So in a fit of proper gamer’s obsession not to let this damn thing beat me ( :) ), I’ve spent several hours of my Boxing Day fiddling around a bit more, and I think I may be onto something wrt solving my problem.
So the problem is that I can get mouse settings that feel good flying, and I can get mouse settings that feel good aiming, but I can’t get a mouse setting that feels good for both.
My tentative solution that seems to be working well just tootling about in the cannisters area:-
Use WASD Descent-style (W=pitch down, S=pitch up, A=roll left, D=roll right; Q and E are set to yaw) to actually steer the ship most of the time properly (i.e. using pitch and roll as the developers intended) and in a “big” way, i.e. for main and general flying. That way my left hand feels like it’s controlling a bulky spaceship, and it feels right and proper, with good speed and timing. This requires a lot of fine tippety-tapping on the keyboard, but that’s not a problem for me, and actually quite comfortable, because I’m both a pianist and an extremely fast typist, (and I cut my gaming teeth on Descent, so it’s awakening old muscle memory :) ). Also it’s sort of lore-friendly, because I’m effectively tapping to puff thrusters.
The other half of the solution is to have the mouse as a sort of “fine tuning for aim” control. The trick is to have it set to Relative (so that so long as I’m not using the mouse it centres automatically and I can continue steering WASD without “interference” from random mouse actions) and also to have the x-axis set to Yaw, and y-axis set to Pitch (also with no Deadzone, and no Power Curve - all I need to tweak for comfort are Sensitivity and the Relative slider). Now of course yaw is “weak”, but because I’m only using it for fine tuning (and rolling with left hand can be added as necessary), it seems to give me the requisite sense of finer control for aiming. Oddly, while I’m using an “inverted” sense of forward/back for the WASD keys, I’m using straight Pitch for the mouse, as this makes it feel more like “painting on a 2-D surface”, i.e. quite arcadey, but only in a sort of micro way, enough to get fine tuning for aim. The only downside of this is that I have to alternate WASD positioning with mouse positioning (except for an occasional Roll tweak from S or D), because of the different inversions.
Along with this I’m using SHIFT+WASD for pumping thrust forward and thrust backward from relative throttle setting (as my previous post) and also for “strafing” (again, it’s as weak as Yaw for this, plus also delayed, but again, it’s only for fine tuning), and CTRL for “crouch=thrust down” and SPACE for “jump=thrust up”.
But the real doozy I discovered accidentally in this session, that’s made me have a new energy for persevering with the game, was my brainstorm of binding Headlook to RMB - which makes it exactly like an MMO!!!
So the whole system works “onomatopoeically” for me, so to speak. I’m a pilot in a ship, and I look around with RMB, MMO style (again, with inverted mouse as I’m used to). And I control the ship largely with my left hand with WASD, and just fine tune aim with the mouse when needed.
And I’ve got to say, it’s FUCKING MAGNIFICENT feeling like I’m actually a pilot sitting in a ship by just having that one RMB tweak. Instead of feeling like I’m looking at a dumb windscreen, I can look around at will with a sense that I’m situated in a vast universe, and steer the ship completely independently with WASD.
So now I’m going to keep practicing in the canisters area with this for a while, then try it out with the first combat mission and practice that (mainly I think I need to practice keeping pace with the mob first, then incorporating firing).
After that, I think I’ll be ready for the game proper.
Excited again!!! :)
(Later note: just tested this setup in the second combat scenario and it works well! I think I may even stick to the same inversion for everything and not use “painting” sense for fine aim tuning, it just seems to be more consistent and work better in combat that way, as opposed to targeting cannisters :) )
(Much later note: this was only tentative, and after fiddling about more, I’ve actually settled on this.)