Death of the Joystick?

[Dysko]

and am now currently using Wingman Extreme gamepad and occaisionally an Attack 3 (which i picked up for $10cdn) cause it handles somewhat poorly.

I had both of them.
The Extreme got his sensor broken after 2 years, and the Attack 3 always worked in a crappy way.

[Nuke]

i had a buddy who had a wingman extreme. it was a good stick but it wasnt that good. especially sence i played descent and it wasnt nearly adequit. i had to keep my left hand on the keyboards which made the throttle useless. i wanted to go with the high end model at the time, which had a couple knobs on the side for extra axes. but i could never find one.

i had a similar problem with the sidewinder force feedback (first version), but it had plenty of controls to play descent with. and at the time that was the most i had required. i used the 4 buttons on the left hand rest as my slide controls. i didnt like using the hat for that due to thumb ache. it didnt have any recentering springs and relyed on the force feedback to center it. as far as i recall it was the only stick with adjustable centering tension. i set it to none when i played flight sims. flying choppers you really dont want springs because your hand will wear out just maintaining straight and level flight. but it was the stick i played fs2 with.

it finally died because some cat i lived with decided to chew up the cable. so for awhile i just used a gravis gamepad, which i bought for my laptop untill i picked up an x36 (or was it an x45 i cant remember). im gonna go with ch next time around, they look well built.

looking at ch's industrial side reveals some cool gizmos. such as this
http://www.chproducts.com/oem/finger_ip_desktop.html
http://www.chproducts.com/oem/finger_desktop_mjfj.html
3 axis hall effect stick. though they neglect to mention the bit-accuracy of their adcs. it seems they have a whole bunch of custom options for designing a professional grade desktop stick, bet it costs more than a fighterstick, pro pedals and throttle combined.

[Thor]

i never like the three axis sticks...just give me left-right, forward-back

[Nuke]

indeed id rather have the yaw axis as pedals, but we make do.

[Herra Tohtori]

The reason why I would prefer my gaming peripherals to be all-metal constructions:



That, my friends, is the part in my Cyborg Evo that limits the stick's range of motion... There's a bloody crack with a triangular chunk missing on the gimbal base. It doesn't affect playing as far as I can tell, but interesting nevertheless. It's on the Y-axis back pressure side, so it's most likely simply a result of my frantic maneuvering in BtRL...

Perhaps I should loosen up my gaming hand just a little bit... I know the ship doesn't move any faster even if I rip the joystick apart like Captain Fukov, but I simply forget that while playing. Similar damage has already been inflicted to the trigger sensor, which caved in due to overabundant use of brute force, but that was solved by duct tape packers both inside and outside the stick...

[Roanoke]

My Sidewinder pro must >10yrs old, is dustier than an egyptian tomb but it just won't die!! It's like the HiLux from Top-Gear. Killing your Sidewinder could be a game initself.

Loosing my gameport ->usb adaptor was a blow though......

[Nuke]

think about it this way. most joysticks refresh at most 30 times a second. your monitor, with a good vid card can do twice that. so theres a small amount of delay between what you see is going on and what your trying to make happen. if your slamming your stick hard enough to do damage then yhoure going from one side to the other in about 5-10 position refreshes. also with the game physics, you must accelerate to the turning speed specified so in those 3-6 refreshes your ship has barely even started to turn and at mose have only turned a couple of degrees. slamming the stick wont make you turn faster.

youre also loosing control because youre not seeing the immediate results of your motion. say you have a ship in front of you, and it pulls a hard turn so that it is to your 10 oclock and at about 15 degrees of pitch above you. if you slam your stick its gonna jam in the corner and youre crosshair will be in a different spot than you want to be in when youre turn has completed. some agressiveness is required, but you should know where your field of motion ends so you can stop moving your hand.

if those gimbals were steel there would probibly be of metal filings in the inner workings of the thing. metal is not indestructable. what they need to do is lign the inner edge limiter with vulcanized rubber, id use steel in the gimbals and the limiter plte but id also use other materials to protect the metal.

i sorta blame spring centered joysticks on this. youre hand knows where its at and can feel the angle of the stick. also you have the screen as a clue to what youre doing. id rather have a friction clutch so that he stick would stay where its at, unless youre hand moves it. if you want to fly a chopper or aim your turret in mw2, you had to cut youre springs.

[Ulala]

I still use my Saitek Cyborg 3D Gold from 6 years ago for Battlefield 2142.

[Roanoke]

First time I played SystemShock2, maybe the 3rd "proper pc", as apposed to console, game I'd played and I was like "this is ****, I can't use the joystick!!"

