Talk:Dead player's line of sight tracks his killer

Does this really count as a bug? It strikes me as one Doom's many unreal-isms rather than a bug. -- TheDarkArchon 22:06, 13 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, you know how you only see the front of any object and not any of the sides or back ('cept players and monsters since they actually move around)? I guess you could say that the line of sight moves because it's repositioning it for the player who killed you... though... it wouldn't matter for the other players cause they'd see the font of you anyway... I dunno, it's difficult to explain, but I'd say it's a bug. --Frusion1021 22:22, 13 September 2006 (UTC)


 * There are a few borderline cases, certainly. And in the absence of comprehensive firsthand accounts of the engine's development (I'm not holding my breath), there will always be room for debate.  For example:
 * A long fall makes the player say "oof" even if his health is zero. Colin Phipps has called this a bug, but on the other hand it is medically accurate IIRC (there can even be reflex motion of a person's limbs after brain death).
 * Monsters gibbed by blast damage seem to fly in an arc through the air for a prescribed distance, then stop and fall straight down like Wile E. Coyote. I think of this as an unreal-ism (especially considering the technology of the time), but some source port programmers apparently consider it a glaring oversight which must be expunged from the earth.
 * The nonlinear AI phenomena described in Monsters fleeing and Lost Soul charging backwards have been called bugs by many technically minded people on this site. On the other hand, none of us has ever met a demon IRL (I don't think), so how do we know how much common sense they should have?  Maybe id programmed it that way on purpose.
 * The description in Bugs says "bugs, limitations and oddities", which I take to mean "if in doubt, write it up". I agree with this, if for no other reason than that almost every anomaly turns out to be useful somehow!  For instance, in a one-on-one deathmatch, this effect could reveal which direction your opponent ran in after killing you, so when you respawned, you'd know roughly how close he was.    Ryan W 23:44, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

This is not a bug.
This is a deliberate feature of the game engine which has a large segment of code in the function P_DeathThink dedicated to its implementation, complete with comments to the effect of "Looking at killer." There is no way by any definition of the word bug that this qualifies as one. Unrealistic? Maybe. But so is everything else in DOOM. Shall we next claim that being able to run fullspeed while carrying all your weapons, armor, and items is a bug rather than a design feature? Treading on dangerous territory here. I will post the code if necessary, but for now I'm putting an accuracy dispute template on this.--Quasar 02:31, 18 September 2006 (UTC)