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GeekNights 070807 - FPS Key Bindings
Tonight on GeekNights, we talk a bit about the FPSing setups we use. In the news, ID busts out on Steam, and Best Buy makes a small error.
Scott's Thing - Cardboard Bridge
Rym's Thing - History Bites Rap
Scott's Thing - Cardboard Bridge
Rym's Thing - History Bites Rap
Comments
I'm going to guess that next week you will be reviewing Mario Strykers?
Why? Because the episode was bad, or just because you don't care about the topic?
I did not know where the catsup thing came from. The deli next to my office puts catsup on the egg sandwiches.
As for Doom... There used to be a dial-in service where you paid money to play Doom online. I do not remember the name of it as I only used it as a free trial. I don't see why you couldn't try to mimic that service somehow.
Correct me if I am wrong (I have not played Doom in years) but didn't Doom use IPX/SPX or some other weird networking system? There were only a few games back then that embraced TCP/IP for the networking of multi-player action.
I also purchased a book way back then with all sorts of softwares for making custom doom wads. Doom was always all about the multi-player. Those who think otherwise are only fooling themselves or have no friends. As for Doom not being good enough because the new games have so much more to offer, let me say that sometimes you want to play a game with less buttons and things to worry about. I enjoyed playing Doom because I could use my four button Gravis GamePad and ignore the keyboard.
I used to hack extensively at Doom. I know all about the linedefs and sidedefs, the texture pegging, sector definitions, and active frames. I liked dehacked for game-mechanics tweaking and Waded for level editing. (Sadly, Waded was an unstable piece of crap despite having the best interface of all of them).
Essentially you get your guy to face the correct direction and hold down the strafe button. You then move in font of the doorway and fire (holding down the strafe button). This way you can move left and right infront of the doorway/opening while still sending your shots in the desired direction.
It sounds like you are talking about locking onto a target and running circles around it the way you do in Zelda TP with the Z-lock.
Here's another situation. You are going down a hallway and there is a 90 degree turn, in other words an L. There is a chaingun guy around the corner who will shoot you. If you walk straight out into the open, then rotate 90 degrees, you will spend a lot of time in a vulnerable position before you can hit him. So you strafe, walking to the side while keeping your facing straight down the hallway. If it's a narrow hallway, or if the guy is hugging the inside wall, that's fine. But what if the guy is hugging the outside wall? You won't know where he is until you go over there. The solution is to strafe into the opening while still controlling your aim separately so that you can shoot at enemies no matter where they are in the hallway.
These are fps fundamentals. If you aren't able to grasp concepts like this, then you have never truly played an fps.
By having dedicated strafe keys independent of your aiming method is critical.
My feeling about the whole inverted up/down access thing is that a lot of it depends on the circumstances in which our expectations about certain things are formed. Being a bit older, and, I suspect, a lot more rural than Rym and Scott, my expectations about the up/down access behavior of weapons was formed while holding actual weapons rather than playing flight simulators or FPSes. When you fire a rifle from your shoulder it does not have an inverted up/down access; however, if you put the same weapon on a bi-pod or some other sort of mount/support, it suddenly does have an inverted up/down access.
For instance in the Halo demo (never played the full game, insert long rant about Bungie sellout, long wait for game previously "almost done" for the Macintosh and vow never to buy any part of the franchise (even though, in retrospect, had I been them I probably would have taken the money too...)) my expectations are that when I am on foot the up/down access should not be inverted for aiming the carried weapon, whereas in the Warthog, firing the big mounted gun from the gunner position, I do expect the up/down access to be inverted. It's definitely not a muscle memory situation, as a mouse has a very different interface than an actual rifle, shotgun, pistol, etc. so it all seems to hearken back to the situation where my expectations were first formed.
We did this in Deathmatch when a room was long or running towards a person while in a corridor. As long as our aiming point was ahead of us we would just move side to side shooting the entire time. Now I will have to dig out my Doom CD roms and play the game again...
When did you guys begin playing the Doom type games? Am I just a relic from the pre-mouse days?
Note: I did not purchase computer with "windows" until 1995.
If anyone out there wants to learn how to control a modern FPS properly, I highly suggest you get Half-Life 1 and beat it on normal difficulty using the default control scheme. If you like that, then do Half-Life 2.
When you live by the console prompt a mouse serves no purpose.
Love you guys generally - but this bit about comparing the mouse/keyboard to the gamepads gave me the sh1ts cause there is no comparison. Nothing needs to be said. I don't know who you were trying to convince, please tell me there aren't people in the world that reckon a gamepad is theoretically better. It's definitely fun, but technically there is no comparison, mouse and keyboard wins everytime. Its like debating whether the sun rises from the east.
And if there are people in the world that reckon the gamepad is better, then let them keep enjoying their sorry state.
So far I personally do not see the use of me having the entire iD Collection, since I already have most of the "current-gen"/"modern"/how ever the hell classify a "generation" of PC games. Hopefully the idea of inputting your retail cd-key of like Doom 3 into your Steam account will come through. I may get hounded at for saying the first sentence [of this paragraph], but who cares, I'm just happy with the Commander Keen collection.