

My problem with "mouse look" is that using the "mouse at all in doom = mouse looking always" to a majority of people, including many weapons modders. Using the mouse doesn't always mean I'm using it with +mlook activated. and for some reason, a lot of weapons mods have "recoil" that breaks horribly on my mouse setup, simply because I don't use mouselook all the time. I did lash out at some mods for doing this, and honestly it really is a bad feature.