EVE General Discussion

We seemed to manage to play that famous 3D game Elite many years ago with WASD for nose up, down roll right/left and comma and full stop for speed control. This was due to the school, for some reason, not buying us joysticks for the BBC B's; apparently the computers were for 'education' or some such nonsense.

Of course, it's still a completely ridiculous idea for Eve.

I like how everyone here is arguing over the controls themselves (which would be easy to implement and/or adapt to) and not focusing on the "technical limitation" or the "need" of the idea... which are the actual obstacles/issues.


- Remember... EVE's servers "tick" (see: "receive, update, and calculate") once per second whereas most FPS and flight simulator games "tick" every few miliseconds. This is what allows EVE to have so many people on the same "world shard" at the same time without throwing the servers into seizures... and explains why most FPS games are limited to 64 person "instances."
And merely increasing EVE's server "tick" to 2 hz (receive, update, and calculate every 0.5 seconds) would double the amount of calculations that the servers would need to process... which would be a bad idea considering that there are still issues with lag.
And mouse control would STILL be superior at such a server speed (2hz) as you would STILL not have the "twitch" maneuverability that WASD fans would expect and/or be used to.

- Regarding the "need" aspect; turrets already "auto-track" whatever target you have and most ships in the game are not "dogfighters."
Simply "jinking" isn't going to throw off turrets or missiles unless you already have an understanding of weapon, speed, and signature mechanics... which can already be exploited with the simple "double-clicking" system that we currently have.
As for the ships themselves; they start at the size of 747 "jumbo jets" to city-sized behemoths... and while we are in space with no friction or aerodynamic issues, inertia is still a cruel mistress and severely limits how fast each ship can turn... at least, not without breaking up and/or going above and beyond plausibility (which, to be fair, is not one of EVE's strong points... but suspension of disbelief can only go so far).


Now this is not to say I don't think WASD controls would be cool... but until the two points above are addressed, I don't think such a thing should be implemented.

The only thing i can see either button controls or joystick usage would be for frigates at the most. fast paced combat and hard to control with double clicks (but even now its still very doable)


That and it'd be cool to use fighters and fighter/bombers as a flyable ship... but even then it's somewhat pointless.

As others have said its a 100s m long warship to 14km warship. They're not really the easiest thing to fly in agility's sense...

Aesthetics aside, What actual benefit does this "fleet turn" have over the "approach FC turn?" What actual problem does it fix?

And getting everybody to drag 2 (well, 3) sliders in the same 1s tick would be significantly harder. And what happens if, in the middle of a turn you need to turn out of it? The people who get one slider done a tick too soon will be headed in a different direction than everyone else. Now, multiply those small differences over the course of an hour long battle, and you have people who, having entered the same coordinates every time as everyone else are hundreds of KM off.
And even if they notice, how do they fix it? (Remember, "everyone can just keep using the old system" isn't a great argument for implementing a new one).

(Align to nothing commands are dead easy to follow. "Approach FC while FC aligns to nothing.")