Marathon: Resurrection Forum

Another call for crosshairs

Posted By: Captain Bob
Date: 2008.1.12.01.28

Even if I don't get to the other things I wanted to review in M:R, I have to bring up my take on this. As people here know, Marathon: Resurrection has permanently disabled crosshairs, and original Marathon had no crosshairs. I just can't play a game with mouselook without a way to focus on where the camera is aimed.

I've thought a lot about why this is, not just for M:R but for games in general. The argument is as follows: I certainly don't need crosshairs etched onto the centers of my eyeballs. However, I am always focusing along a line from the center of my eye. You have peripheral vision, but it's physically impossible to focus anywhere but along that center line. However when you're playing a game, your eyes can focus anywhere. Ideally they would always be focused on the center of your screen, but that doesn't always happen. When something catches your eye, like a monster appearing off to your left, you instinctively look at it. When you do, your focus is off-center from the center of the screen. The monitor doesn't know you're looking someplace else. But your aim in games like this is hardwired to where the computer thinks you're focusing. So in a game where reflexes are important, very often your eye jumps off-center, you do your best to move the mouse to re-center your target in the center of the screen, you pull the trigger...and you miss. Because in that fraction of a second, you have no way to precisely tell when the target is re-centered. You don't have time to visually judge how big your screen is and thus pinpoint where the center is.

In Marathon, you *did* have a way of re-centering. Being a not true-3D environment, you were almost always on level footing with your target. Therefore, by hitting the V key to center your view vertically (stop looking up or down and look straight ahead), you were confident that your target was centered on the screen vertically. Horizontally, your weapon was placed in the center of the screen. Some weapons even had prominent iron sights. So you had a visual aid, not unlike crosshairs, you could use by turning until your gun and your target lined up with each other. There was only one exception: the missile launcher, whose placement on the side of the screen made it more difficult to aim properly.

When I played through M:R's singleplayer, I had to cut out a circle from a post-it note and stick it on the center of my screen. When I have to do something like that, it screams bad design to me. After I finished, I re-discovered the preferences option to draw your gun in the center, instead of to the side, of the screen. I kick myself for not finding that sooner, because my accuracy really did improve. Technically, you can set up UT with explicit turn left and turn right keys, and a center view key. However, I think mouselook is overall a superior setup over keyboard-only for a first person shooter (and I was one of the longest holdouts for keyboard-only; I used to play UT and everything else up to Jedi Knight II with Marathon's keyboard layout), so long as this centering/focusing problem isn't an issue.

So that's why I urge for the crosshairs to be an option. You can still have the crosshairs off by default. You can't stop people from doing the post-it note thing anyway, and it's almost annoying enough for me to hack the mod myself to add them back in. Rather than fight this, I say it's a good idea in general principle to let the user make their own choices.

Messages In This Thread

• Another call for crosshairs -- Captain Bob -- 2008.1.12.01.28
  • Re: Another call for crosshairs -- Wail of Suicide -- 2008.1.13.23.39