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[Raapys]

Raapys
You don't understand why rolling is an integral part of 6dof dogfighting?

Although this guy is using a mouse (but is using a throttle and TrackIR), the mouse controls in Disaspora (Freespace 2 mod) aren't nearly as auto-assist as those in Arena Commander currently.

This is a decent, though not perfect, example of what Newtonian 6dof ought to look like. If he were using a joystick instead of a mouse, he'd have superior pitch and yaw control. You cannot do this with just a mouse and keyboard (throttle control's not fine enough, among other considerations), particularly with a setup that encourages chase-the-mouse for targeting rather than point-the-nose.

It looks cool and all, but why's the spinning necessary? How, practically speaking, does it make a difference from just turning the ship around while continuing in the original direction? He could just do a 180 with his nose and fire backwards; he'd have far more control than with all that spinning around, and he'd also have a smaller profile than with all the spinning around.

 

[Blaine]

I think most of us are flight sim noobs and don't fully understand what the problem is. From reading your posts, it seems like the problem isn't mouse aiming, but mouse aiming on top of flight assist.

Essentially, yes. 1:1 mouse aiming (for gimbaled guns) tied directly to automated flight controls is a problem, because it's extremely arcadey. You merely move your mouse in the general direction of your enemy, and, once he's on your viewscreen, hitting his ship is on the whole as easy as playing Duck Hunt on the NES, because all you really need to do is hover your mouse cursor over his ship. You're aiming a gun and the ship's moving to follow, like an FPS where you're playing a really fat dude. This game isn't supposed to be Quake in space, especially not slow-mo Quake in space.

If guns are fixed, and you must aim the nose of your ship (which doesn't move near-instantaneously, as the mouse cursor/gimbaled guns do), then mouse controls are balanced—a mouse and keyboard are much more precise at aiming, but worse at maneuvering. A HOTAS is excellent for maneuvering, but not as good at pinpoint aiming.

The current mouse controls in Arena Commander are like the mouse having its cake and eating it, too. Both maneuvering and aiming are reduced to straightforward, simple exercises and I absolutely promise you it'll become tedious quickly.

I have a question. What if there were two different modes. Like if you held shift, the guns would follow the mouse, but the ship wouldn't and when you let go the ship would follow the mouse, but the guns would point directly in front of the ship?

Mouse users would never go for that, and plus, that would be even worse for them (I'd think) than simply changing the way gimbaled guns work to be more controller agnostic.

It looks cool and all, but why's the spinning necessary? How, practically speaking, does it make a difference from just turning the ship around while continuing in the original direction? He could just do a 180 with his nose and fire backwards; he'd have far more control than with all that spinning around, and he'd also have a smaller profile than with all the spinning around.

I linked a video because it's just one of those things that's difficult to explain properly, and must be experienced.

 

[Bradylama]

Rolling the craft helps orient the pilot to the objects around him or her (or xem) in a more intuitive way, plus the pitch may be more powerful than the rudder, so you would use that more often in a dogfight. Banking turns can also juke somebody on your tail while they're stuck following the previous lead. If you can roll and bank quickly enough you have a chance of turning the tables on your pursuer. If you tried doing this same thing with FPS controls, your ship would move in a clear swinging arc that your opponent can just as easily follow. It's like telegraphing a punch with no option of feinting.

Now, in games like this with Newtonian or semi-Newtonian models you could just maintain trajectory and turn the ship around, but keeping your trajectory also makes you an easier target.

Spoiler

Pilot orientation is still vitally important even in a space game. You want to know for certain that you're not going to dive into an asteroid or a capital ship deck while trying to perform some kind of fancy maneuver.

 

[Blaine]

Indeed.

Rolling can be combined with pitch and yaw in various ways, to produce a corkscrew maneuver (imagine a colored smoke contrail), for example. This is totally impossible without the ability to roll.

Granted, rolling is much more useful in an atmosphere where down is down and up is up, but it's still necessary in space for fancy maneuvers.

