Control Thoughts, and How to Equip Mortar

[watchful]

#8797

F1 – help, though it only shows default controls
F2 – to save, in some versions, may require patch for DOS
F12 – options from in-game

Controls felt super janky using a DOS copy, at least within DOSBox-X and the DOSBox settings recommended by PCGamingWiki. Holding SHIFT instead of turbo toggle was better but still much more stilted than I remember. GOG version had much smoother controls for me, though I suspect it’s not DOS-based. GOG version also had a few visual glitches like an outline around the screen and ammo sometimes doing a hall-of-mirrors trail outside the letterbox.

WADS and mouselook is possible, yet I had trouble with the DOS version. It seems the sniper mouselook is easily broken by changing too many bindings. What worked for me was carefully changing only the keys needed, using up-down arrows for looking up/down, and turning off mouse Y axis. Sadly the falling sequences end up worse, as on must use A+D for horizontal then up+down for vertical.

Also, mortar is accessible only from the “zoom” screen; which was very non-obvious to me. If there were analytics I would guess they’d say 40% of people got stuck there.

What did others think?

[synfrog]

#8801

I thought the flexibility of changing controls was great for a 3d game this old. I switched to WASD, put sniper on right mouse and zoom-in on middle mouse and it was fine. I had turbo on both toggle and hold-shift, but I usually used toggle as turbo felt better unless there was some precision platforming to do.

Well, except for the falling and end-of-level tunnel sequences where the key controls would break as you note.

My big annoyance with mortar and things like it is that the sniper rifle would default to whatever special ammo I picked up (usually not what I wanted), and it was hard to know what other ammo types I had. Cycling through them was slow, and I usually didn’t want to stay in sniper mode for long.

[Martli]

#8802

Yeah I changed to WASD too and it’s totally manageable (if annoying during the dive stage). I initially had y axis mouse movement on so thanks for the tip to disable it! Will also put sniper ontonright mouse!

I also tried a sidewinder gamepad which was a bit awkward without dual analog sticks which I’m used to for third person games.