It’s not about counteracting it. It’s the physical properties of an objects rotation. I’m not saying that it won’t be fast, in fact I’m completely agnostic about this whole argument. There will be always be a non instant rotation simply because there is mass to be rotated. I was answering why rotation had to be limited. It’s limited at some level by the physical properties of the ship.
I really don’t care if joystick or mouse is better…I’ll just use what I have the most fun flying. What I felt and flew with in the prototype seemed fine with me and I have no issues with current mechanics.
Sure they can. Rotation within a field can be very difficult, despite being able to impart linear motion to that field. That ‘field’ is the whatever-it-is that allows these ships to accelerate to ludicrous speed with ludicrous accelerations that should crush everyone and everything on a ship - but don’t.
It’s important to realize that these ships aren’t rockets, despite INS’s choice to make them look like rockets - which I have always considered to be absurd.
Oh, and as for controllers, the only thing I’ll offer is to reinforce the idea that systems should not be designed for a specific controller. Being able to instantly turn a ship simply because a controller can do that is silly. In contrast, being able to look around quickly does make sense. So a player relying entirely on a joystick can turn a ship naturally, but look around slowly. A player relying entirely on a mouse may find ship control a bit cumbersome, but looking around is very natural.
When VR comes along or pogo stick controllers or water-based controllers or whatever else, the control schemes will have to be redesigned, and it is the gameplay that will remain constant - so that’s where the focus should be placed.
The coconut effect is incredibly powerful. Ships in Infinity behave in a Newtonian fashion; therefore, people expect rocket nozzles.
It also serves the serves the rules of perception and cool. Flaming rocket nozzles easily sells that ships are actively maneuvering and looks visually interesting.
I’ve always flown with a mouse until this year when I got my first stick. Its weird and I’m still a far better pilot with the mouse, but I find it more fun and consequently more immersive with the stick. I looked into getting a gamepad for translations(all of this was in elite) and any other keys I might need but never bought one.
Flying elite FaOff with a stick was certainly a challenge but it made it rewarding to master. I still don’t understand the lack of rotational assist but I actually found it fun to slowly spin or roll through a belt looking for targets. It felt real.
Before I stopped playing I was forcing my aim/steadiness with the stick to get better by taking railguns out for a spin. What a rewarding feeling it is to take out an eagle or sidewinder in a few shots from a distance away with faoff!
I’m not a fan of ED’s flight model, with the extremely limited turn rates, so it looks like the seemingly small amount of movement on the 3D mouse wasn’t too constrictive. But it doesn’t seem like it’ll do well with a flight model akin to IBS.
What are your thoughts on this?
So for IBS with the mouse, does the ship follow the mouse or do we have to ‘saw’ the mouse pad?
I really, really like analogue input control for certain stuff. And that stuff is constant turn rates and, especially, translation. The most fun is in orbiting stuff while using all axis. But the nimbler the rotational axis are for each ship, the more frustrating it got to fly them with an “speed controller”. The translational axis on the other hand felt great all the way trough.
I would recommend just leaving it to the pilot and handing them the tools, like WarThunder did. Their Mouse Aim mode works from niblest fighter to big bomber all the way trough. Yes it’s op, but it’s also a lot of fun.
Allow this MouseAim mode to be disabled by ServerAdmins. So there will be Servers with Mouse Aim and Servers with “Speed Controller” aim, “virtual Joystick” style.
Me Personally I will do following: For nimble fighters in space I will use my mouse directly and only 3 Axis on the Space Mouse. For big bombers and in atmosphere I would like to have a button so I can transfer the rotation to the space mouse and use the mouse to free look. The only difference is that in the second instance the Reticles wont follow, I have to manually aim them, where in the first instance the ship is enough nimble to follow my view fast enough so there really isn’t a difference.
I am going to be annoyed if the mouse is intentionally gimped. I play PC because I don’t want to deal with the inaccuracy of controllers, not to have the feel of a controller while using a non-controller.
However, I don’t expect it to feel like a FPS either. There should always be some form of overshoot if I try to scroll directly onto a target and don’t slow before hand. Inertia should play its role, and every ship is going to have varying amounts of linear and rotational acceleration.
To take SC as an example, I have no idea how it is at the moment as I havent played for some time but it had direct mouse control, move the mouse over a target and the ship will follow, and with a very quick turnrate at that.
This really does put joysticks at such a disadvantage that playing against each other just wouldnt be fun.
While a big portion of SC is supposed to be singleplayer/solo stuff for some this is not an issue, but IB being strictly competetive I can definitly see an issue. At least if you are partly aiming for those who wishes to play with joysticks.
ED “solves” this by having a low turnrate. Their intent was not to balance out the controllers as much as just a concept they had for the game, but its a side effect of that design. And from what I can tell, both joystick and mouse users are pretty happy with it, aside from some complaints from both camps about the slow turnrate and restricted speedlimit.
Playing E:D with mouse is actually atrocious IMO.
In my view the whole flight mechanics in E:D ruin the whole game. It’s basically submarines in space,
SC’s primary mouse mode is, apart from some smoothing issues, a pretty standard vjoy(ED even has a slightly superior version) where the distance from the center of the screen controls your rotational speed, i wouldnt describe vjoy as “the ship will follow”. Some ships turn very fast and others turn slower than the helion, and thats only accounting for the fighter class ships which currently make up everything playable. I hope that, likewise, IB will have a good mix of turn rates on ships and i think controller imbalance is inherent to complexities like this. If you prefer a joystick you’ll likely prefer slower turning ships too, it just works to it’s advantage. maybe you’d like to bring that mess over from the SC forums but the majority of people discussing that topic there have been swept up in a kind of hysteria about controller imbalance and stopped progressing the discussion long ago.
E:D’s solution isnt something anyone really wants to emulate here seeing how far a departure it is from Newtonian flight, furthermore i think the main reason controllers dont matter as much there is a combination of the complete lack of real challenge and competiton in it’s game world, in addition to an extremely slowed down combat system, in all respects not just turn rate, where you could probably control the game competently with an array of toaster levers.
I’d like to point out that it’s possible modders will make a server for people with joyaticks only. Everyone wins like that. Can anyone confirm if that’s possible?
It would be pretty hard to do it with modding as I don’t see any easy way to check if someone connecting has the mod that limits his input scheme. This has been shown in other games. When it comes to things that affect everyone, it’s easier, it might just crash an unmodded client, but it would work. But when you just want to edit the way a ship input is send …
I think I-Novae should really implement two input models for Mouse and let server admins limit what is allowed on said server. WarThunder has game modes other then Arcade where exactly what we are discussing happens. There’s the Mouse Aim mode, where the mouse is used to aim in a direction like in FPS and the virtual Joystick mode that just simulates a Joystick and isn’t any better or worse then a Joystick and really quite comparable.
I wouldn’t really call the modes “Realistic” and “Arcade” as with Starships Mouse Aim might be realistic and viable, unlike Vehicles from the 20th Century.
From my experience in the ancient infinity combat prototype and flightsimming in general, I’m pretty sure that mouse aiming is the way to go for space combat.
Sticks might be more viable in dense atmosperes where having more constant inputs is probably more helpful. Overly twitchy mouse movements in atmosphere seem to cause some nasty spinning from what I’ve seen in Battlescape prototype vids.
