Flight Assist Off may blow one's mind.
FA for short. Oh! and don't forget about thrusters.
Oh yes, thrusters...
FA for short. Oh! and don't forget about thrusters.
Oh yes, thrusters...
Flight Controls - My Initial Impressions
- Thread starter Vulteran
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A friend of mine came over last night and gave the tutorials a bash (no, he's never played E: D, is not in fact a big gamer at all) - I have an X-55 Rhino. His first effort in the Sidewinder was hilarious and fairly short-lived. However, he quickly got the hang of the controls and completed the advanced combat mission within half-an-hour or so of playing. The only comment he made with regards to the controls was that twisting the stick results in yaw, while side-to-side results in roll (which seems counter-intuitive) - however, this was due to the control set-up and can easily be changed, so isn't a real complaint at all.
Controls are fine, in my opinion... Why would they need to be like other games? E: D is what it is, and I believe it is stronger because it carves its own path (and doesn't simply replicate other games).
Controls are fine, in my opinion... Why would they need to be like other games? E: D is what it is, and I believe it is stronger because it carves its own path (and doesn't simply replicate other games).
You could always edit your first post to make it sound less whiny. Saying "I am a developer and ask you to change something to my liking because I know best and can do it better" is not the ideal way to get serious replies.
Creating a one man hobby project doesnt qualify you as a game developer. But even if you created the Star Citizen flight model this community still would not care because most of them enjoy Elite Dangerous and the way dog fighting works. So I suggest to leave the whole developer thing and talk about facts instead.
If you want to give the game another chance you should really try a joystick. You could also try binding yaw to your mouse x axis and use Q and E for roll, this helped me to enjoy the flight model before I got my joystick. But in the end this game is designed for a HOTAS setup. I dont think that this is a bad thing, other games (like Star Citizen) punish you for having decent gaming hardware and are best to be played with M&KB.
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It works very well with a game controller too. I was using my Xbox One controller for several months, only recently upgraded to HOTAS. Using mouse and keyboard wasn't a great experience for me...
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I tried all three input methods, all of them work well. But a HOTAS works best
Just look down your arms and see the very same stick and throttle...
Honestly I think 'offended' is a bit theatrical. I know it's a bit of a buzzword at the moment for any time people feel slightly annoyed or disappointed about something, but it is very unlikely that FD had you in mind when they were making choices about the flight model.
As others may have pointed out by now, rolling an aeroplane in atmosphere does indeed induce some degree of turn - however, that's only because the wings are producing a lift vector directly upwards with relation to the aircraft, and if you roll the aircraft, you turn that vector to one side or the other. Your straight-up lift reduces, while a new lateral component appears. A level turn with a fixed-wing aircraft is produced via a combination of roll and increased pitch to counter the loss of lift.
In space, quite obviously, there's no air, and therefore your ship is not depending on lift to keep it up. Therefore yet, if you roll the ship in forward flight, nothing will happen to the direction of flight. With Flight Assist on, ED's flight model is a rough approximation of aeroplane flight - but these ships are not aeroplanes. In terms of computer games, it really doesn't take much for even an avid air pilot to adapt to vacuum flight.
This isn't to defend the flight model entirely, incidentally: I think it's crying out for a kill rotation function in FA-Off, and it baffles me how the game setting manages to explain the omission of such a basic feature. But I honestly can't get all agitated over a flight dynamic (FA-On) that otherwise is exactly the same as every other arcade-style first-person spaceship game there's ever been.
As you've probably been told already, ED has a comprehensive control-mapping facility. If you don't like where the roll and yaw functions are set, then swap them, change them for something else. There's even, if I understand right, a feature to merge roll and yaw functions to better imitate atmospheric flight. I've never used it, since as a long-time player of Microsoft Flight Simulator and the like, it would still seem bizarre to me for my spaceship to behave too much like an aeroplane.
I'm not going to ridicule anything you've said. I am going to say that I think that, as a game programmer, you'd understand the process of making decision consistent with your vision of the game you're creating, and that, if you look objectively at the flight control system ED offers, you'll see that most of your complaints here have no foundation. You're grumbling about things you can change quite easily (you can even create and maintain numerous control profiles and swap them around depending on your mood, your control devices, the phase of the Moon, whatever), and at least one of your complaints is based on a comparison to air flight that shows you don't seem to have really looked at how air flight works.
