[Striker]

robertmo, on 11 June 2026 - 04:32 AM, said:

do you plan to add mouse support?
we got mice with lots of buttons now, very responsive, and acurate. Uncomperable to the old two button ball mouse the original dos game used.
It's totally uncomparable comfort when compared to any most expensive joystick.
check how it works in boosted edition. it's magnificent control and precision.

Is this what you're looking for?

[robertmo]

Striker, on 17 June 2026 - 01:42 PM, said:

Is this what you're looking for?

no, this is mode: absolute.
which is just a joystick emulation using a mouse.

dos game also allows real mouse mode: relative.

[Striker]

I'm reluctant to implement the relative mode because of two factors: It jitters with framerate changes, and it lets you move faster than joystick/keyboard controls, which throws the multiplayer balance off.

[robertmo]

what does "mouse flip" do?

[todd2]

robertmo, on 19 June 2026 - 08:12 AM, said:

what does "mouse flip" do?

Guessing based upon ancient experience, but would expect it flips the Y axis.

[robertmo]

>It jitters with framerate changes
So how do other mouse only games like duke nukem forever handle that?


>and it lets you move faster than joystick/keyboard controls, which throws the multiplayer balance off
gamepad and joystick gives obvious advantage over keyboard
joystick has obvious advantage over gamepad
with mouse it is not that easy - i would rather say it is two different strategies even when compared to keyboard
cause mouse doesn't allow dogfight - sitting on a tail and making barrels
other thing is nobody forces anybody to use a joystick
also everybody has a mouse, but not everybody has a joystick

[Striker]

The framerate-related jitter has to do a combination of things. First, with how TV/Fury3/Hellbender don't have a fixed timer, they are purely deltatime-based and can run code at any arbitrary framerate. So the faster the framerate, the more divergence in the behaviour. The second is SDL2, it doesn't have any support for floating point input values, and also doesn't support 1000hz polling rate. I'd need to upgrade to SDL3, which is a lot of work.

Also, with the mouse in relative mode, you can literally instant 180 like a typical FPS game. This isn't that kind of game, turning speed should be consistent across all devices.

That said, the absolute mode in TerminalFury is greatly improved over the absolute mode of the original game. It has a fixed bounding box that is even on both axes and is much snappier than TV's old code.

[robertmo]

game is a shooter not a realictic flight simulator. Both: original dos game and also boosted edition have relative mouse mode too. i also can play it both in dosbox and in boosted edition in mouse relative mode without any fps related problems. you can also always allow limiting fps in your game by turning on vsync and choosing resolution with lower Hz. everyone can also limit mouse polling in his mouse control pannel.
also if you configure the mouse so that you can make 180 quickly, than it is hard to do a precise aiming cause mouse is too fast. And using accelerated mouse mode makes fast and precise control harder. using a button to switch sensitivities is also slowing things down and having to adjust your brain to more than one sensitivity is also harder.
joystick also allows sensitivity and sensitivity curve and sensitivity/curve switch settings.

you can also play using a joystick and mouse together.
you can even have joystick in one hand and mouse in other hand.


why have you limited view distance so much?

[Striker]

Lots of game logic is tied directly to the draw distance. Can't extend it any further without really breaking the gameplay.

Another reason, is the cost to render the scene goes up EXPONENTIALLY with each increase of the draw distance. IE: If the draw distance is set to 32, which it is, it draws 64x64 tiles in both directions, that's 4096 tiles it needs to instance, set the matrices up for, and draw. If I bump it to 33, that's 66x66, bumping it to 4356 tiles it needs to draw, etc etc. It gets worse the higher it goes. A draw distance of 40 means I need to draw 6400 tiles, with barely any more visible benefit than a draw distance of 32. With the amount of CPU->GPU work that needs to be done for each tile, this gets expensive very quickly. Photex engine was never designed with modern GPU rendering philosophies in mind.

That said, in the next release I did push the fog boundary itself back, allowing more of what's already there to be seen, it should look like there's more draw distance when there really isn't, though at the risk of more obvious pop-in.

Also, about the mouse input, I don't get paid enough to argue. My decision is final. Also, the DOS game is indeed actually affected by the framerate issue I mentioned, it's just less obvious because Boosted Edition locks the framerate, and the DOS version runs at a ridiculous speed at all times on modern systems. I know this because I've had the code to both for almost 10 years and know how they work.

[robertmo]

how about adding relative mouse mode just for single player?

(i guess it would be also possible to make multiplayer allow mouse vs mouse or joy vs joy)

but i am asking about single player only.

i can play it in dosbox and in boosted edition and it is great this way. while joystick is struggling to hit anything for me.

[Striker]

robertmo, on 03 July 2026 - 02:58 AM, said:

how about adding relative mouse mode just for single player?

(i guess it would be also possible to make multiplayer allow mouse vs mouse or joy vs joy)

but i am asking about single player only.

i can play it in dosbox and in boosted edition and it is great this way. while joystick is struggling to hit anything for me.

If I implement it, that's probably what I'm going to do, singleplayer-only, or gated by a gameplay flag on servers.

[bingbong]

Striker, on 02 July 2026 - 04:56 AM, said:

Lots of game logic is tied directly to the draw distance. Can't extend it any further without really breaking the gameplay.

Another reason, is the cost to render the scene goes up EXPONENTIALLY with each increase of the draw distance. IE: If the draw distance is set to 32, which it is, it draws 64x64 tiles in both directions, that's 4096 tiles it needs to instance, set the matrices up for, and draw. If I bump it to 33, that's 66x66, bumping it to 4356 tiles it needs to draw, etc etc. It gets worse the higher it goes. A draw distance of 40 means I need to draw 6400 tiles, with barely any more visible benefit than a draw distance of 32. With the amount of CPU->GPU work that needs to be done for each tile, this gets expensive very quickly. Photex engine was never designed with modern GPU rendering philosophies in mind.

That said, in the next release I did push the fog boundary itself back, allowing more of what's already there to be seen, it should look like there's more draw distance when there really isn't, though at the risk of more obvious pop-in.

Also, about the mouse input, I don't get paid enough to argue. My decision is final. Also, the DOS game is indeed actually affected by the framerate issue I mentioned, it's just less obvious because Boosted Edition locks the framerate, and the DOS version runs at a ridiculous speed at all times on modern systems. I know this because I've had the code to both for almost 10 years and know how they work.

I just wanted to say a huge thanks for making this port to begin with! I've wanted higher resolutions and screen sizes for TV for a long time.

Also as someone also interested in mouse control, relative movement is fine (though I might want the option to disable the bounding box in the HUD like you showed in your video). Like you said, TV isn't a game where you can turn on a dime, so it makes sense.

My only wishlist would be to be able to eventually render it in VR or stereoscopic 3D, but I don't know how much extra work that would be either.