Wolfenmaus - Modern mouse control for Wolfenstein 3D/Spear of Destiny

Wolfenmaus enables vanilla Wolfenstein 3D or Spear of Destiny to achieve modern style WASD controls. Unlike other solutions, Wolfenmaus does not modify the Wolf3D code in any way (on disk or in memory), but uses the interfaces that are built into the game.

Game support

• Wolfenstein 3D - All 1.4 versions
• Spear of Destiny - All versions
• Many 16-bit DOS mods of the above

Other games that use the Wolfenstein 3D engine lack the required interface for this to work. See the "How it works" section for more information.

Limitations

• The mouse look angle is not reset between levels and can accumulate while in the menus, so you may often start facing an unintended direction.
• This can not be used to record demos as the angle you're facing is not part of the game's normal control structure.
• The nowait flag is implied, so the demo loop is skipped.
• The game will no longer lock your camera angle during ending sequences.
• A frame (~14ms at least) of input latency is incurred due to the look angle being applied prior to polling the inputs.

Usage

Place wolfmaus.exe in the game directory and run it passing along the command to run the game.

wolfmaus [options] wolf3d ...

Options:

• -i<mask> - Inverts the function of mouse buttons (1 = left, 2 = right, 4 = middle). Add values together to invert more than one button. Button inversion should only apply during gameplay.
• -s<num> - Sensitivity value matching the in game configuration (0 = slow, 9 = fast). Default value is 5. Other values except 13 are accepted and would have the same effect as configuration hacking in vanilla. Values 14 and above invert the x axis.
• -v - Disables vertical mouse movement in game. Will still work in the menus.

Since Wolf3D binds strafe to right click by default, a typical invocation might look like:

wolfmaus -i2 -s9 -v wolf3d goobers

For some reason, likely because they expected all movement to be done with the mouse and in that scenario run would have no effect, id arbitrarily prevented binding run to the mouse via the menus. It is possible to enable always run by modifying your config file. Set the byte at 01F6 (left), 01F8 (right), or 01FA (middle) to 02. The location of these values in the config file may vary with mods. If successful the menu will show the respective button being bound. The button can then be added to the inversion mask. Note that you can still walk but you will have to use the mouse button and not the keyboard or joystick.

If you consider input inversion cheating, it is worth noting that Wolf3D menu allows multiple actions to be assigned to the same keyboard key. If you spend most of the time in game with the run key pressed, binding strafe to the same key would prevent the need to hold a second key.

How it works

The problem that vanilla Wolf3D faces is that the game's input code only has two analog axes (controlx and controly). These are populated with the sum of inputs from the keyboard, mouse, and joystick. When you press the strafe button the controlx axis is reinterpreted from being turning to being strafe.

There has, in a way, been a hidden third axis the whole time presumably thanks to Alternate Worlds Technology. Wolfenstein 3D includes support for a VR headset and through that we unlock the ability to offset the player's angle and this offset is independent of the strafe control. In modern times one would expect that this offset only applies to the camera, but for Wolf3D this is implemented simply as adding the helmetangle (a value between 0 and 359 located in memory at 0040:00F0) at the start of the frame/tic and backing it out at the conclusion of the frame.

Wolfmaus can effectively be seen as a modified mouse driver which more importantly implements the interface expected for the VR helmet. The horizontal mouse movements are simply redirected to helmetangle.

Since the VR headset code is included in the Wolf3D source code as released this automatically works with many DOS mods. It does not work with all of them as the VR code was previously seen as useless, so particularly the more advanced mods may have removed the feature to reclaim a small amount of memory. Additionally Wolf4GW removed most of the VR code so any 32-bit mod will not have the required interface point.

Whether it be because they removed it, or because the code they were licensed did not include it, none of the games that licensed the Wolf3D engine include the VR code. There is apparently evidence that Alternate Worlds Reality had a version of Blake Stone for their headset, but none of the released builds contain the code. As of this writing it is anyone's guess if copies of it or AWT's own game using the engine, Cybertag, still exist. If they were found presumably this would just work with them.

Compiling

This program is written for Open Watcom v2. Ensure that the compiler is added to your PATH and the Makefile should take care of the rest. If not the WATCOM, INCLUDE, and LIB environment variables can be set accordingly.

# Build wolfmaus.exe
make

Credits

Thanks to NY00123 for brainstorming support. This was identified while looking for code that was still disabled after finishing Disney Sound Source support in ReflectionHLE and pondering how the VR code would be enabled.

Thanks to Woolie Wool/Executor for naming the project.