Then you may quit, and I'm sure many people have already suggested it. Or, more constructively, you could look at the control menus and see if you really can't find any way to create a satisfactory setup for yourself.
Quite honestly I think the flight model is my biggest disappointment about this game. I was a keen player of Frontier and First Encounters, and I'd so looked forward to an Elite IV that would build on those. I never imaged we'd be regressing to a remake of the original arcade game, as fun and as groundbreaking as Elite was. I'd hoped for a simulator, not a shoot-em-up.
But that disappointment wasn't enough to stop me seeing how much fun ED is, once I accepted it for what it is. Hopefully, you'll be able to get round the flight model issue you're having and enjoy the game similarly.
To the original poster - just wanted to say - don't be to annoyed at some of the unhelpful posts.
This topic was probably one of the most contested ones in the design discussion and it has been "done to death".
So people are pretty passionate about it but you aren't alone in your thoughts.
I think there will be more threads like this too once the other space games come out as Eve Valkyrie, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen all use the mechanic of pitch/yaw vs Elite style pitch/roll.
Maybe sometime give this a go though - start Elite, set the speed into the blue zone for manoeuvrability (important to make things handle well) and try flying around for a bit. Think "fighter jet dogfight" in space rather than "Quake in space" and maybe it will make more sense.
Hope you can get over the curve as it's a shame to miss out on this game. If not though check out the other games I mentioned when they come out as they might be up your street.
Good luck Commander!
This topic was probably one of the most contested ones in the design discussion and it has been "done to death".
So people are pretty passionate about it but you aren't alone in your thoughts.
I think there will be more threads like this too once the other space games come out as Eve Valkyrie, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen all use the mechanic of pitch/yaw vs Elite style pitch/roll.
Maybe sometime give this a go though - start Elite, set the speed into the blue zone for manoeuvrability (important to make things handle well) and try flying around for a bit. Think "fighter jet dogfight" in space rather than "Quake in space" and maybe it will make more sense.
Hope you can get over the curve as it's a shame to miss out on this game. If not though check out the other games I mentioned when they come out as they might be up your street.
Good luck Commander!
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I'd quibble with that. I see no reason why developing a game, even at a modest scale, doesn't qualify someone as a game developer. One could argue that Limit Theory is just a one-man hobby project: it's just one that drew a lot of Kickstarter backing. I make no predictions on whether that game will appear, but given the work already done, I'd still argue with anyone who told me Josh Parnell wasn't a game developer.
And besides, I'm pretty sure the OP said 'programmer', rather than 'developer'.
I like Elite's flight controls.
I use an X-55 and they feel great to me (especially when you kick FA off). I found K+M quite tricky TBH, but my brother actually prefers it (and seeing him flying around, he seems to be flying as well as if he were using a joystick).
I use an X-55 and they feel great to me (especially when you kick FA off). I found K+M quite tricky TBH, but my brother actually prefers it (and seeing him flying around, he seems to be flying as well as if he were using a joystick).
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Going back 30 years to Elite, the original controls were ONLY pitch and roll. If a ship was at 9 o'clock on your screen, you had to roll left 90 and pitch up, or roll right 90 and pitch down. Tracking a moving ship was a real challenge. Frontier used a different, very "mousey" way of moving the ship, in line with its pure Newtonian physics. In general, Frontier was a great game, but the super-accurate physics and almost arcade control system combined to make it either too easy (autopilot and time dilation) or too hard/clunky, which was a shame really.
Roll on another 20 years, and Elite Dangerous has to contest with its past. The physics model is MUCH closer to the original Elite, where the ships behave like planes in space to an extent. Maximum speed, pitch rate dependent upon speed etc. In many ways, it's what the '84 crowd are used to, but in gaming terms it's nigh on perfect. A simple, robust flight model which has survived 31 years. In 1984 we didn't have Yaw. We had Cobras, Asps, Pythons and Sidewinders but no yaw. Adding yaw like a plane's rudder makes much more sense in the Elite universe than making it like an "up/down/left/right" arcade game. It's VERY useful for combat fine tuning, and also for fine tuning on approach to land.
