Writing for Half-Life

Re:Writing for Half-Life by qwertyuiop924 on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @01:47PM (#12637550)

It's about how people think about things. Other companies could have put a stick on their controllers, but Nintendo were the first ones to realize that it was a good idea. Twin sticks could have evolved earlier, but Sony was the first company to really get it. Turok on the N64 didn't need to have as bad controls as it did, but until Goldeneye, that was just the way things were done. Mind, Goldeneye's controls weren't that great, but they were playable.

OTOH, there are some old games that control fine. Megaman 2 still feels great to play, as does Quake with +mlook and WASD. But yes, control affordances matter. For the large part, Doom can only be played comfortably by modern audiences because of the work Source Port developers undertook to allow for rebindable keys, and sgtmarkiv's Brutal Doom, which allows for proper mouselook, if you really want to be that guy.

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Re:Writing for Half-Life by dietrichepp on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @03:22AM (#12642076)

That's a good point.

I've been doing Ludum Dare for a while now and it has only deepened my respect for games with good controls. For the last jam, I didn't spend nearly as much time on control feel as I usually do and I got a bunch of negative feedback for it.

For another example, people criticize Unity for games with poor feel, but what's really happening is that Unity has enabled a bunch of new developers to make games with less effort, and that includes spending less effort on getting the controls to work well. All Unity did was lower the bar to entry.

Take a look at Quake III, in bg_pmove.c PM_Accelerate

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c...

This is the code that translates player input into acceleration for the physics system to handle. Notice the code blocked out with #if which fixes a bug but the fix isn't used because it "feels bad". The bug lets you accelerate to ridiculous speeds with the right pattern of movement.

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Re:Writing for Half-Life by qwertyuiop924 on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @05:45AM (#12642626)

...that's not exactly why that fix was killed. What you see is Carmack losing a war with the fanbase: strafe jumping came about in Q1, and was a really important part of the Quake metagame. Carmack wanted to kill it, because it didn't fit his vision. He tried to, but the only fix he could come up with was limiting jumps and having a cooldown, which he recognized was actually even worse, because it just wasn't fun.

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Re:Writing for Half-Life by dietrichepp on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @08:37PM (#12649205)

> the only fix he could come up with was limiting jumps and having a cooldown

That's not true, look at the code. It does something else. You can also check out the .plan from Jun 3, 1999:

> When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.

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Re:Writing for Half-Life by qwertyuiop924 on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:23AM (#12650771)

Yeah, I believe that was how it was changed. I don't totally recall though, so nevermind.

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