Yeah, I tried that, and it’s good for aiming (as it’s almost like a teeny bit of normal yaw movement as you’d expect with a mouse), but it feels better to have pure roll for maneouvering - again, that dilemma, I can seem to get comfortable moving around, or aiming, but not both at the same time, i.e. settings and slider combinations I find good for one aren’t good for the other.
I did a couple of trade runs in my lakon type 6 on xmas eve. netted about 120k. bored, i parked the lakon and took out the viper. flew to a resource extraction zone to pwn some pirate butt. 30 minutes of solid pew pew later i was down to 60% hull, 10k richer and had a gaggle of rozzers on my six and warped the fuck out of there with my hair on fire. what a game :)
anybody else here using a rift? if so I have a neat little trick for you to check out: http://arkku.com/elite/hud_editor/
I run with
<MatrixRed> 0.2, 0, -1 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> -1, 1, -1 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 0.17, 0.31, 1 </MatrixBlue>
For extra rez while still retaining the information given by red and blue colouring.
I tried my hand at mining for the first time. Went to one of those belt clusters that was defined as “Major reserves” and “metallic” with a class 2 refinery ranked E I think. It’s pretty fiddly and a bit hard to figure out, but not impossible. Basically the one I got had 2 bins in it to store not-yet-complete tons of a given metal. Do they get more bins as they go higher in rank, or is that determined by class?
I ended up with 5 tons of silver to sell and 1 of bertrandite. Not too shabby for a first run. BTW those tumbling asteroids are pretty intimidating up close. If I had an Oculus Rift I don’t know if I’d have had the nerve to scoop up some of those chunks. Now I know how that little triangle felt back in the day.
To counteract the sense of gloom, one thing I did discover that gave me immense joy, that’s really intuitive on the left hand side for those used to fps/MMO usage, is to have throttle bound to mouse wheel, yes - BUT, the game also has a dirty little secret: “thrust forward” and “thrust backward” which you can bind to W and S. This is much more like moving in an fps, i.e. you hold down W and so long as you hold it down, you pump yourself forward, and when you take your finger off W you stop (or revert to whatever speed your throttle is set at). This, in combination with setting 50% speed to a key you would normally use for “autorun” in an fps/MMO, makes it almost identical to fps/MMO, so you can take advantage of that ingrained muscle memory there. I also have a convenient key bound to 100%.
This means you are in the blue zone (your “autorun” key at 50%) automatically most of the time, and you use W and S to intuitively pump yourself faster or slower than that when you need to, or just use a keypress to instantly boost to 100% when you need to. So you very rarely need to actually use the throttle (mouse wheel) as such, but it’s nice to have there.
I also have thrust left and right bound to A and D and thrust up/down bound to Space and Ctrl (which would normally be “jump” and “crouch” in an fps/MMO, so again, intuitive for that old muscle memory).
Yes, I enjoy manual docking in much the same way that I enjoy landing in flight sims. After 6 months I still find docking a fun procedure and find it hard to imagine why anyone would want to automate the process. In fact the landing and fuel scooping are pretty much the only fun parts of flying the huge Lakon Type 9.
I also enjoy docking. It’s one of the few parts of the game that requires some input into flying the ship on my part. The other is when I am being interdicted. (I haven’t tried actual combat yet, but I suspect that will be the third area where my input is important).
@gurugeorge: That’s pretty cool as a flight setup. That’s almost identical to what I used in I-war. Except with a joystick in my right hand instead of a mouse, obviously. But in Elite so far, I’ve stuck with the default control scheme.
Santa brought me a Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X, recommended by others here. This is the first flight stick I’ve ever had. I bought E:D on pre-release so I’ve been playing it since release day one with mouse and keyboard. I managed to get fairly proficient at everything but combat, so I could have stayed with m/k and probably been fine except for combat.
But now that I’ve tried the T-Flight for a few hours I can’t imagine ever going back to m/k. Perhaps this is obvious to you veterans, but to anyone who’s on the fence about this, the T.Flight makes a huge difference in ease of play and is reasonably priced ($45ish, though Amazon had a sale weeks ago for $35). I do find the throttle a bit sticky, but perhaps there’s some fine-tuning in the controls that I can do.
Last night at one point while playing I looked up and found my wife and teenaged daughter both laughing at me as I sat there with my geeky HOTAS trying to land a ship. Shit, wait’ll I get an Occulus Rift.
Still struggling to find a good control scheme for the Hotas, though. The official forum has some suggestions, including with downloadable binding files, but I want a scheme that does not require any keyboard input at all, and I haven’t found any.
How many buttons do you have access to on the throttle?
I’m trying to think of how many buttons I use all the time on the keyboard.
UP throttle
Down Throttle (you’ve got those two covered already)
Jump
Left Shift (to look around my cockpit at the left or right panels)
Landing Gear
Q and E. (Used for tabbing through the interface panels)
I think that’s it. 5 buttons? Oh, and in the combat tutorial I was using the cursor keys for power management. I open and close the cargo scoop using my right panel interface, even though I’m sure there’s a keyboard shortcut for it. You can do the same for the landing gear actually.
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?