Also, depending on your ship, yaw can be awful or useful. Thruster upgrades affect all of the various agility parameters too. A Vulture with C-class thrusters feels like a ballet dancer compared to an Asp with D-class for example.
Play some more. It's just what it is, part of the game, at the end of the day.
Roll on another 20 years, and Elite Dangerous has to contest with its past. The physics model is MUCH closer to the original Elite, where the ships behave like planes in space to an extent. Maximum speed, pitch rate dependent upon speed etc. In many ways, it's what the '84 crowd are used to, but in gaming terms it's nigh on perfect. A simple, robust flight model which has survived 31 years. In 1984 we didn't have Yaw. We had Cobras, Asps, Pythons and Sidewinders but no yaw.
Adding yaw like a plane's rudder makes much more sense in the Elite universe than making it like an "up/down/left/right" arcade game. It's VERY useful for combat fine tuning, and also for fine tuning on approach to land.Also, depending on your ship, yaw can be awful or useful. Thruster upgrades affect all of the various agility parameters too. A Vulture with C-class thrusters feels like a ballet dancer compared to an Asp with D-class for example.
Play some more. It's just what it is, part of the game, at the end of the day.
I think think you must be one of the most negative people on here
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He's hardly whining, I see posts all the time that are 10 times more whiny than this, in fact the OP was particularly tame compared to other posts complaining about things
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Your response gets more and more aggressive as it goes on, you could have chosen to help out a newbie in a million ways but instead you told him to get out basically
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God forbid you ever make a game, you'll make an excellent Dev, driving away people and all
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I get your point, but it becomes problematic when someone wants to back his opinion by stating that he is a game programmer. Without telling you which games he worked on.
I am a game programmer myself, here is what I have done so far:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, World\n");
return 0;
}
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, World\n");
return 0;
}
Totally agree with the OP about the yaw rate being poor.
The difference is that I absolutely love the pitch & roll flight. It is staying faithful to the original 1984 Elite gameplay, while at the same time updating and improving it.
Very much a "marmite" thing - I'm on the side of loving it, but I do accept and respect the OP's feelings on it. Frontier are not going to change it though.
All I can suggest is to stick at it, you may get to like it and "dig" the way it works.
The difference is that I absolutely love the pitch & roll flight. It is staying faithful to the original 1984 Elite gameplay, while at the same time updating and improving it.
Very much a "marmite" thing - I'm on the side of loving it, but I do accept and respect the OP's feelings on it. Frontier are not going to change it though.
All I can suggest is to stick at it, you may get to like it and "dig" the way it works.
I remember rebinding keys early on in SC and ED to make them the same. Can't remember which set I kept closest to default.
But keyboard for roll, strafe (lateral thrusters), and speed, with mouse for pitch and yaw works well.
As others have said, roll and pitch. You'll enjoy it after a while, and possibly feel accomplishment at piloting skill.
But keyboard for roll, strafe (lateral thrusters), and speed, with mouse for pitch and yaw works well.
As others have said, roll and pitch. You'll enjoy it after a while, and possibly feel accomplishment at piloting skill.
Perhaps you would understand if you'd read the first post before the mod's removed the worst of the deeply offensive, childish, trivialized and entitled parts. Have a look at all the posts Yaffle had to edit to remove them.
TL
Dude, the starter Sidewinder is really fun to fly, highly nippy and maneuverable. Having flown one since Alpha in December 2013, I can vouch for it being just about the perfect starter ship to get people learning to pilot in E: D.
The only ship I find more fun (in terms of pure joy to just fly around) is the Eagle. I'm sure many would agree (and perhaps even more would disagree
)Incidentally, you'd have had a stronger point to make if you'd said "some of my friends agree with me". We're not global fanboys on these forums, and I've made some dark and salty points about issues in ED which frustrate me too. As "initial impressions" go, your post is valid, but come back in 4 weeks once you've got beyond a basic, unupgraded ship and let us know what you think then. Get into an Eagle with A-class Thrusters and try not to smile with glee when you go into a swooping turn to target a larger ship like a Cobra which is wallowing in your wake.
--EDIT-- Eagle ninja'd!
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