dpJudas wrote:Okay, so the world is vertically scaled by 1.2 for reasons only Carmack knows.

320x200 logical aspect ratio of 4:3 physical monitors means that the image was stretched to the equivalent of 320x240.
So what happens when you render on square pixels, rather than stretched pixels? As long as you can't actually change the view pitch (and with Y-shearing you're not actually changing the view pitch, projection is still horizontal) then you can get away with just stretching the rendered image. But if you start getting a polygonal renderer that lets you look up and down for real, then stretching the rendered image just doesn't work anymore. Not stretching also doesn't work, though. The only solution? Stretch the
world. That way things still look like they should,
and you can look at them at weird angles.
TL;DR: blame Mode 13h and Mode Y; this all would have been avoided if Doom had been coded in Mode X instead.