[General Battuta]

I played and enjoyed Tachyon quite a bit.

[Nuke]

i still have my copy of tach. last time i played it i still had a ****ty x52 with a deadzone the size of jupiter. maybe should try it on my ch gear.

seriously if youre gonna make a case against joysticks in space sims, im surprised you haven't brought up freelancer. thats one of those games where joysticks would not have worked at all. joysticks are great for flying, not so great for aiming. i used a ch profile that mapped out the mouse position based on the position of the stick, it was crude but functional. however it was impossible to hit anything, the joystick resolution being much lower than the pixel resolution of the screen, caused the crosshairs to jump around quire a bit restricting aiming. of course it was trying some new ideas that give it a lot of brownie points. but freelancer was always a love-hate affair for me. i mean there were things about that game that i really liked, vast universe, open ended gameplay, dynamic politics and economy, i even liked the control scheme somewhat. there were many things i hated too, ****ty story, impossible to skip cut-scenes, no long term maintenance of online servers (the game was later hacked to use 3rd party servers), modding it sucked, and it really ****ed with my preference to use inverted y in mouse games (it just dont work in that game).

i dont really support the idea that the lack of joysticks killed space sims (but i do insist that all space sims offer good joystick support, and i mean joystick support, not xbox gamepad support). id actually blame the bloating of the games industry. back in the day you had small games studios, and miniscule budgets, and studios could freely develop into niche markets. when studios got bigger they needed to turn bigger profits to sustain themselves, and thus only focused their attention to making games in popular genres, or trying to emulate previous successful titles.

[jr2]

I wonder if there is a way to have a joystick offer two modes that hot-switch (sort of like the toggleable scripted joymouse) on the fly:

1) Regular joystick mode, configurable deadzone.

2) Precision aiming mode, no deadzone, sensitivity down real low... well, not sensitivity, but the reaction amount (which they term sensitivity), so if you hauled the joystick all the way over, it would maybe be the same as going 1/4 the way over in regular mode...

3) Or maybe, the same as 2) above, except 2/3 the way over is equivalent to 1/4 the way over, and full over is emergency snap-out of precision into regular mode.  Well, whether you wanted that or not would likely depend on if the toggle was an actual toggle, or if it was hold-down, and also, if it was bound to a button on the joystick or a button on the keyboard...

But you get my drift, right?

[flecht]

Wouldn't it be easier to handle the joystick with axes configured to work in exponential manner? Have someone tried something like this? Is it even possible?
I hope you know what I mean.

[jr2]

Yes, you mean, in the center, it is very precise, but in the outer ring, it is very responsive.  If the right balance could be struck, that should work just as well.

[Nuke]

most profilers that come with high end sticks lets you do that, lets you set the gain curve (at least thats what its called in ch control manager), deadzone, etc. you can also do remapping the axis range by keypress. the ch software comes with its own scripting language for this kinda stuff, you can do some pretty awesome stuff, like mix axes, create fake axes, etc. unfortunately its proprietary and doesn't do **** for non ch gear. actually ppjoy+glovepie gives you everything you need to write scripts that arent tied to any joystick manufacturer. ppjoy's api is somewhat simple to use, so its not hard to write a console util in c to do some advanced mapping behavior as well as up sampling and smoothing.

my biggest gripe with joysticks is actually their resolution. it actually decreased when they moved from gameport to usb. a $0.20 microcontroller is cheaper than a $0.50 microcontroller, and electronics companies like to source the cheapest parts possible, so they sell you a fart and put the cheap one in there, even though the better one is less than a buck more. then they add insult to injury and put the fifty cent microcontroller with the 10 bit adcs in the "advanced model" that costs $50-$100 more for an extra 2 bits of precision. and for a few cents more they could throw in a high resolution adc ic, and you would get a nice 16 bit axis. its quite sad. im probibly gonna move on to something homebrew or based on oshw, as its becoming very practical.