I'm just gonna throw out this controversial statement like its
nothing. But it's true.
It's one of those things I got used to over the years and haven't spend much time thinking about, until I let a friend of mine (experienced gamer, newbie to space sims) play the first few missions of WoD. Watching him struggle against the controls opened my eyes to the atrocity that is the default FS2 control scheme. Let me elaborate:
First off all, Freespace has a
huge amount of utterly redundant keys. Look at
the default keys, 6 different keys just to set your throttle! That's not counting Forward/Reverse thrust and afterburners. Over 20 targetting keys! Holy ****, I never use more than like 6 of these (which is still a lot). And worse of all, the keys you use the most are literally all over your keyboard. Thankfully some wise coder made Controlconfigdefaults.tbl a while ago (which Axem pointed me to after hearing me ramble about this subject), allowing me to give WoD an actual nice and sane WASD
casual/accessible/streamlined layout. With all the commonly used keys right within hand reach.
And for those that are now going "Spoon, your
face sucks donkey, give me back my classic control scheme!", you can easily switch between the new and classic control scheme by hitting the default key in the controls config. Everybody wins.
Also in my ungoing struggle to make WoD
casual accessible, lets talk about shield management.
Equalizing shields under fire allows a player to easily take three times as much punishment. But it often just comes down to mashing the Q button a lot when under fire. Yet I've heard of players
who don't actually manage their shields at all. Either because they are playing on a gamepad, are not very good players, or are simply not thinking about it because there is often so much stuff going on in a freespace mission. Consequently they get stuck on missions because they keep dying with plenty of unspend shield hitpoints to spare. Therefore I asked Axem to write me a simple script that makes your shield automatically equalize. It frees up one more key on an already crowded keyboard, makes lesser skilled pilots survive for longer and allows veteran pilots to focus on hitting those other important keys instead of mashing that Q.
In other news, Dahblount told me that I had show off the MkIIIW
With two medium and two heavy gunmounts, the W variant allows for a completely different weapon set up than the normal Ray MkIII. Mostly employed by the Delest Dynasty who favor putting heavier armaments on their strike craft.
