Do any games give you air motion sickness? *OT*

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, August 05, 2013, 18:56 (4474 days ago) @ stabbim

I wonder why Marathon in particular seems to do it for so many people? This isn't the first time I've heard it called out specifically. I get why something like Portal would trigger motion sickness, but what about Marathon would set it apart from other first-person games?

There are a lot of possible causes.

It's got faster motion than most modern games and an interesting flow of in-game movement.

Some people might take issue with the use of sprites for some objects which would be handled by 3d models in modern games.

But one thing that I suspect might be an issue is the perspective projection; it literally does not account for the pitch of the camera, only the yaw.
Imagine that the camera is always looking toward the horizon, and you have an 80-degree horizontal field of view, but your field of view is massive in the vertical direction; that is, it's a very thin and tall image, letting you can see way up and way down. BUT, suppose someone lays a viewing window over the image so that you can only see 80-FOV slices with a 2:1 aspect ratio at any given time; to see the whole thing, you have to slide the viewing window up and down. That's basically how looking up and down in Marathon works. It's a really efficient graphical approximation for a game with that sort of engine; for instance, Doom does the same thing, but it's not apparant in the original version of Doom because it doesn't let you look up and down.