Wirehead Studios

This is a small question, but never the less.

Quake 3 can zoom in with any weapon he pleases.  At the moment, so can any other class.  Quake 3 was the only game out of the 5 featured in Gen that had this ability.  That being said, for nostalgia's sake, will zooming be taken away from the Doom Warriors, Slipgaters, and Strogg Troopers for 1.0?  I understand if Earth would keep it (Sniper Rifle).

Or, will everyone keep the zoom?  It sounds like a "either everyone or no one" kind of situation, but I was just curious.

That's a pretty good question, It does seem to be in... Well Doom 3, not sure about Q4... and to hell with ETQW...

I see no reason to take away zooming across the board.  And... technically that's not accurate.  You could change fov settings in Quake 2 and write zoom scripts.  Same with Q1, and I've done it for Zdoom as well.  Zooming will stay.  For 1.0, the Sniper Rifle will actually work somewhat better while zoomed.  It's not a damage change, it will just be easier to use if you're "shouldering" the gun, so to speak.

If that's the way the sniper is going to work, keep in mind that some people play Q3 with "truelighting" or reverse-zoom scripts. They have their ordinary fov set very high, their zoom fov to 90 or so, and walk around with +zoom all the time. Just something that popped to mind.

Sounds about right.  I need to look into Q1 and Q2's zooming functions!  I was completely unaware.

For the Sniper Rifle.  Will the gun be more "accurate" while zoomed?  Less "bounce" after firing?  Basically ways to balance the weapon so that its prefered usage is while zoomed in?

Sounds good either way.

Less view kick while zoomed, which will make it easier to see where your shot went so you can range and lead better.  Damage and weapon accuracy will not be affected.

Tab:  If people use funky whacked out scripts I can't help that.  Zooming from 120 to 90 FOV isn't really giving as much of a long-range advantage as zooming from 90 to 20, so it's really moot that the gun will kick visually less.  Besides, viewkick can be disabled completely anyway.  This is more of a feature to allow people who like the viewkick to be able to use the gun better while sniping long-range without having to disable the viewkick to make followup shots.

Sure. I wasn't worried much about it, but I just wanted to give you the heads-up, in case you weren't familiar with that kind of "pro" practice.

Fair enough.  I know the "pro" crowd does some pretty damned strange things, but why someone would walk around "zoomed" to 90 degrees with a high default FOV makes no sense to me.  You're losing your zoom capability and gaining what?

I believe it has to do with the effect it has (or had in some versions) on some effects, mainly the lighting shader. If that's true, then using zoom that way has also been referred to as "thinshaft"-scripting -- making the lighting easier to aim, I guess. Always struck me as more of a fashionable-looky-I'm-so-cool thing, than anything really useful.

I hope it wont be too dramatic of a change, but it sounds pretty good.  The Earth Sniper Rifle is one of my favorite weapons in the game.

Go to Space CTF (or whatever space level has a railgun on an incredibly high platform).  You can really get a feel for the bullet's relationship to gravity, and the big kick after firing it only adds to the tension of getting it right and the pleasure of being successful when shooting targets from that far away.

Er, wait.  Tab, did you actually mean lightning, as in, the stuff that zaps out of clouds?  :surprise:

D'oh, typo there. Yes, I meant to type "lightning" -- the Q3 shaft is what I was talking about.

Ahh, makes much more sense now.  :doom_thumb:

This is partially :offtopic: but I have a little question nonetheless.

On the subjaect of FOV settings in general, I'm currently using a widescreen monitor and in games like Q1, 2 and 3 I've upped the FOV to 106 to compensate for id (among others) apparently not quite grasping the whole concept of *wide*screen. The thing is, in Q3 the weapon model is skewed, and in Q2 when I change the FOV it disappears completely. Whilst I can live with the side effects in Q3, can Q2 be corrected?

Generations has a fix in the next version for weapon model scale correction with > 90 FOV settings.  It was actually pretty easy to do - a lot easier than I thought it would be.  In Q2, there's no fix without recompiling the executable.

Recompile, eh? Have to look into that. I'm using a modified quake2.exe for widescreen at the mo (not my own work) so time to dig out the reading glasses ...

As far as the Gen fix goes, is it an engine-side fix or mod-side? Just wondering.

mod-side.  It just requires scaling the view weapon's forward axis relative to the cg_fov value.