Being the game that led on to Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, I am a little interested in this series of old games, particularly the first person perspective 3D games.

Can anyone tell me what the control scheme is like? Is it the same as in Wolfestein 3D and Blake Stone with the ability to use the mouse?

Also, an additional question, what order should the games be played? I'm sure I can find this on Google or something, but well, I'm asking one question so may as well ask this second one too. :)

When you launch the game you are given a list of the games starting from 1-5 with 6 quitting the launcher. The games are in proper order from 1-5 so just start at 1 beat it and move on to 2 etc.

Just one thing to note, this pack is missing one game, the very original release. It is free online at the bottom right of http://www.downloadstore.com/

I can somewhat see why it wasn't included in this pack though, as it has absolutely no story apparently. It only has 10 levels and doesn't allow you to save. If you die you start from the beginning. That said the very first map has a secret along the southern wall which allows you to jump to levels 3, 5, 7 & 9. You also have to 'dig' through secret tunnels, firing one shot for every block opposed to the sequel where hitting a secret wall will cascade the entire section of the secret wall.

So... The initial trilogy from id Software:
0. Catacomb (see download above if you want to play it)
1. The Catacomb (aka Catacomb II)
2. Catacomb 3D

The Gamer's Edge trilogy or the "Lets try and confuse players by using an A word for all the subtitles"
3. Catacomb Abyss
4. Catacomb Armageddon
5. Catacomb Apocalypse

These last two always confuse me cause I'm never quite sure which is worse, an Armageddon or an Apocalypse.

A warning about the first two games, Catacomb & The Catacomb, both feature levels where using a key on a wrong door can result in you getting stuck. If you have trouble navigating these maps I'd recommend this brilliant site:
http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/PC/index
It has maps of all the Catacombs games except 3D. Not as necessary for the 3D games but really helps with the top down ones.

I managed to find a demo version of Catacomb 3D so that I could try out the controls, and now I can see what you mean. However, I find the keyboard turning to be a bit off for a first person perspective. For instance, with keyboard turning you get a constant rate of turn speed, whilst with the mouse you can turn slowly or quickly, which is more intuituve and gives a feeling of greater control.

I have a utility (a DOS application that runs in DOSBox) that cancels mouse forward and backward motion. I used this for Blake Stone and Wolfenstein 3D, so I can try running it with that to stop the mouse moving me forwards and backwards.

Then I'll try using the DOSBox keymapper to adjust the controls. The cursor keys (turn left and right, move forwards and backwards) and the keypad (for combinations of turning and moving) are okay, but they are quite distant from the other controls (H, B, N for heal, bolt and nuke, as well as the numbers for the scrolls). I could try using the keymapper for W and S for cursor up and down, and A and D for the strafe modifier plus left and right cursor, so that they are strafe left and right. This is similar to what I did for Blake Stone and Wolfenstein, giving a more modern control feel, but it doesn't give strafe turning as the modifier causes mouse left and right to strafe too, but it is still something.


UPDATE:

It worked fine, and upping the mouse sensitivity in the DOSBox config file (to 150 instead of 100) also improved the mouselook.

So now my controls are:

Mouse for left and right turning
Mouse left click - fire
W - forwards
S - backwards
A - strafe left
D - strafe right
Shift - run (both shift keys activate run)
H - healing potion
B - rapid fire bolt
N - nuke blast

And the following controls still exist for optional usage:

Mouse right click - strafe
Ctrl - fire
Alt - strafe
Cursor keys for forwards, backwards and turning
Keypad controls for movement and turning combinations


The only downside is that the WSAD keys are dual mapped to both the letters themselves (for typing savegame and highscore names) aswell as the cursor keys (with the strafe modifier for A and D), but this only causes a minor irritation when typing the letters in a name as sometimes the cursor moves either before or after typing those particular letters.

As mentioned before, though, you still can't strafe and turn at the same time as the modifier activates meaning mouse turning becomes strafing too, but then the game was never designed for strafe turning anyway, so it isn't a flaw as such.

Try as I might I just can't configure dosbox to map left and right strafe to A and D. I can get them to turn though, just not to strafe. Can someone give me some foolproof help?

Thanks

Can you please post a tutorial on how to change the controls? And the name of the application that unbinds the mouse y-axis?

Whoa, never expected to get a reply to a post I made almost 5 years ago.

The utility to stop forwards and backwards motion from the mouse is called novert.com, and it also gets referenced in the Blake Stone, Doom and possibly also Wolfenstein, forums. If I remember rightly, you need to do some hex editing to get it to work right for the Catacombs 3D games, though.

As for modifying the controls, there are plenty of guides for how to use the DOSBox keymapper. Here's one, for example:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Mapper

Thank you. Yeah I'm late to the party but I recently got into retro fps games and the Catacomb games looks cool. I' just not sure if I will be able to get used to the default controls

I cant believe he actually bound strafe to A and D. Strafe requires RMB to be pressed. Dont believe cirle strafe works either. So its not SOLVED.

I used Reflection Keen source port for the Cat3D and it worked just fine apart from starfe problem. For the AAA games I still had to use DosBox and it took me a while to find a working controls scheme, as adjusting sensitivity doesnt help much. Finally I remapped Tab to Shift, so I use Shift+A/D for fast turning and it gets more or less playable.

The games themselves are a milestone in FPS genre and definately not worse than Wolf3D. Abyss is my favorite so far.

It's not that hard to modify Reflection Keen's keyboard handling to change the turn keys to permanent strafe keys that work independent of mouse turning. ;-)

Could you clarify how to do that?

Do you know how to compile the source code?

If you do, it's very easy: If you want to modify cat3d, you have to edit src/id91_11/cat_all/cat3d/c3_wiz.c

Search for “ControlMovement” or “strafing”. You should see the gray and red text in the attached screenshot. Delete everything that's red in my screenshots, but take care to leave the “speed = 0;” (green) bits.

Recompile. Done.

Edit: Oh… If you've never seen a diff view… ignore the + and - at the beginning of each line and everything that starts with an @.