How to fix mouselook stretching in Chex Quest?

[SlayaDud]

Hey guys. I love Chex Quest ever since I was a kid! Felt like replaying it recently and noticed that when I look up and down with the mouse the world looks like its stretching. Now when I play Doom in Zandronum or GZDoom that doesn't happen, so is there a setting in the game to fix this or do I need to play the Chex wad in Zandronum or GZDoom to fix it? Help would be appreciated!

[Drwalrustein]

That how the Doom engine works. Because the original engine is not suppose to have mouselook, it looks distorted when you look up or down. Now it doesn't happen in Zandronum and GZDoom because they use a hardware renderer that stops the distortion. If you want more information look here: http://zdoom.org/wiki/Free_look

[75]

Hi Slayadud, long time no see

That "stretching" effect is normal if you're running ZDoom or Zandronum in Software mode. There's no way to fix that in zDoom unfortunately.

The original Doom engine didn't support looking up or down, so the "stretchy" freelook is sort of a hack to emulate it. Only OpenGL ports (e.g., gzDoom and Zandronum) can look up and down without that effect.

[noob1234]

Out of curiosity, what engine were you playing Chex Quest on? Pretty sure mouselook isn't in vanilla.

[SlayaDud]

I was playing Chex Quest 1 in the Chex Quest 3 package "chex3.exe". Thanks for the responses! I'm am now more informed on how the original engine and source ports work. =)

[xbolt]

The Chex3 engine is based off ZDoom, so there's no way to stop it from doing that. But the wad will run in GZDoom totally fine.

[Ether Bot]

I don't know the EXACT mechanics behind the distorted version of mouselook but what I remember is that the camera is physically moving UPWARDS and the image is intentionally warped at the edges to give off the illusion that the player is looking up.

That only happens because regular zdoom is still 2.5-D as far as I can tell... play chex quest in something else like Zandronum or GZDoom and it should work

[75]

I don't know the EXACT mechanics behind the distorted version of mouselook ...

If you guys are interested, I'm not an expert at the rendering side of the engine (yet), but I think the code for looking up and down in software is similar to what was in the Build engine

http://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php

My Guess: The small part of Michael Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming that I've read so far makes me think that this stretching is due to the fact that Doom uses a 2 Dimensional BSP (instead of a 3 Dimensional BSP like Quake); however that explanation doesn't work for Build, the Build engine never used a BSP.