Vanilla doom autoaim glitch/bug

[tempun]

qoncept said:

Features are intended. Autoaim working beyond the "gaps" shows this was not intended. Pretty clearly an unintended glitch.

I assert that it was intentional corner cutting by someone who didn't want to spend his time writing tricky code.

qoncept said:

Gez just listed a handful of similar, very minor bugs that have been fixed in source ports. I would argue that this one impacts gameplay even less AND makes even more sense to fix than those.

They all have relatively simple fixes and have plausible explanations.
* Sky never changed in D2: it doesn't change in D1 in any one game session, but in D2 it can. An oversight.
* Blockmap: this is possibly also corner cutting, but maybe they just forgot that a thing can overlap multiple blockmap cells. Fix: register the thing with every cell it touches, rather than only with the one where the thing's center is. Relatively simple.
The other two are also very plausibly unintentional.

This one is intentional. Graf described the code above. (Here's a link and another to prboom-plus code.) In simple terms, it first considers all objects which can be hit by a ray from player's center in the exact horizontal direction he's facing (but any vertical that a player can see. I hope you understand what I mean). It only appears that there's a zone in which autoaim works because objects have non-zero width. Then directions 1/64 of the full angle to the left and right of the original direction are tried in the same way, in that order. What's not intended here?
It seems to me that this has no simple and satisfactory fix, and a satisfactory fix would require adding some tricky code. Perharps I'm just dull. Prove me wrong.

[qoncept]

Adding 2 or 4 or 40 more tracers would be a simple (and yes, inelegant) fix. Still imperfect but, in the words of whoever originally wrote that code, "good enough."

If I gave the impression that I have a strong opinion or care whether any source ports change this behavior that was a mistake. I've never noticed it before (or at least couldn't identify what was happening). But if I were involved with any of them this would be the next code change I made.

I remember reading through Quake 2 patch release notes and seeing that they fixed a bug where if you were crouching in water of a certain depth and facing a certain direction (etc etc) the railgun wouldn't produce a trail. The circumstances almost never happened, but they found it while the game was still maintained and fixed it.

[printz]

Gez said:

Plenty of things that do not destabilize the game have been changed.

For example, the sky never changing across episodes in Doom II unless you load a save? Doesn't damage stability in any way. Hitscan attacks warping through the blockmap instead of hitting an enemy? Not going to corrupt memory. Monsters unable to see the player if they are aligned with a vertex? It's not going to cause any sort of crash. Ouch face only showing if you're healed? This does not negatively impact the integrity of your computer. And so on.

Lol. A couple of those are only cosmetic - and I'm indifferent to changing them. The rest are indeed stable and I continue to say that they are part of Doom and shouldn't be changed except in mods with different intended gameplay.

We are sperging over something tiny here. Probably the optimization ports will just bring the new Doom by fixing it, and the conservative ones won't. And vanilla Doom and its simulators aren't going anywhere.

[kb1]

I have a feeling that JC might have added the extra 2 traces empirically, in an attempt to reduce the impact of the "blockmap bug". In other words, at certain distances from the shooter, the side traces just might enter the adjacent block. This gives a shot that would normally "slip thru the cracks", a chance to work anyway. If you think about it, it's kinda good that that blockmap bug existed, cause we ended up with a game that spreads pellets semi-realistically, providing that "real-world" feel that would be difficult to otherwise fabricate, IMHO.

Of course, it's quite unrealistic in fact, and it makes it quite difficult to shoot the SSG, and have only a few pellets hit your target, since your shot is bent towards the center. I think the game would feel better without the horizontal auto-aim - I think I'll mock it up and see for myself: 0 extra traces, 2 extra (original), 8 extra, etc.

At any rate, I find it both humorous and tiresome to see the instant "Don't tread on my Doom" holy war that erupts from the suggestion of creating a simple, toggle-able setting. Does anyone really believe that a programmer worth his salt would, intentionally, irreversibly, hack up such a fundamental aspect of their favorite game? Or the bunch: "Ugh, Doom is so broken! We NEED this change, or I'll never be able to fire the SSG slighly off angle again!". Doom. We know drama.

[dew]

kb1 said:

I have a feeling that JC might have added the extra 2 traces empirically, in an attempt to reduce the impact of the "blockmap bug".

i disagree. the blockmap bug is not nearly that noticeable as some people claim and id ignored much more obvious bugs. wouldn't it make more sense as compensation for the coarse keyboard-only turning?

also the bug might not have been described, but it was certainly felt the whole time. think of d5m1: you often whiff a shot when standing on the stairs out of the bfg room and aim at your opponent hugging the outer wall.

i don't care if this gets fixed in ports, but not allowing an opt out for people who prefer oldschool deathmatching to overpolished zanzan experience would be silly.

quick edit: also let's be honest here. vertical autoaim would still work okay if you actually aimed at your opponent properly. this fix mends the little aimbot doom so kindly provides. do you really need even more help hitting the other guys?