[DaBrain]

My joystick is broken, so I have to use the mouse for now. It's not that bad, but there are some things that could be better.

Well, not everybody has a joystick anymore nowdays. This his why games like Freelancer improved their mouse controls.


Most basic thing: Support the wheel! My mouse doesn't have many buttons, so every single thing counts.
The wheel would be prefect for the throttle control.


No hard turns! That's the biggest problem imho. It's hard to turn. I can increase the sensitivity, but not without making it harder to aim.
This is just an idea, maybe there are other ways to fix this.

The cross is your mouse postion. You can't move it out of this ring. The closer you get the the edge of the ring, the faster the rotation in this direction will get. (exponential). In the the center part, the precision is very high, so the aiming will work perfectly.




I've no idea about the shape of this part of the code... I'm pretty sure my second suggestion will be problematic. But still consider it. It might just be the one missing bit to increase the userbase a lot.

[Prophet]

Yes. Freelancery mouse control would be neat.

And I thought wheel works already...?

[asyikarea51]

I use an old-school ball mouse, and I have to turn the sensitivity up just to get some of the... "heavier"... ships to turn. And even then, I'm not getting a fast-enough turn rate, even at maximum level (although it's tolerable/okay on the more agile ships like the Ulysses). I don't have too much of a problem in weapons aiming though.

Just felt that I should've pointed that out, even though I've sort of already learned to live with it...

[taylor]

Code: [Select]

while ( !(post-3.6.9 == new pilot code == new input code == better joystick control == better mouse control
            == mouse wheel support == more button support == freelancer-style mouse control) )
{
    printf("!!!  IF I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF ONE MORE TIME....  !!!\n");
    repeat++;

    if (repeat > 1) {
        signal(SIGKILL, term_handler_EVERYONE);
        exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
    }
}

[ARSPR]

The cross is your mouse postion. You can't move it out of this ring. The closer you get the the edge of the ring, the faster the rotation in this direction will get. (exponential). In the the center part, the precision is very high, so the aiming will work perfectly.

I feel this can be a good improvement. You would be using the mouse like if it were mounted in the top of a virtual joystick. I remember a very old helicopter simulator which worked really fine in this way. Even, as joysticks usually have ugly zero errors, some people will throw them away (despite of their extra buttons).

[Admiral Edivad]

No hard turns! That's the biggest problem imho. It's hard to turn. I can increase the sensitivity, but not without making it harder to aim.
This is just an idea, maybe there are other ways to fix this.

The cross is your mouse postion. You can't move it out of this ring. The closer you get the the edge of the ring, the faster the rotation in this direction will get. (exponential). In the the center part, the precision is very high, so the aiming will work perfectly.

I agree.
I have a laptop with the mousestick...
and to control the ship is even worse than with a mouse! But the precision on a slow target is good.

[DaBrain]

@taylor

I didn't want to request new stuff before 3.6.9. Just had this idea and thought it would be a good one.
I wasn't sure if there where any plans to work on something like that.

Yes. Freelancery mouse control would be neat.

And I thought wheel works already...?

Could you please check that. It doesn't work for me for sure.

[Freespace Freak]

Wait!  Taylor, you're saying that 3.6.9 will have Freelancery mouse support??? Will this be in RC8 I guess??

[Turey]

Wait!  Taylor, you're saying that 3.6.9 will have Freelancery mouse support??? Will this be in RC8 I guess??

post-3.6.9

as in this is MAYBE a 3.7.0 feature.

Please don't make taylor go insane. we need him for coding.

[Freespace Freak]

I thought that meant post as in a forum post!

[taylor]

@taylor

I didn't want to request new stuff before 3.6.9. Just had this idea and thought it would be a good one.
I wasn't sure if there where any plans to work on something like that.

My point was that both features have already been coded.  It's part of the (already complete) new mouse code, which is from the (already complete) new joystick code, which is part of the (already complete) new input handling code, which is part of the (not complete) new pilot file code, which is coming post-3.6.9.  I've mentioned this more than a dozen times already, anytime someone brings up something about better joystick/mouse support.

