EVE General Discussion

Everyone hates this idea and everytime I see it suggested, everyone always does.

That said, I think many of you are wrong about all the 'lore' related reasons for not doing this.

Yes, you might be the captain and not the 'helmsman' but you are also a capsuleer, and your thoughts are supposed to translate into near immediate ship response. In other words you should be able to control the ship a lot more immediately than any captain relaying orders to a helmsman.

On that note, I have given conning orders on a warship (in RL) and I remember once, for fun, taking the helm when a buddy of mine had the watch. The whole time I was thinking -- geez, sometimes I wish I could just push the helmsman out of the way and do this myself. Impossible of course, as the bridge of most modern day warships doesn't afford the helmsman as good a perspective as the officer of the watch but still, sometimes it would be nice to have immediate control. And that's on a 4000 ton warship that reacts a lot slower than most ships in eve.

Speaking of this, many of the biggest ships in the world actually have helm controls on the bridge wings that the captain will use when coming alongside, going through tight passages, etc. In those situations, they want immediate control.

Again, there may be technical challenges in game for straightforward joystick control and I wouldn't want that anyways, as eve is not really a dogfighting game.

What I WOULD like, however, is a wider range of keyboard navigation commands, perhaps even complicated maneuvers.

Heck, there are plenty of times when I know I need transversal that I just end up fumbling around to change my heading at 90 degrees. even if the WASD keys just emulated mouse clicks at 30 degree variations.

So, if you needed to change heading 90 degrees to startboard, a quick triple press of d. I think stuff like that would allow reflexive heading changes while I am doing more important things with the mouse.

I think that was the point: to get any kind of value out of a direct control scheme, you have to update your movement far more often, and transmit and process a massively increased amount of data, and that would just break… well… everything.

Also mind you i rather see other things first such as line of sight put into play for shooting instead of very cumbersome joystick control.

I am very sure I can spin click a spot in space extremly faster than any joy stick jockey ever could.

Fair enough. I guess we're both describing two sides of the same coin maybe. I'm saying "sure it would be possible, but it would be lame" and you're saying "to make it not lame would be impossible". :)

I'm glad tippia is making my points for me, because I'm really not feeling eloquent today. :P

Adding shortcuts for double-clicking, based on camera position, might not be a bad idea, except I'm sure it'd just end up confusing rookies, send logi's veering off in random directions (already seems to happen lots anyway), and maybe get a lot of extra keyboard spam to the server. Not saying it's necessarily a bad idea. Better than direct stick/rudder anyway. Better than the existing awful "new shortcuts" by far.

I don't think it would play how you think think it would play.

Firstly, it would still spam the server with commands. Not as many as direct control, but an additional 1 per second movement command that an orbit or keep at range command would not be issuing. That would add up in big fights.

Secondly, ignoring that, it would still take a fairly complicated implementation to make it feel right. Get in space in a big slow ship and start playing around with the movement physics. Do some warps, some aligning in various directions relative to your current vector, some stop commands, etc. It's a learning experience in itself. Mapping it so it *feels* like you're controlling the ship with your joystick would take some real tweaking. And the reward would ultimately be a less playable game (the whole point of joystick control is supposedly to control what's happening on the battlefield, except would require your perspective to be that reduces situational awareness.) Sounds like a bad investment to me.

Why would I need a fighter pilot stick to fly a boat?

A joystick is a 3D device? Pretty sure if you take one apart, you'll find only 2 potentiometers controlling the X and Y axis, i.e. 2 dimensions. Maybe you'll find a 3rd one or a switch controlling a twist in the z-axis on select models. Granted, it's been quite a few years since I took one apart to make a custom flight yoke, but I'm still fairly certain the technology hasn't been completely rewriten.

And you were accusing me of ignorance.

edit: a lot of joysticks also have a potentiometer for throttle, usually separate from the stick part of a joystick, sometimes on a completely separate device.

Majority of joysticks today integrate yaw via twisting the stick so that is what I am referencing here. Throttle is also often included in some form which would map to ship velocity very well. They also almost always have some stick mounted buttons including a top "hat" switch whic could be usefull for camera control or other functions like weapons/target cycling.

So, yes, very much better for 3D nav than a mouse.

Issler

This little dohickey is kind of a 3d joystick. You can use it on it's own or use it with one hand while you use the mouse with your other hand. I got to play around with one that a co-worker had once and it was pretty cool. He used it with a mouse and basically just used the spacenavigator to provide the third dimension, but apparently you can use it alone for all three dimensions.

http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacenavigator.html