First post!

I thought I'd start this blog off the right way, a picture of me playing drinking games on the beach in a viking helmet!

Time to get my life on the internet started.

Call of Duty 4 Ironsights

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at Call of Duty 4 and how effective their ironsights are at the most fundamental levels. The entire mechanic is polished and well thought out.



Indulge the player's fantasy that they are a professional soldier, well-equipped and well-trained, fighting in a real battle. The entire feature seems to be built around providing immersion and ease of use.

First-person shooters have a fundamentally simple mechanic at their most fundamental level: Find the bad guy, move the screen so the bad guy is in the crosshair, then pull the trigger to kill them. On the PC, where first-person shooters have always thrived, the mouse works as a natural interface for looking around. On the console, however, the analog thumbsticks are neither as precise or natural. Therefore, console shooters take a number of extra steps to help the player.

I'll discuss two techniques, soft lock and adhesion, that actually influence the look speed and view rotation explicitly in another post. For now, I want to focus on how Call of Duty solves this problem in single player.



This auto-lock and snapping technique is only used in the single-player. The console game plays radically different from the PC version in terms of controls. The player is constantly scanning, moving their view to find another target. When they are within a reasonable distance to another target, they pull the left trigger to take aim, then pull the right trigger to fire. Instead of wrestling with the controls to look at the target, it is easy and tactical.