Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

I think the main thing missing from the Flight.X control schemes that I’ve tried involve accessing the UI panels. Controlling the ship is all covered.

I play on a big-ass laptop. I want to put it near my HDTV, connect it to the TV via HDMI, connect the Hotas to the lappie, and then sit on my couch, controlling the game entirely through the Hotas. Don’t wanna be jumping up to get to the keyboard. I’ll try tweaking the control schemes I’ve tried in order to get close.

Trackir. Then looking towards the panel will bring it up :)

I asked this earlier but don’t think anyone saw it. :) Is there a way to use the HOTAS to escape out of the Map screens without mousing over to “Exit”? I’m using an X52 Pro.

I’ve noticed that when I upgrade my kit, I get full value for the part I’m replacing. Presumably when you purchase your Cobra, you can sell off/downgrade to stock all the upgrades you’ve made to your Sidewinder first, for that extra little bit of cash to spruce up the new ride.

Decided to buy myself a hauler as a birthday present since I had enough to buy it, upgrade, and keep my sidey. Bumped it up to 16T of cargo space. Now to make some space $

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.)

I’m excited for you gurugeorge. But please don’t call enemy spaceships mobs, for my Sanity’s sake. Thanks! ;-)

Well, the backspace key on the keyboard does that, so you should be able to assign one of the myriad buttons on that setup to do the same thing, right in the “Controls” part of the game options. Or if it’s somehow hard-coded in the game (I haven’t checked), you could use the HOTAS’ programming software to assign a button on it as “keyboard backspace.”

Barring that you could use Voice Attack to do that if you don’t mind talking to your computer.

You can bind a key/control to the galaxy map in the configuration menu. Using this key will open/close the map. However, there doesn’t seem to be an option to do the same for the system map unless I am missing something.

So glad to hear it’s clicking with you, George!

Hey Brian, what was up with Twitch there earlier? Did you actually do a Backseat driver podcast with Tamara?

@krayzkrok: Hold off on that Cobra. In fact, hold off on that Cobra until you have at least 1 mil free.

Right now, I’m flying a pretty tricked out Viper, all C or above. It cost me over a million to get there. When you start going up in ships, the costs for decent equipment grow exorbitantly. Real Man Equipment (A & B) is stupid expensive. For instance, if I want an A level power distributor, it’s going to set me back over 500K. Not to mention weapons above E. Each of my D-beams cost 300K apiece. Kitting out a C-level Cobra will probably take about two million.

And there’s fuel to consider. You drain a Sidey tank and refill it for what – like 100Cr or something? I drain my Viper’s tank and it’s closer to 2K Cr. Travel costs suddenly become significant and you begin to scan planets and USS sites more closely just to pay for gas.

Unless you can grind bank in your Sidey, I would recommend going Eagle next if you’re going the combat route.

I imagine insurance on a decked out Cobra is pretty expensive, as well.

Not a podcast, just a little copilotong session. :)

I also got attacked by a pony today:

So, if your ship blows up… thats it? You only have access to the starter ship unless you got money in bank to buy another?
Bit like EVE, except no subscription fee then?

You should be able to pay insurance to buy back the ship you just lost.

You can even get a loan of 200k if you can’t afford insurance.

There is such a grind between the Cobra/Lakon 6 and the rest of the bigger ships, right now the most profitable thing i can do is trade with my lakon which will probably net me like 150k-200k every 20 minutes but thats boring.

Combat is fun but also really slow until i can kill anacondas solo (which i cant)

Next upgrade is an ASP and people are saying you need like 30m to equip it properly for combat. (costs 6m to buy)

@tylertoo re: the HOTAS X: I dedicated the rightmost thumb button on the joystick as my shift button, thus allowing for two functions for all of the others. Even so, I still need to use the keyboard for some things. I have heard of some setups that assign another button as a shift button as well. I think the setup I have now plus maybe some voice attack commands would free me of having to use the keyboard at all.
Oh, and I do have TrackIR.

I don’t have the game yet but I’m playing with my new X52 Pro. I’m used to ratty old Microsoft FFB2s and cheap Saitek gear so it feels great to me. No idea why anyone thought a pinky button was a good idea though. I’m going to try to remove that or take off the entire handle brace.

I asked this earlier but don’t think anyone saw it. :) Is there a way to use the HOTAS to escape out of the Map screens without mousing over to “Exit”? I’m using an X52 Pro.

There is also a control labelled “UI Back” you can bind to a key or button. This will back you out of all menus, including the galaxy map. I have it bound to the shaft thumb button on my X55.