Question: Vertical aiming is very limited – is this intentional?

[RavenMacDaddy]

Whether using mouselook to deliberately aim at something vertically – or relying on autoaim alone – the vertical aiming can only go so far.

Meaning, the player has to physically reposition themselves in order to hit their intended target.

This is especially noticeable when trying to hit something that's (very) close to the player.

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This is very easy to test: Start DOOM – E1M1 on UV difficulty.

Go directly to the left, as usual, shooting the enemies at the top first – but leave the soldiers at the bottom.

After you've picked up the armor at the top of the stairs, as well as the dropped shotguns from the enemies – try to hit the shotgun zombie soldiers below, from up there.

It's nearly – if not completely – impossible.

[bradharding]

I'll have a closer look at the relevant code but as far as I can tell, the vertical aiming (that is, with autoaim on) is the same as vanilla.

As for when mouselook is on, the extent at which you can look up/down is restricted, as it is in other software ports, to reduce y-shearing.

[Calinou]

Most software-rendered source ports limit vertical aiming to 35 degrees upwards and 55 degrees downwards. Hardware-accelerated ports (or polygon-based software renderers) don't have to do this as they use polygons for rendering, instead of the original raycasting approach.

You can test this in Crispy Doom, PrBoom+'s software mode and the like.