 

[Raapys]

Mm I'm not entirely convinced, but my experience with joystick play is limited to a few hours many years ago, so I'll take your word for it. I could never get the stupid thing to sit properly on the table; every time I did a sudden maneuver it would unstick and leave me hanging. That, and the thruster would never calibrate correctly despite my efforts, so I always ended up with a minimum speed of +- 10m/s instead of zero.

Don't think I tried it at all in a newtonian setting.

 

[Haba]

Still would love seeing someone convince me on how it makes sense to have a sci-fi setting where fighter craft controls are worse than in modern day fighters...

 

[Blaine]

Still would love seeing someone convince me on how it makes sense to have a sci-fi setting where fighter craft controls are worse than in modern day fighters...

Well, let's have a go at this F-22 cockpit... do I see a joystick there on the right? Is that a throttle over there on the left? And are those pedals I spy beneath the instrumentation, by any chance?

But wait! Perhaps fighter pilots can't use mice because they'd vibrate and bounce around the cockpit every time the aircraft dived, banked, accelerated, etc. I wonder what drone pilots use, since they sit at a desk in an office?

Holy fuck, are they using joysticks and throttles? Could there perhaps also be pedals underneath those desks? I see they have trackballs and keyboards for when needed, but why are they still using those shitty old HOTAS controls?

I wonder why the US Air Force hasn't configured their aircraft and drones to follow a mouse cursor?

In a realistic future, a stick, throttle, and pedals would still be used for maneuvering, but the guns and missiles would automatically track and aim themselves through computer guidance without any user input at all save target selection. In fact, many modern weapons systems practically do this already. So if you're going to make a realism argument, make it properly.

 

[bertram_tung]

Played both Arena Commander and Elite Dangerous Premium Beta, and I have to say Elite blows away AC so far.

Yeah, AC is newer and not as far along, but the flight mechanics of Elite are way more codexian.

 

[warpig]

Still would love seeing someone convince me on how it makes sense to have a sci-fi setting where fighter craft controls are worse than in modern day fighters...

In a realistic future, a stick, throttle, and pedals would still be used for maneuvering, but the guns and missiles would automatically track and aim themselves through computer guidance without any user input at all save target selection. In fact, many modern weapons systems practically do this already. So if you're going to make a realism argument, make it properly.

Controls in a "space fighter" if such a thing could ever exist would imo probably be the AI hadnling everything or maybe the pilot being a brain in a jar hooked into the ships computer and there wouldn't be any dogfighting. But we're talking about a game so fuck realism, stick+throtthe controls make sense because playing space dogfighting games with a joystick is more fun than using a mouse.

 

[Haba]

Exactly, one shouldn't use the realism argument when we're talking about sci-fi rocketships. You want to be a space cowboy and dogfight with a joystick, I'm cool with that.

After all, like I've said, a realistic space sim would be fuck all fun.

 

[Bradylama]

Exactly, one shouldn't use the realism argument when we're talking about sci-fi rocketships.

Still would love seeing someone convince me on how it makes sense to have a sci-fi setting where fighter craft controls are worse than in modern day fighters...

The row over the current kb+m controls has much more to it than some sense of "realism," but rather the fundamental manner in which the game is experienced. Like I've said before, this is a game where players are expected to take out insurance policies on their ships. If PvP is imbalanced to heavily favor mouse users with arcade controls, then the game is effectively no different from every other stale arcade dogfighter on the market. We were sold on a Wing Commander/Privateer MMO during all the pledge drives, not Ace Combat in Space.

 

[J_C]

I finally could give a spin to AC. As I feared, my rig is not good enough (or the game is not optimized enough) to handle the game. I only have 30 fps max, but even in an empty space, it tends do dip into the twenties. I believe in a dogfight, it would be even lower. Well, I have a few years until the game is released :D I will upgrade my PC by then.

 

[Blaine]

My latest contribution to the mouse auto-aiming wars:

 

[Bradylama]

Big new patch today so they can show off the $180 Freelancer and some of the finalists from their ship design contest. Those of us without Blaine money are having our hangers temporarily upgraded to Deluxe so we can gawk at the gnarly shit we'll never own.

