Freelook improvements

[Fox666]

You can't do it without changing gameplay logic.

Projectiles fired upwards only have vertical velocity added, meaning the horizontal velocity is always the same. As a result, if you fire upwards, the projectiles would have infinite velocity.

You can already see this with enemies. If you fly above the final boss in Stadium, his rockets will kill himself due to an overflow in the vertical velocity.

[Rachael]

You can't do it without changing gameplay logic.

Projectiles fired upwards only have vertical velocity added, meaning the horizontal velocity is always the same. As a result, if you fire upwards, the projectiles would have infinite velocity.

You can already see this with enemies. If you fly above the final boss in Stadium, his rockets will kill himself due to an overflow in the vertical velocity.

This is true - and it's actually true of the Doom engine, too.

And as you pointed out, ZDoom changed that with the gameplay logic. ZDoom actually uses proper trig math for a projectiles' pitch-angles, instead of just putting it on a tangent and forgetting about it.

[Phredreeke]

Could a quick fix he made where for game logic purposes the game assumes the angle to be the maximum normally allowed for angles above that?

[sinisterseed]

That sounds kinda hackish to me tbh.

[Graf Zahl]

Agreed, that doesn't sound right.

[Rachael]

I don't know why, other than demo backwards compatibility, why anyone would want to retain the tangental math for projectiles. That is just a quick and dirty fix, almost like freelook was a feature tacked onto the engine at the last minute.

[Phredreeke]

Yeah, thinking about it, it would be weird aiming straight up and firing and the bullet marks don’t appear where you aim, rather far below it.

Could changing the projectile code in Duke3D/RR/IF to allow for freelook be done without rewriting the CON code and breaking compatibility with existing mods?

[Graf Zahl]

Could changing the projectile code in Duke3D/RR/IF to allow for freelook be done without rewriting the CON code and breaking compatibility with existing mods?

No idea yet. I somehow doubt that the original CON would ever have allowed doing the math on the script side.

[Fox666]

Yeah, thinking about it, it would be weird aiming straight up and firing and the bullet marks don’t appear where you aim, rather far below it.

Could changing the projectile code in Duke3D/RR/IF to allow for freelook be done without rewriting the CON code and breaking compatibility with existing mods?

Original CON code no, but mods definitely would break with such a change.

[Rachael]

Original CON code no, but mods definitely would break with such a change.

If there's a way, I'd prefer to do it this way: If post-source-release CON code is found, then it'd use the existing (tangent) math, otherwise, it'd use proper sine/cosine math for the angles. Not sure how Graf feels about it.

[Talon1024]

Well, if there's nothing that can be done about the up/down freelook limitations without breaking stuff, so be it. But there's something else about the freelook that's been bothering me.

Notice how looking up and down feels more natural in this video?


If you try to look up or down in Polymost, it feels more like you're using the software renderer than a true 3D renderer.

[Phredreeke]

That's Polymer. It works completely differently from Polymost.

[Graf Zahl]

It works differently, yes, but Polymost still uses true 3D rotations for pitching. What exactly is supposedly wrong with Polymost?

[Talon1024]

Here are two screenshots taken from E1L1 in Raze (Polymost) and Eduke32 (Polymer) in (almost) the same location, and (almost) the same view orientation:


Polymer's perspective projection looks better, whilst Polymost looks like it has slight Y-shearing in comparison. It looks like Polymost renders a trapezoid-shaped view onto a rectangle, whereas Polymer does proper 3D perspective projection.

EDIT: Also, here's the start of E1L1, looking straight down, in Raze (Polymost) and Eduke32 (Polymer)

[markanini]

I can definitely see it.