Freelook improvements

[Talon1024]

Currently, freelook seems to be constrained to 45 degrees up or down, and some slight Y-shearing is noticeable.

Also, it seems like looking up and down is far more sensitive than looking left or right.

[Graf Zahl]

Don't expect any quick results here. Build's pitching is totally different than what ZDoom implemented. It only shifts the horizon line up and down. This has two implications:

1) You cannot look up and down 90° because that'd result in an infinitely distant horizon line.
2) the math to calculate pitching is not intuitive.

This would have to be changed in all games and in parts of the engine itself. So don't expect any quick results here.
For the mouse sensitivity, for now you should change the vertical setting to better suit your needs. I really hope I can get this stuff refactored to using a real pitch but I have no idea how much code depends on it - with EDuke you surely can expect that it was exported to scripting as-is, in which case we are stuck.

[Kinsie]

Here's a good illustration of some of the issues apparent, from a BUILD-knowledgable dude on the ZDF Discord:

In Duke3D, there's this thing where if you're shooting a projectile like a rocket, then its ground speed (basically its motion in a 2D plane as observed from top-down view) will always be the same, regardless of the vertical component of its velocity.

This means that if you could get as close as possible to looking fully up/down in Duke3D, then the closer that this is done while shooting a rocket, the closer the rocket's speed would be to infinity.

[Graf Zahl]

So it does work exactly the same as Doom does here. Only ZDoom changed projectile velocity to properly factor in the pitch.

[Kinsie]

Yeah, Gutawer mentioned it's similar to vanilla Doom handling. So, not an unsolved problem but it probably takes a bit of messing around.

[Graf Zahl]

Definitely. This is something that goes deep into the engine logic so it must be handled very carefully.

[Phredreeke]

This is what comes to my mind whenever the subject of "uncapping" freelook comes up.



(note: I'm not against what is being suggested, I just find it odd...)

[Enjay]

Are you saying that people can't look straight up like that?

Also, given that the weapon stays in the HUD view, the external representation would look even weirder (bent backwards by 90 degrees at the waist or something).

[Graf Zahl]

Those who try to bring too much realism to their games will always lose.

[sinisterseed]

That screenshot is pretty funny for some reason :v .

I'm also looking forward to this feature, like, a lot. The view limits are pretty annoying, in a Software renderer not so much but since we don't support that anyway... + better sky rendering, this Y-shearing effect is some of the worst I've experienced compared to what's done in the Doom engine, in large open areas looking up/down feels like the sky is actually moving instead of my view.

[Graf Zahl]

All in good time - but please be patient.

[sinisterseed]

Never said I'm not .

[PlayerLin]

I did remembered some very, very old version of EDuke32(well, I can't really sure, that was very long time ago) didn't limit the angle of player can look, and the result was if player look up and down on 90 degrees, then shooting rockets, they'll go horizontally...no, it's BAD.
(Not to say the very ugly y-shearing and other texture problems...)

If no side effects exists, I would like see fully freelook feature.

[Graf Zahl]

Yeah, me, too - but this will require some quite extensive changes, and I am not sure that there isn't some scripting hook that works against it.

[drfrag]

Are you saying that people can't look straight up like that?

If you want to see something fun try DOOM BFA, there's no freelook limit and it's software. It's like you do a backflip and you can do it forward too, there's some graphics corruption but it's fun and some flats are corrupted even without freelook. Also funny that if you change the graphics settings you get a message saying you must restart the game or else it would crash, but it's too late to go back or save the game.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/classic-rbdo ... ic-edition