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

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 10:07:20 -0400 
Dave Rickey <daver at mythicentertainment.com> wrote:

> Okay, I'm considered a bit odd for it, but I play FPS games with
> Joystick/Mouse.  

There's a guy down the hall from me here who plays with a mouse in
his right hand and a SpaceBall 3000 in his left hand (yeah, he's a
Pro-E type).

  http://www.alsos.com/Products/Devices/SpaceBall.html

Watching him play is fascinating.  Playing against him is scary.  He
has a fluid level of control over his character motion and
attitudinal position that is unbeatable.  Watching him jump, spin,
and fire multiply in mid-air with each shot aimed precisely and in
different directions is painful.

> 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".

<nod>

Back in the dawns of time I wrote the basics of a game that was
somewhere between Elite and a tank game.  It used two joysticks, one
for view direction and one for thrust direction.  The right joystick
moved the view direction around the sphere with the button firing
various weapons (minor weapons in the direction of view, major
weapons along the axis of orientation, front or rear).  The left
joystick controlled thrust direction with joystick angle controlling
angle of thrust against the half-sphere of the rear of the ship and
the button being thrust on/off against a logarithmic time scale
(thrust on any of the extreme joystick positions spun the ship in
place, changing orientation only).

I loved it.  Nobody else did, which is typical for my UI concepts.
Flight paths were crazy and really tough to predict.  You could fly
freely, shooting minor weapons in any direction unrelated to current
attitude with the delta vectors on thrust, particularly with the
non-linear time/thrust scale allowing for crazy jinks.  Trying to
place leading or bracketed shots against a target that is doing an
exponentially decreasing radius turn while also piling on non-linear
deltaV (yeah, the physics model was bad) was near not easy.  You
could fly beside someone while blasting them
square-rigger/ships-of-the-line style, run directly away from (or
towards) them and hit them with your big guns, do rapid orientation
spins without changing directional vectors to fire major weapons in
directions other than you were traveling (do small circles with your
thrust joystick and fire conical sprays of shots), do high
acceleration tight spins around targets while hammering them, etc.

Of course in a very crude wire-frame mixed vector and character
graphics world this sucked, especially since the idea was that many
of the play details surrounded slow moving shells/mines (long
leading shots, hedge and fence shots, diversions, mine traps, etc).

> 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.

http://www.madcatz.com/index1.html

Yeah, its reversed.  

> Where am I going with this?  Just that WASD was just the best
> solution to an impossible problem...

I prefer ESDF (E/forward, D/back, S/F sidle left right) as that
leaves A/Q/z free for the pinky.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows
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