I soon learned the error of my ways.

[vamitul]

just brought me a Trust  Predator Gm2500 . so far, it's great. the only problems are the very hard springs in it (after one hour of playing my hand is sore) and the deadzone.

[Dysko]

just brought me a Trust  Predator Gm2500 . so far, it's great. the only problems are the very hard springs in it (after one hour of playing my hand is sore) and the deadzone.

I didn't find the springs so hard.
However, the throttle died in 6 months.

[Wobble73]

just brought me a Trust  Predator Gm2500 . so far, it's great. the only problems are the very hard springs in it (after one hour of playing my hand is sore) and the deadzone.

It's SOOOOOOO tempting to say something about having weak wrists, but I shall refrain from doing so! 

[vamitul]

"your sarcasm has been noted, Mackie"

[haloboy100]

Freelancer ruined the joystick...

i meen they make a game that you can't even use the joystick with, and they call it a SPACE SIM!?!?

i want the thrill of battle and the feel as my ship as it flies through space blasting any enemy scum to dust with my SUPER-UBER-MEGATRON-LASERS OF L33T DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!! 


...ok so i played freespace 2 for 72 hours streight....go figure

[StarSlayer]

...ok so i played freespace 2 for 72 hours streight....go figure

As many people from Pan Asia have proven this can only lead to death.  The human body cannot play video games for that many hours without expiring

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4137782.stm (Nice job on the game picture )

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/19/1034561356377.html

Lets face it your body needs to eat, sleep, and BM.

[Herra Tohtori]

On Baldur's Gate 2 hints that were shown after loading, saving, resting etc.: "While your characters don't have to eat, you do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players."

Ain't that true...

[Mika]

Heh, the joysticks. The digital ones that were used with Spectrum and C64 were quite bad, didn't last that long, at least after Track & Field or something similar when your 120 kg uncle decided to have a try... Now that I think of it, its quite amazing I never noticed that the character would only turn with max rate or then not at all. Didn't seem to bother the game dynamics.

Cutting off the nostalgia, the joystick I bought for that P233 (1996 I suppose) turned out to be the best damn joystick I ever bought. I think that the CH Flightstick Pro has been manufactured at least from 1991 (Falcon 3.0 has it in its control set, along with the Thrustmaster). Quite a feat for design of that era. Still sitting next to me, ready for a session of Falcon 4 AF. Trusty old thing. I haven't even noticed any sensitivity losses, maybe there is a little more noise if you look at the inputs but that can be adjusted with dead-zone and recalibration.

According to my eyes, the thing which breaks the joysticks is slamming it hard to the other side. With a joystick that pits excessive forces against your force, the urge to do that is much higher. My old room mate had his shiny new joystick broken and tried this old CH. His only comment was that it felt too easy to move the thing. A matter of sensitivity, perhaps? I never had a problem with that, though. Calibrating the joystick so that it hits the software limit before the physical limit along any axis will surely help also. I have never used force-feedback systems, I cannot comment on those.

Funny thing those helicopter simulations, I never noticed I had to keep the collective in a single position when flying Janes' Longbow. I apparently did, but it belonged to the excitement of staying away from the SAMs that it went off unregistered. As a side note, it was the most boring military simulator I ever played.

Also, I recall some unfortunate bombing flight in F4AF where the bird took some serious damage from a nearby flak and partially lost the control surfaces. Thougths went somehow like this when using the trims: "Pitch control... Yaw control... Roll control... straighten dammit!" "Pitch and Roll to maximum!" "Counter the rotation and nose!" I still had to apply some force on the joystick during the flight back to base. That took one hour, by the way, and was not boring, quite contrary: "How the hell I'm going to put this back to the plate??!!" The landing is another story, that involving quite creative use of rudder and throttle, and a couple of missed approaches.

I only say you have weak hands. [/Slams door and runs away]

Mika

[Nuke]

i think the only difference with the newer ch hardware is the inclusion of a micro controller to process the signal data to convert it to digital for usb. im very intrested to know what the bit depth per axis is on the thing is. other than that i dont think the hardware has changed much.

one thing i noticed about chopper sims, and i was hopping airports in fs2004, is that using a twist handle on the x-52 or any other stick for that mater, is no replacement for a good set of rudder pedals. i remember the rocker on the saitek x36 was even worse. i went as far as removing the spring on the twist handle of my old sidewinder ff, which worked well in fs, but not that well in descent games. so i want the rudder on pedals where it belongs. so ch is the direction im going.