Hey guys, I checked the the board for previous threads about mouse control and the general consensus seems to be that the mouse sucks for anything but aiming when you're already on someone's tail and you should use the keyboard otherwise, or that you should turn the sensitivity way up to the point where it's not even good at that to make it so you don't have to pick it up off the mousepad every half second.
Has anyone here played airquake? Airquake is flight sim mod for Quake 1 that did flightsim mouse control right. See also
http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Quake.Detail&id=344 .
When you use a mouse in a first-person shooter, you snap the mouse around and your character does a 180 instantly. Obviously, this is not good behavior in a flight sim, so there's no reason a flight sim should check for mouse deltas since 100ms ago and then pretend that that's the mouse delta is the joystick orientation. The result of that is, you move the mouse, and then you turn by the maximum of how far you moved the mouse and how fast you're allowed to turn. So you end up whipping the mouse across the mousepad, picking it up and putting it back in the middle, repeating, and turning slower than you're supposed to be able to. In a dogfight, you often end up turning in the same direction for several seconds, so being able to do so without picking up the mouse is desirable.
It would be better if the mouse's position was used as the joystick orientation. Already, the mouse is forced to (gr_screen.max_x/2, gr_screen.max_y/2) at the beginning of a mission. After that, the mouse should be allowed to move around the window as much as it wants to , and then for example (point.x-gr_screen.max_x/2)/gr_screen.max_x could be used as the stick orientation.
This would make the mouse a lot more like a joystick. I argue that it's a good idea because I estimate that most gamers don't have joysticks.