My Fighterstick also came in the mail. I haven't been able to test it out yet since the fat patch is still installing. I really like the feel of it and it's seriously making me consider buying the Pro Throttle. If I do I'd have to get another tv tray/table to form a boxed in battlestation.

 

[Blaine]

hangers

My Fighterstick also came in the mail. I haven't been able to test it out yet since the fat patch is still installing. I really like the feel of it and it's seriously making me consider buying the Pro Throttle. If I do I'd have to get another tv tray/table to form a boxed in battlestation.

That's the feel of a quality motion assembly—almost completely smooth (you can feel the fine texture of the barrels' material sliding across each other, barely), solid as a rock, feels like a well-oiled machine, and you can tell that all the parts fit perfectly together within narrow tolerances. It will continue to feel that way for the next decade or so, or perhaps only five or six years if you beat the shit out of it almost every day.

If you put your hand on a Saitek x52 stick and move it about, it'll feel slightly "grind-y," slightly "non-solid," a bit "wavery." It's not bad (or even poor) per se and is difficult to describe properly. It will develop issues or break much sooner than a Fighterstick, especially if you're rough on it.

It's just impossible to explain this to most people. They see that the x52 set is about $60 cheaper than the CH Products Fighterstick and Pro Throttle, but don't realize that the CH Products stuff will last 2-3x longer (the Saitek throttle will probably last longer than the stick, however). And if you're getting pedals too, the price difference is even more negligible, because Saitek pedals cost about the same as CH Products pedals. It's about $300 vs. about $240.

It's like that example of how it's more expensive to be poor than middle-class: A middle-class person can afford a pair of $200 boots that will last ten years, while the poor person buys $40 boots that fall apart after 1-2 years.

 

[Blaine]

By the way, the mouse vs. joystick war continues in earnest on 4chan's /vg/:

 

[Bradylama]

hangers

I buy you all of these beautiful spaceships, AND YOU PUT THEM ON DISCOUNT HANGERS!?!?

Anyways, I DO love the feel of the stick, but the inability to remap any of the controls in-module makes it impossible to control the Hornet the way it's meant to. Of course, ALL controller configurations are active, but just being able to map yaw to some keyboard buttons would make all the difference. (of course, what I really want to do is apply it to one of the 4-hats)

Also, Deluxe hangars are FUKKEN HUGE. Bigger than the Xbox, and I don't mean that facetiously. Anybody who buys a gunship, high-end explorer, or a frigate is practically going to have to buy one of those golf carts. It's too much distance and you're getting none of the cardio.

 

[Blaine]

Also, new addition:

 

[Turisas]

Stick bros.

 

[Severian Silk]

I will be using a gamepad most likely. Was able to play successfully FreeSpace, Tachyon and IWar 2 using it.

I have a joystick, but I was never comfortable using it. It sits too high on the table.

 

[Blaine]

I will be using a gamepad most likely. Was able to play successfully FreeSpace, Tachyon and IWar 2 using it.

I have a joystick, but I was never comfortable using it. It sits too high on the table.

You must master your environment, Severian, and bend it to your will. Never let your environment master you.

Spoiler

I'm telling you to stop by Lowes, OfficeMax, and/or IKEA

By the way, devs have responded to the control scheme issues; should still be on the front page of the dev tracker here:

http://partedveil.com/

There's a lot more to get into than what's covered there, but suffice it to say it's not quite time to start panicking over controls/gimbaled guns yet.

 

[Blaine]

 

[Destroid]

Now if this was battlezone at that point you would whip out your sniper rifle, blast the pilot, and steal his ship.

 

[Blaine]

The Redeemer gunship just won The Next Great Starship competition and will be implemented in the game.

I'd post pictures, but the CIG website just died.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustri...-team-four-horsemen-redeemer-class-gunship/p1



Freelancer using a jump point:

http://a.pomf.se/epcmlw.webm

 

[Disgruntled]

Almost a forgone conclusion with the Redeemer. That team got work done fast and the rest could barely catch up in the end.
But the one I actually want to buy didnt even get third place . Chris better get them sorted into the game anyway.

Spoiler