[MUD-Dev] When the interface becomes the challenge.

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Hook <bwh at wksoftware.com>
> At 11:12 AM 6/19/01 +0800, Alex wrote:

>> There is no excuse for not allowing this as at least an option in
>> any 1st person 3D game. Remember, 'don't fix what ain't broke'
>> and 'keep it simple stupid'!

> First person mouse/keyboard controls suck.  To FPS players, it
> feels natural as hell, but if you want to hit the broader market,
> it sucks.  Take someone that has never played an FPS and sit them
> in front of a typical Quake ASWD/mouse combination and they will
> do one of the three things:

>   - stare straight down
>   - stare straight up
>   - walk into lava

> It takes hours and hours of just practice to get that basic
> control system mastered.

> Unfortunately, nothing better has come along (witness the disaster
> that is the FPS genre on consoles), but it still bites.  Diablo 2
> has a very simple interface that ANYONE can play.

Okay, I'm considered a bit odd for it, but I play FPS games with
Joystick/Mouse.  I basicly put everything that most people use a
keyboard for on the stick, with run forward-back/strafe left-right
on the XY axii of the stick.  I started doing it originally for
Tribes 1, because the sheer number of things you can do in T1
quickly overwhelmed not only my manual dexterity, but the technical
limits of the keyboard (it is impossible to go back-left with a
keyboard and throw a grenade, the hardware driver cannot recognize
more than 2 non-shift keypresses).  At one point, I was rated 111th
out of over 50,000 at Tribes 1.

This takes moderately special hardware, a left-handed or
ambidextrous joystick (unless you are left-handed), but when I've
actually convinced people to try it for at least 2 hours on the
right hardware, they've invariably been converted.  Somehow,
controlling navigation with the stick is very intuitive to people,
once they make the mental leap to realizing the left hand controls
their horizontal movement they do fine.  And where the WASD layout
can require some serious digital contortions once additional
functions come into play (like repair kits, grenade throwing, etc.) 
the joystick puts the multi-tasking onto the thumb, which for most
people is much easier to "train".

The only near equivalent for the consoles is the Panther XL series
(combination Trackball/Joystick), which is set up exactly backwards
to be useful for this purpose, only left-handers or ambidextrous
people can really make use of it in an FPS.  Happens that the DAoC
booth was right next to the MadCatz booth, where they were demoing
the PXL in 4-player Q3 deathmatches.  You could always tell when a
left-hander was in a match, because he'd be wiping the floor with
the rest of them.  The pointing device pretty much has to be
controlled with the primary hand.

Where am I going with this?  Just that WASD was just the best
solution to an impossible problem, controlling an FPS with mouse and
keyboard.  Once a few people mastered it, they completely destroyed
the competition, and popularized a control setup that most people
would *never* master, and that put sharp limits on the complexity of
the interface.  Since the joystick has a reputation as a useless
control for FPS left over from the Doom era, when people tried to
use it as a pointing device, and because you need a hard-to-find
lefthanded or ambidextrous stick, the Stick/Mouse combo hasn't
caught on.

--Dave Rickey

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