Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Akalabeth Angel on September 21, 2009, 01:02:47 pm
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What sort of set-up do people use for Descent? It seems to me that there are just two many keys to effectively control your craft.
I have a logitech wingman extreme but Descent doesn't seem to work very well with it. The HAT doesn't work for sliding, the bank function of the joystick has no effect either. And in reference to using it in conjunction with the keyboard, well you have to accelerate, slide in four directions and bank. That's 8 keys to take care of with one hand and far too many in my opinion.
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1. Get PPJoy and set up a mouse-powered virtual joystick.
2. In-game, bind yaw and pitch to joystick X and Y (which is really your mouse, since you're using PPJoy). Bind the throttle to the joystick Z (your mouse wheel). Left/right buttons are primary/secondary fire.
3. Bind the following keys:
W,A,S,D: Slide up,left,down,right
Z: Forward thrust
X: Rear thrust
Tab (OR Shift OR Ctrl): Afterburner
Q: Bank left
E: Bank right
And there are all of your core controls. Go blow stuff up. Totally doable 2-hand config.
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First-off, Descent should work just fine with the twist axis of a joystick; even the original retail game never had any trouble with me assigning it to bank. It should have no problem recognizing HAT switch directions, either. I don't think my old crappy Wingman Force 3D gave me any trouble, and that wasn't that far off from the Extreme. Does the controller config in the Windows control panel detect all of your joystick functions?
Secondly, I go with an all-joystick setup myself, though most people in the community seem to prefer either joystick+keyboard or mouse+keyboard. My joystick's X, Y, and Z axes are assigned to yaw, pitch, and roll, respectively, and I use the throttle for acceleration/deceleration. The HAT switch handles sliding, a button on the base of the stick controls the afterburner, and the primary and secondary fire are controlled by the trigger and main secondary button. There are quite a few joystick people who dump lateral motion and sliding off on the keyboard. Sushi's post contains a feasible mouse+keyboard combination, but there might be a few movements in there that are somewhat awkward to pull off. The most important thing to remember about Descent is that your config needs to allow you to move along all six degrees of freedom at once, while also firing weapons and working your afterburner. It's a bit of a tall order, but if you tweak your config enough, you should be able to find something effective that works for you.
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I use a keyboard only. My setup is 2/4/6/8 for turning, arrow keys for sliding, 7/9 for banking, enter/apostrophe/slash for forward/reverse/AB, 0/right control for firing, and 1/3 to switch weapons. The sliding is a bit odd since I often switch which hand I am using for it, but I've gotten used to it. I could do fairly well online with this in the past.
D1 was the first FPS I played, and I based my control schemes for FS and many other flying/driving games (not necessarily 6DOF) on this setup. I have sort of become ambidextrous with the numpad, since I use my right hand on it for keyboard-only games and my left hand for conventional mouse/keyboard FPSs. :p
One problem with such a setup is that keyboards tend to have stricter limits on the number of simultaneous keypresses on the numpad. The G15 I have now doesn't have this problem, but 3 or 4 keys was the limit on some of my past keyboards, which could easily be exceeded by tricording, turning and firing.
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Ah, the keyboard-only option. I have no idea how you guys do it, but I guess if it works, it works. :p
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We do it with a 1:1 mixture of pure skill and pure badass. The resulting explosion of awesome is considered a Mk. IV crime against humanity. :D
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WASD for forward, reverse, and sliding left and right. Q and E for banking, mousewheel for sliding up and down. Mouselook for pitch and yaw. The rest of the keys are defaults.
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1. Get PPJoy and set up a mouse-powered virtual joystick.
2. In-game, bind yaw and pitch to joystick X and Y (which is really your mouse, since you're using PPJoy). Bind the throttle to the joystick Z (your mouse wheel). Left/right buttons are primary/secondary fire.
3. Bind the following keys:
W,A,S,D: Slide up,left,down,right
Z: Forward thrust
X: Rear thrust
Tab (OR Shift OR Ctrl): Afterburner
Q: Bank left
E: Bank right
And there are all of your core controls. Go blow stuff up. Totally doable 2-hand config.
nice. :yes:
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Keyboard. Mostly default controls. I think I rebound the reverse view, though.
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My control scheme in Descent 1 and 2 is similar to my control scheme in Descent 3:
Up/Down Arrows: Thrust
Home/End: Pitch
Delete/Page Down: Bank
Numpads 2, 4, 6 and 8: Slide
Z: Primary Fire
X: Secondary Fire
Space: Afterburner
F: Flare
It must be pointed out that this isn't a very good control scheme, but it's the one I'm used to. Suffice to say that I never flew well in multiplayer (my efficiency was 29%).