Support for both was added since it has been requested about every month for over a year.

And I thought wheel works already...?

The current code only supports the first 3 mouse buttons, nothing else.  Support for the wheel will arrive when the new pilot file code does.

[Nuke]

you might be able to do it now with wmc's latest scripting build. theres a whole stack of phisics vars to play with. you could probibly throw something together to hold you off in the mean time.

[Backslash]

   taylor, that's got to be the most entertaining reply method I've seen all year.  And it's also funny that it's not just some newb asking this time...

Poor taylor, he works so hard, but half of it is so awesome that it gets missed or flies over our heads.  We should make a sticky of "Stuff Not to Ask Taylor About Again".

No hard turns! That's the biggest problem imho. It's hard to turn. I can increase the sensitivity, but not without making it harder to aim.

Agreed.  I find I use a silly combination of the numpad and the mouse, which works pretty well all things considered.  That is, I do that only when away from home and my joystick   Though, the mouse is the ultimate for Maxim sniping...

I have a laptop with the mousestick...

Ouch, well there goes the numpad idea for you I'm sorry...

[DaBrain]

Don't burn me. I've missed the posting taylor talked about the controls...

I remember the same situation with WMC. It's not easy to keep on track with the features.

[Prophet]

Just ask a non-coder to name 10 new features in the engine... 
I have to think hard just to name few, and even those are old stuff like fighterbeams and some FRED functions. One just can't remember all this whitout spending time in making/using the features.

[DaBrain]

Well that wouldn't be a problem for me. I could just name all features I'm using. So I could easily name more than ten.

[Kaine]

i want those explosions.

[WMCoolmon]

I've forgotten most of the features I've implemented. Some of the more esoteric and minor ones, for instance. I don't think anyone really cares about the majority, although I think it would be interesting to dig through the commit logs sometime to see what features I implemented, but completely forgot about.

Of course the most major ones - hud_gauges.tbl and the lab GUI system - I hardly ever think about anymore, since they were discontinued before they ever really amounted to anything. (And in both cases, finishing them would take a _lot_ of work)

These days, I often find that I can't just implement things because the way that I want to do it would involve ripping out a major portion of the existing code and rewriting it to something more organized and expandable. A lot of the scripting stuff I have the problem of seeing something that could cause a major hackish situation in the future, but would require either a major redesign, or a painfully imperfect workaround to get the effect I'm hoping for. (Eg the two sound lists in sounds.tbl use many of the same functions, but are still stored separately in memory. Slapping those into scripting either means duplicating the functions for the different types of sounds, creating a 'generic sound' scripting object, or rewriting key portions of the highlevel sound code to make the whole thing make more sense, while still maintaining backwards compatibility with the TBL and the rest of the code. The fact that retail interface sounds are hardcoded is even more painful.)

[ARSPR]

The cross is your mouse postion. You can't move it out of this ring. The closer you get the the edge of the ring, the faster the rotation in this direction will get. (exponential). In the the center part, the precision is very high, so the aiming will work perfectly.

I've just realized... IMO the boundary should be a square rather than a circle.

The ships have two clearly diferent movements: x-axis for left-right turning and y-axis for up-down pulling. In this way if you are at '45º', the ship doesn't just move to that direction (right and down). It pulls and it turns at the same time, which is somehow different.

In this situation the circle boundary means that if you are pulling up at max speed (mouse pointer in the bottom of the circle) you can't turn at all. With a square boundary, both movements would be independant. In fact, joysticks have a square behaviour rather than a circle one.

(Y-axis should be reversible as maybe some people prefer pulling up when moving the mouse forward/up, rather than pulling down).

[DaBrain]

Please no square. 

Of course your ship may not turn into all directions with the same speed, but the cricle is just the control the direction. You put the cusor to the edge of the circe, and the ship will start to turn as fast as possible into that direction.

i want those explosions.

They'll be in the SoL demo early next year.