[Taristin]

Or you can get combustion and make your own.

[DaBrain]

Uhm... but they won't look anything like them...

[ARSPR]

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 just prefer the Joystick/square emulation. Please notice that just now, when you use a joystick and you just turn left/right your ship has some aditional components (some twist and some moving pulling down). Look at the stars background or how still targets move in radar. So it's not a "flat" movement. But pulling up/down IS a flat movement. So they are different kind of movements not just different directions of turning.

With the circle behaviour, I don't know how you can make the ship move in the same way.

And I think the square behaviour is more intuitive, as I've said before, you would be just mounting the mouse in the top of a virtual joystick which always has the square one. One example: with the circle boundary, if you are pulling up at 100% and you move your mouse left the pointer would stay in the top/bottom of the circle, (there's no room for horizontal movement in it), and you won't turn at all. Do you think a normal user would expect this?

But this is just my opininion...

[Turey]

One example: with the circle boundary, if you are pulling up at 100% and you move your mouse left the pointer would stay in the top/bottom of the circle, (there's no room for horizontal movement in it), and you won't turn at all. Do you think a normal user would expect this?

The normal user would expect the direction of movement to correspond with the direction to the pointer. So if you move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen, then move it halfway to the right edge of the screen, the place where the pointer is would be on the line connecting the center of the circle and the pointer.

This can be done in either a square or a circle setup, but I feel it works better in the circle one.

[Nuke]

theres no reason to have a pointer unless you will also slave turret commands to the mouse. you could probibly just use a setup similar to privateer 2 or elite. i think it would be less distracting.

[Freespace Freak]

theres no reason to have a pointer unless you will also slave turret commands to the mouse. you could probibly just use a setup similar to privateer 2 or elite. i think it would be less distracting.

I disagree.  It'll make non-joystick flight easier, so you won't have to do the slide-pickup mouse move.  I think it should be for both cockpit and chase views.

[Nuke]

theres no reason to have a pointer unless you will also slave turret commands to the mouse. you could probibly just use a setup similar to privateer 2 or elite. i think it would be less distracting.

I disagree.  It'll make non-joystick flight easier, so you won't have to do the slide-pickup mouse move.  I think it should be for both cockpit and chase views.

you completely misunderstd me. flight sim style mouse = good feature, mouse pointer on screen == distracting. the only reason the mouse pointer worked in freelancer is because it aimed your guns. a simple roll|yaw+pitch rate gauge is suffietient.

[Freespace Freak]

you completely misunderstd me. flight sim style mouse = good feature, mouse pointer on screen == distracting. the only reason the mouse pointer worked in freelancer is because it aimed your guns. a simple roll|yaw+pitch rate gauge is suffietient.

Ok, I'm now thoroughly confused.  Are you saying that having the drag-pickup-drop method be the only one and the one included in the game be the only one, or are you referring to some other method?  If the circle-pointer method bothers you, then I'd say stick to the drag-pickup-drop, and let others use the new way, because I doubt they'd completely replace the old method with the new code.  If you're talking about some other method that I'm not too clear on, then I think that might be vialble.  I don't see why we can't develop yours and the circle-pointer method.  I think I'd prefer the circle-pointer to anything else, personally, but only in first person perspective.  You just have to remember that the reticule is where you're firing and not the pointer.

[Turey]

Ok, I'm now thoroughly confused.  Are you saying that having the drag-pickup-drop method be the only one and the one included in the game be the only one, or are you referring to some other method?  If the circle-pointer method bothers you, then I'd say stick to the drag-pickup-drop, and let others use the new way, because I doubt they'd completely replace the old method with the new code.  If you're talking about some other method that I'm not too clear on, then I think that might be vialble.  I don't see why we can't develop yours and the circle-pointer method.  I think I'd prefer the circle-pointer to anything else, personally, but only in first person perspective.  You just have to remember that the reticule is where you're firing and not the pointer.

*sigh*

He's saying he loves the circle-pointer idea. He thinks it's the best idea in the world. He just thinks that we shouldn't clutter up the HUD by actually DRAWING the circle and pointer on the screen.

[Nuke]

the freespace hud is both a blessing and a curse. its a blessing as it gives you all the information you can possibly need as effieteintly as possible. its a curse because you cant add anything to it without cluttering your screen. a privateer 2 style yaw/pitch gauge would look better and would blend into the existing hud elements better.

[ARSPR]

My last post about this...

It's a pity I don't remember the name the old chopper sim I played with the built-in joystick emulation mouse control, I mean, my explained square behaviour, (I played the game in my first PC and it was a 386SX with 2 MB of RAM ...) . But it was simply great. And it had a pointer over the screen to show you the position of your "joystick". At the begining it was a little annoying seeing a pointer running over the screen, but when you got used to it, it was just another extra HUD info.

Nevertheless the pointer it's not absolutely necessary. It's just an aid because mice can't have "autocenter" function or force feeling like joysticks. 

I haven't played Freelancer so I don't exactly know how it works but I am feeling that the circle behaviour that other people is explaining is just a way to show a square-behaviour code in a "prettier" way. Keep in mind that if you really code this kind of control your horizontal and vertical movements are linked as I said in previous posts. So if you can turn when you are pulling up/down at 100%, (as I suppose it is desired by everyone), YOU DON'T HAVE A CIRCLE BEHAVIOUR despite what you get "painted" in the HUD.

[Nuke]

the script i wrote for turret control had mouse emulation. it had a big square and a little square. the little square was your deadzone and the big one was your field of motion. i only had the script draw theese for debuging though. anyway it would convert screen coords into a number from -100 to 100. if youre in the dead zone you return a 0. i could have written it better so as not to waste the dead zone. but i still trying to recode all my scripts to work in the new system.

[Freespace Freak]

Well, from what I remember, Freelancer didn't acutally have a circle, it just had the pointer.  Now the pointer functioned as a targeting reticule as well, but I see you'r point about the circle.  I think we have two ways of doing it.  Drawing an imaginary circle that the player can't see, but is the limit to how far the pointer can go.  The second is the yaw, pitch gadge, but I think that might be a little more difficult to see in exectution.

[Mongoose]

Unless I'm reading this wrong, I think the whole "square/circle" argument comes down to whether or not a mouse player would be able to push both the X and Y axes to their limit at the same time, which any joystick user can obviously do.  In other words, your standard joystick, being a "square" example, has four "corners" for limits; you can see these in the standard Windows game controller calibration screen.  In each of those corners, both the X and Y axes are at 100% motion; translated to in-game, this would allow your fighter/turret/whatever to move most effectively in those directions.  With a "circle" model of motion, these "corners" do not exist; when attempting to move equally in the X and Y directions, instead of getting the 100% generated by a joystick, you'd be getting (100/squareroot(2))%, via simple geometry.  This produces a limit on how fast you can actually move the reticle and could put the mouser at a disadvantage.

[Freespace Freak]

Hmmm, yes, but I think you can still do it with a circle.  When the cursor is at the edge of a circle, it is at maximum turn in the vector from the origin of that point on the circle.  So, a cursor in the top left corner would correspond to a cursor on the edge of a circle at 45 degrees left of straight up.  Either method would work, I just kinda felt that the circle method makes more sense.  But that's to our eyes.  For a computer code, the square method might work better.  Either way, I wouldn't want the box or the circle actually visible, but rather hidden, but the cursor would still be there.  The cursor simply would not be able to move past the edge of either the circle or the box.

[jr2]

I find I use a silly combination of the numpad and the mouse, which works pretty well all things considered.

same here.