descentchampions.org

Something like the orb 180 wouldn't work now. Descent puts hard limits on what the ship can do, after all the control input has been registered and tallied. There's nothing a controller can say that will make a ship turn faster!

My distant memory is that it has always been that way, but something was put into Descent specifically for the spaceorb, as the developers said more direct control was necessary to make it work better or something. The 180 flip was something the orb developers did that was an abuse of that. I don't know when that control was taken away, but I do know that the orb itself never recovered from the damage to its reputation.

^^^^^^^^^^^Trufax. =)

I just looked up a picture of it. I had no idea it was held like a controller! Always assumed it was like a big trackball that sat on the desk. Wild.

I always thought part of installing the spaceorb was overwriting the hog/ham/whatever file and it was kinda done without permission from the descent devs. Fun, intuitive controller, I was good enough on the 3dpro that i didnt want to invest the time to get better with it, as it was imho too imprecise in my clumsy hands.

I always wanted to get the microsoft strategic commander working with descent. it was a keyboard replacement that functioned as a hand sized hat switch with some buttons on it. Put all your slides on that, rotations on the mouse or joystick and go to town. Alas, you could only press one button at a time (i.e. dont put fire secondaries and primaries together on your left hand) which made it decidedly impractical. I imagine someone could have written a better driver to eliminate this problem but i am not that person.

https://www.google.com/search?q=microso ... acZ6eQM%3A

Drakona's bindings gave me an idea so I've made a slight change.

I do the same thing as her, vertical groupings of opposite functions. This allows my left hand to control 4 degrees and my right hand on mouse to control the remaining 2.

Q is select homer
A is select smart

W/S is banking
E/D is left/right
R/F is up/down
T/G is forward/back

Weapons are the number row
Afterburner is space

That's all for the left hand.

Right hand is standard mouse buttons and axes. Scroll wheel down is deploy proxy's, scroll wheel up is secondary cycle. Thumb button is fire flare.


The change I made is moving all my bindings over by 1, so that I can put homer/smart on buttons for my pinky. Can't put them on the right because then I wouldn't be able to fly forward/back when choosing weapons and that's far more important than being unable to bank for a brief moment. Need to adjust which finger I use to select weapons now, but after a day I'm about 85% there.

Chilly, this thread was useful for me. Maybe you can glean something that might need a tweak.

Thanks Swarthy! I'll give this a read. Tough to get my head around all these mid-board setups! I've thought about getting one of those crazy devices PFunk was using -- so many keys!

For reference, my setup at this point is:

WASD - the usual
Q/E -- roll left/right
Mouse move - aim
Mouse L/R - strafe up/down
Ctrl/Spc - pri/sec fire
1-4 - laser through plasma
C - fusion (shorter distance than 5!)
6 - concs
middle click or X - homing missile
scroll down or Z - smarts
F or fwd mouse thumb button - fire flare
R and rear mouse thumb button - rearview
Tab - drop proxy

All of my sensitivities are maxed in all directions with zero/minimum input buffer. I'm thinking I have trouble turning quickly because I haven't quite dialed in the perfect bank angle/pattern/timing to do so, and I think the sensitivity/buffer settings are adding a bit of noise into what should be smooth piloting. Turning sensitivity down and adding a small input buffer makes for smoother flying, but I can't tell if I can turn much, if any, faster than before (plus I lose the fine control that gives the vulcan its flavor).

I briefly experimented with the 'old-school' setting...It's actually pretty analogous to Overload's input response where the turn speed spikes at less than the maximum input threshold, but it doesn't feel quite right here since I'm still throwing as much input into yaw/pitch as I can even if I know the game will refuse it. Overload responds to this a little more gracefully just by nature of having uncapped controls, especially in single-player. Might practice a bit more with it though, as the results weren't too far out of the realm of my normal performance. 1v1 mp is naturally more stressful than my usual challenge mode action so control subtlety will need some practice too...something, something mind games?

I use 1150 and two clicks to the right