Games Done Quick

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It's not over yet...! Actually it probably is.

Hello. I know this is beyond the limit, but I've been debating on saying this for a few days- Only learned about the limit when trying to type this up.

I am PersistantRubine, so all quotes from me are accurate, I can confirm.

I understand where you are coming from with the vertical mouse controls, they can be awkward, and can be absurd at times... But this isn't a fix. This isn't a "We're working things for new players to have more fun"

This is a bandage. A wall.

It's like telling someone "You'll find out later" and they never do.
Players deserve to be aware of the full power of the camera, and they also deserve to be aware that they can limit the camera. But this doesn't mean disabling it immediantly and never showing players that they can change it outside of the tutorial, which we are ALL aware, some will skip or ignore it.

To repeat something I've said before, when I first came back to SRB2 after a few years, I couldn't figure out where the Vertical lock was. For whatever reason, I must have somehow disabled it while going through the menus to set things up... And I tried to adapt because I thought it got removed. I played the entirety of Greenflower, and hated every second. So I went online and asked someone.

Turns out, they didn't know you could turn it off. So we were both stumped... And I got pissed due to not seeing the option to turn it on. Due to me being young at the time, I stopped playing for around 3-4 years or so out of rage and annoyance. I had the mindset of a new player then; I expected something I had seen before and come to know exists/is standard. And I ended up leaving because it wasn't there. I didn't have fun.

Fast forward a few years; I almost entirely forgot about SRB2 until being reminded of it by a video on youtube. I remember the camera problems and rejoin, trying to see what went wrong.
The first thing I notice?
I had fun again. I could move the camera up and down again. I could play without being frustrated again.

So. I want to bring this idea to you, as a compromise.
Another Doom Engine game, Megaman 8 Bit Deathmatch, does something neat.
When you first play the game, you get shown the options then and there.
I look through them, because I was encouraged to.

Why not, when the player first starts the game, show them a message.
"Vertical Mouselook on/off"
They choose their preference.

"Thank you! You may change this later in X settings."

They know where it is, that it exists, and can play as they want. All problems are solved.

I, again, apologize for this. I want it to be clear that I will not come back to this conversation unless explicitly asked by a mod to talk more. Thank you for your time, and I hope that I came off as politely as possible.
 
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It's like telling someone "You'll find out later" and they never do.
Players deserve to be aware of the full power of the camera, and they also deserve to be aware that they can limit the camera. But this doesn't mean disabling it immediantly and never showing players that they can change it outside of the tutorial, which we are ALL aware, some will skip or ignore it.
The thing is, our game never really cares whether you're using vertical mouselook or not. I rarely ever look up or down. I have played both ways and actually prefer vertical mouselook off in third person and simply use the mouselook key when I actually want to. This is rare, and generally the fault of a custom level designer.

I'm not saying that there aren't situations where vertical camera movement is useful, because there are. I'm saying that those situations are rare enough that we can safely remove the mechanic for new players because it's not important to play the game. It'd be as if we taught players about crawla bouncing in the tutorial. It's a situationally useful thing to know, but it's very much not necessary to explain and teach before letting the player play.

To repeat something I've said before, when I first came back to SRB2 after a few years, I couldn't figure out where the Vertical lock was. For whatever reason, I must have somehow disabled it while going through the menus to set things up... And I tried to adapt because I thought it got removed. I played the entirety of Greenflower, and hated every second. So I went online and asked someone.

Turns out, they didn't know you could turn it off. So we were both stumped... And I got pissed due to not seeing the option to turn it on. Due to me being young at the time, I stopped playing for around 3-4 years or so out of rage and annoyance. I had the mindset of a new player then; I expected something I had seen before and come to know exists/is standard. And I ended up leaving because it wasn't there. I didn't have fun.
If you aren't exaggerating this is a failure of the menu system, not the default control scheme. The default control scheme is designed to be best for those that don't know what they want yet. You knew what you wanted and you couldn't figure out how to get it, which is a totally different issue. That means that the menu structure was ineffective at helping you find what you were looking for, and for what it's worth our menu structure was abominable for quite a long time. While they're better now, I definitely agree that there's plenty of room for improvement in this regard.
 
It's like telling someone "You'll find out later" and they never do.

As Mystic mentioned, the SP campaign does not rely on the ability to look up and down to any degree, so it is fine if the player doesn't know about this right off the bat.

Even still, I highly doubt that a player would "never figure out" if they were committed enough to change the control scheme. This is because "vertical mouselook" as an option is easily accessible from the menus -- simply from observation and experimentation, they're bound to figure out what that option does just out of curiosity. And personally, I almost always look at the control scheme before I jump into any PC game (and I'm surprised more people don't do the same).

The only point where I can see this becoming a problem is if the player transitions from a third-person-perspective platformer gametype and switch to an FPS gametype, and the mouselook controls stay non-vertical. If this were ever an issue, I imagine this could easily be fixed by creating a second default for vertical mouselook specifically for deathmatch modes.
 
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All this talk about making the default control-scheme more easy for platformer players makes me wish analog mode allowed for manual horizontal camera movement. The inability to do that is pretty much the only thing that keeps me from using that at all times.
 
All this talk about making the default control-scheme more easy for platformer players makes me wish analog mode allowed for manual horizontal camera movement. The inability to do that is pretty much the only thing that keeps me from using that at all times.

I might be misunderstanding you, but I believe horizontal camera movement is possible i analog mode. Years ago in a 1.0 version, I used a controller for the game and set the L1 and R1 buttons to horizontal camera movement, ala PS1 classics such as Spyro and Megaman Legends. It’s still not as accurate or fun a control acheme as mouse and keyboard, and I was never able to beat Egg Rock like that (which may be due to my skills rather than the control scheme), but it was a working control method.
 
