Yeah I know it's been mentioned a lot already, but I got this idea that I quite like a while ago and, while taking my shower, I thought about it again and figured "heck, why not submiting it anyway?". So here I go:
One of the most popular ideas is to have a Freelancer-like mouse control. It's very nice and allows you good control with just a mouse. But the thing is, it is perfectly adapted to FL only because the ships have turret-mounted weapons.
I've just tried the demo of SpaceForce 2, which basically is what we'd want here: FL mouse control, w/o the turrets. Now it is nice to play, but there's one problem: you tend to move the mouse to the target thingy that lets you know where you should shoot, and not your actual targeting reticle. So of course you shoot behind your target. Ok you keep going on, and you get the grasp at moving the actual reticle over the projected target thing.
Now things get better, you hit... when your target flies straight. But they, of course don't, most of the time. And now you enter a whole new world of pain. You have to guess where the ship will turn, because it takes longer for your reticle to move to where your mouse points than for your target to actually move away. So you miss a lot, not because you don't have the reflexes or you're a bad shot, but because your ship just won't shoot where you want, when you want, it's always half a second late if your target is doing anything else than an easy to predict curve. So before you used to have to predict where your target would go, and now you have to predict where your ship will point at that moment as well.
This is obviously why they put turreted weapons in Freelancer. But we don't have turrets in Freespace, and I assume that, unless you're flying a transport or something, we don't want them anyway.
So I got this idea that, I think, is quite good:
make the WHOLE ship a "turret".
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Hold on, don't start thinking "lol, that's totally idiotic", at least wait for my explanation, then feel free to.
...
Come on, calm down, take a deep breathe. Stop the drooling too, please.
Thank you.
So my explanation... it is difficult to explain, so bear with me, it may be awkward and lengthy.
Imagine the current Freespace HUD (imagine one with an actual cockpit mesh, it will be easier, and the whole idea will be more efficient with one anyway). To that HUD, you add one crosshair. That one is where the current crosshair is, so, while moving straing forward, both the old and new ones overlap.
Now that new crosshair NEVER moves, whatever you do, it just indicates the center of your screen, right?
Now you want to turn ( I know you want to), so you move the mouse to the left, because there's that nasty cargo hanging there, and you want to shoot it and blow it up to pieces.
In Freelancer, this is what you get: the mouse cursor moves where you move your mouse (yes!), and the turrets point there too, so you will still shoot where you point. The ship also turns more or less slowly toward that direction. This is good because you retain a great accuracy, but this is bad because it makes things easy as cake, since unless the target actually goes out of the screen, the maneuvrability of your ship has little impact on wheither you will hit or not.
Now what we've got with my idea. You move the mouse to the left, ok? The new reticle doesn't move one bit, it remains right there in the middle of the screen. What you move on the screen is the OLD reticle, and along with it, the WHOLE cockpit (and along with the cockpit, the WHOLE ship). The farther you move the reticle, the faster the ship turns, as always, BUT with its max rotation limit set by the speeds writen down in the ships.tbl file. The distance you can move the reticle should be also limited, say you turn at max ship's rotation speed when the reticle reaches half the distance to the side of the screen ( because you don't want your ship to face somewhere out of the screen where there might be a sathanas 20 meters away ready to ram you to death). And when I say half the distance, it can be less than that, you don't need to move it a lot for the ship to move after all, since you can have expentional speed the farther you go away, and you don't want the HUD to get out of view either. The new reticle has only one purpose: to know where to bring the targeting reticle back if you don't want to turn.
So you will have the nice FL control, still retaining the fixed firepoints systems, but actually shooting where your mouse is pointing at, w/o making it any easier for the player thanks to turrets or whatnot. To sum up, you take the mouse control system and just reverse which reticle the mouse actually moves. One additional bonus is that it actually gives a purpose to 3D cockpits.
Voila, I'm done.
"puts on flame-resistant suit"