All this talk about making the default control-scheme more easy for platformer players makes me wish analog mode allowed for manual horizontal camera movement. The inability to do that is pretty much the only thing that keeps me from using that at all times.

...you didn't know there were camera left/right buttons? Or am I misunderstanding

Mind you I think we were killing those for 2.2 or something anyway, my memory is gone on the matter though.
 
...you didn't know there were camera left/right buttons? Or am I misunderstanding

Mind you I think we were killing those for 2.2 or something anyway, my memory is gone on the matter though.

The left/right buttons do the same thing the strafe buttons do when Analog mode is on instead of doing what they're supposed to do, which is turning the camera.
 
We're talking about seperate "Camera Left/Right" controls, not the regular turning left/right ones. In fact, if you turn devmode on in 2.1, you can even rotate the camera around the player with the default tank-style control mode (as in, when you're not playing analog).
 
DqmvpHD


The "Rotate Camera L" and "Rotate Camera R" buttons under Camera Controls do exactly what they say while in analog mode. This is what you're looking for.

EDIT: Ninja'd again.
 
MI notes they're dead in internal; this is a bit of an exaggeration. We've moved them over to use the normal camera turning keys instead, so that we don't have two confusingly labelled and somewhat redundantly purposed set of controls.

(The thing he notes for devmode IS dead as a result, but that was effectively a remappable bind of cam_rotate, which avid users of the feature can handle themselves.)
 
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First of all, holy crap! How did I not know about this?! I can finally play SRB2 with a controller without having to worry about the camera being moronic!

Second of all, I suppose my real issue is that the mouse and joystick axis for turning use the turning values instead of the rotate camera values, which causes you to move instead of turning the camera when analog mode is on, and since you can't edit what horizontal mouse/joystick movement does in-game, there's no way to have mouse camera control while still having analog mode on. I should probably look into how to change that in the source code if I want it fixed that badly, but still.
 
Bump because I didn't want to create yet another a new topic for this sort of discussion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuvGyXUqFC0
Gee, it's a new video of new-ish people (KC3K and DaveAce have done one video each prior, I could not find another video of Garrulous64 playing.) playing SRB2, Garrulous64 has enabled analog mode and the other two are on mouse and keyboard, let's see how they compare, shall we?

Commenting on things I've noticed both in general and specific to these videos as I go through the video...
-This hasn't been brought up in the video (yet(as far as I am aware)) but the intermission timer for singleplayer and even for multiplayer is rather long and breaks the flow of gameplay and the video in general, I think it could be reduced to 10 or even 5 seconds. Just enough to glance over people's scores.

-Springs seem to be a problem for beginners across the board, maybe making springs force you in the direction they're facing more consistently would be a good idea?

-NiGHTS special stages look pretty hectic with no differentiation between players' trails, perhaps making player colored trails a thing would mitigate this?
--Speaking of NiGHTS, new players seem to get both lost and confused as to how NiGHTS actually controls, making the path a different texture on the ground might help these.

-In terms of navigation, Garrulous has been doing a pretty good job finding his way despite picking the "worse" control option, he still needed some help at certain branching paths, personally I would propose a more automated camera system that gently guides the player not at all turns but at an intersection of 3 or more.
--If there were an analog only camera change linedef, the camera could ideally show the player all three paths as they come up to them, then rotate smoothly and quickly to focus on the path the player chose by inserting a line near the entrance of said path.
--The player should have control of the camera most of the time by using the rotate camera buttons, but the game should take over when necessary to show where their options are rather than strictly letting them do all the work or letting the game handle everything. This allows for a neccesary balance between freedom of control where the player should go, and the game teaching the player about how the level is laid out.
--If you're worried about wide open spaces, the player has enough room to run around and explore as is so there is no need to take control away from the player for these segments, same with ramps and other segments where the player is free to make a big decision on where to go.

-I'm on the fence about the default setting for playersforexit, on the one hand it makes for snappier timing if it's set to one, but if it's set to all it gives everyone a chance to complete it, the downside is that if one player gets stuck, the rest have to wait for the straggler to finish. I propose that the countdown from race mode be added to co-op or just recreate betterplayersforexit within vanilla so that while everybody has a chance, they're not waiting forever and not everybody gets left behind.

Some of the things I stated in the spoiler is also from experience myself, my dad isn't really into the game but I try to get him to play anyway, he's voiced some of these concerns himself every time we play and he doesn't like to play the game because of these issues, so we end up playing so infrequently that he forgets how to play and thus the cycle continues.
 
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I took a careful look at the video. I feel it's necessary to point out that the Tails and Knuckles players actually look like they're on the default setup (arrow keys for forwards/backwards and turning) which in absolutely no way represents how the game feels when using strafe keys and mouselook. I genuinely don't believe there's much of a comparison to make among the three players; none of them stood out to me as any better at the game than the others, and there were certainly places where each of them excelled differently. For instance, the analog player by far had the hardest time fighting the bosses. In large part, though, I think these differences were brought upon the players by their character choices. Each of them seemed picked up how their individual character worked pretty quickly (you can even hear them talk about Sonic's need to actually perform all the platforming versus Knuckles being able to skip everything during their playthrough of GFZ2). Their focus on obtaining the emerald tokens likely affected the way they played the game as well.

I'd certainly argue that analog is a much easier and more comfortable first-timer control scheme than the default arrow keys setup, but to the best of my knowledge the majority of the veteran playerbase uses FPS controls and the game is definitely modeled around that control scheme. Starting players out in analog mode would be advertising a setup the game isn't designed to be played with (further evidenced by its removal from menus in 2.2). I'm interested to see how encouraging first-time players to use the strafe keys in 2.2 will pan out.
 
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