To JOYSTICK or not to JOYSTICK? THAT is the question!

GeeBot said:
Controlling a vehicle by thought isn't as speedy as you might think (ha, ha). Recall in Fire Fox how Clint has to think all of his mental commands in Russian? That takes soooo long. By contrast, you could probably execute a barrel roll with a minimal movement of the wrist.

The way the human body works is that signals travel from your skin and to your muscles basically to the spinal cord and back. Freakily enough, this means when you touch a hot stove, for example, your hand's motion away is being controlled by your spine, not your brain.

This is why reflexes are so much faster than conscious movement. When you learn to drive or fly or ride a bicycle or whatever, a lot of what you do becomes reflexive. You don't really have time to think, hrm, I'm leaning over a bit, maybe I should shift my weight so I don't fall flat on my face.

Thought control would probably have some benefits (it would free up your hands from having to toggle a bunch of auxiliary buttons... super-HOTAS?), and we can't really know how it would all work (maybe it would interpret your latent desires to KILL CRUSH DESTROY and trigger an AI for the next 10 minutes to execute the perfect combat manuevers to wipe out a squadron of bad guys), but the current control scheme is fairly close to optimal. They've tried replacing steering wheels in cars with joysticks, and they offer a lot more precise control (to the point where people get careless and start crashing into stuff just as much as before... sigh). Hey, do you think the military would still be using the same setup if countless hours of real and virtual flight experience didn't back it up?
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At some point the mentality of the populace must catch up to its technology..hence to those who jump into their vehicle and turn it on...but shut off the brain...WAKE UP! :D


In other words, folks need to pay attention regardless if its a person or a puter controlling the vehicle. No amount of technology or reflex actions can prevent a crash or death because someone was fumbling with a cell phone or lip stick or changing a CD or radio dial. I would think that even in the future...humans must "keep the eyes on the road and hands upon the wheel/jstick/mouse/keyboard/holopannel, or whatever control interface there will be.

Actually the military is doing more experiments on pilot-less vehicles than ever before, some of them completely computer controlled, some remote piloted. And these craft are having a very high success rate. Recently there was a contest held by the DOD in which civilians entered their creations for a remote controlled land vehicle. Not a single entry ran the course all the way, but the concepts worked very well. Even tho the civilian units never made it, the military remote vehicles are currently in use as we speak..flying over Iraq and other areas getting recon data and even taking out a target or two, all while the operator sits at a console watching it all happen on real time video. And yes...some of those "Predator"s are controlled by a computer with a person sitting at a monitor, keyboard and......(drum roll please)....a MOUSE! Tho I have seen some control centers have both depending on the operators preference. But a majority of the units flying are already programed with the flight paths and navigation data. The operator basically just sits and watches. From taxing, to take off, to flying the mission, to flying home, to landing, to taxing to the hanger, these things are fully automated, and quite advanced than your average "COX" remote airplane concepts.

I dont think we are too far off from other control interfaces for vehicles. Heck in the late 70's they were working with auto pilot systems to land jumbo jets in cases of emergencies, and it worked. That was 30 yrs ago...imagine what kind of chips there are now working those auto pilot systems 1 minute after you leave the ground.
 
GeeBot said:
The way the human body works is that signals travel from your skin and to your muscles basically to the spinal cord and back. Freakily enough, this means when you touch a hot stove, for example, your hand's motion away is being controlled by your spine, not your brain.

This is why reflexes are so much faster than conscious movement. When you learn to drive or fly or ride a bicycle or whatever, a lot of what you do becomes reflexive. You don't really have time to think, hrm, I'm leaning over a bit, maybe I should shift my weight so I don't fall flat on my face.
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How about a direct connection between your nervous system and the space craft? That would eliminate the .8 second latency between giving the command to do an action and actually doing the action. Your brain would give the command to, let's say, roll your wrist, and in so doing the space craft would execute the roll.
 
There's one minor, little quibble, in regards to the thought delay of the mental control system in the movie version of Firefox: the reason Gant had to convert his thoughts to Russian was because the plane was designed by soviets, for soviets. Were the design to have originated in an American lab, English (or "American", for the folks who think they're witty but are only half-right) would've been the language used by the system.

Of course, that whole setup is working with the kinda silly notion that the thoughts would need to be actual word-type commands, instead of using something like mental images of what to do to make the action happen (not unlike the control method utilized by the Copperhead pilots, in Timothy Zahn's Conqueror series). Images are processed faster than actual words, given that there's one less level of "translation" involved (changing the visual shapes of letters/words into actual concepts) with the former.
 
MY opinion.

Personally, I do not use a joystick for flight games for two reasons:

1.) You never know if they are compatible or not to the game
2.) They cost too much for as much as I would use them, to be honest.

So, I adapt to using the mouse and keyboard. It is pretty effective in the long run, and I have adapted it for sims very well.

P.S. I have an old com from 97, so I do not even know if they work on my system anymore!
 
Evan Brandt - the QA lead at DA..

Its not that big a deal.. I just like to whine about it now and then... ;-)

In fact I think there's probably a copy floating around the office I could grab if I really wanted to..

Thanks for the offer though. :)

-Johnny
 
Oh, heh, okay, I thought Hadrian had promised you a Freelancer for some reason (before he disappeared).

I guess Microsoft's "give away a dozen copies of the game to anyone who might be interested in buying it" program doesn't apply to people who actually worked on it... (G)
 
ChazZio said:
Personally, I do not use a joystick for flight games for two reasons:
1.) You never know if they are compatible or not to the game
2.) They cost too much for as much as I would use them, to be honest.
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Of course #1 is a direct result to #2. If you are willing to spend the price of 2-3 games on one really good stick once you will most likely not have any problems at all. Plus it will probably actually be cheaper then to buy dozens of cheap sticks that break regulary.
Admittingly my HOTAS system cost me around $400 (incl Voice Control Software), but OTOH I haven't seen a single piece of software be that windows or dos that didn't work with it. And it does not show the slightest defects after 4 years.
 
My Sidewinder Precision that I got years ago is a fantastic all-around joystick that never lets me down. I think it was 80 bucks.
 
Ein-7919 said:
How about a direct connection between your nervous system and the space craft? That would eliminate the .8 second latency between giving the command to do an action and actually doing the action. Your brain would give the command to, let's say, roll your wrist, and in so doing the space craft would execute the roll.
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What if the pilot were to sneeze?
 
Yeah, the Precision Pro is cheap and good (though not DOS-compatible). The Sidewinder line's calibration-free optical sensor really does work. Mine cost like $50. I'm not sure Microsoft really makes them anymore, though; I heard they were getting out of the (game) hardware business. I hear Saitek has a few good controllers that are relatively inexpensive, too. I can't imagine playing most sim games with a mouse; most games have an awful mouse control scheme.
 
McGruff said:
What if the pilot were to sneeze?
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Let's see...what's the natural reflex action taken by the hands/arms and feet/legs during a sneeze? I would imagine a kind of curling into a fetal position (albeit a slight one), so maybe "shields at full power" and "cut all engines with a quick reverse thruster burst" would make sense to me. I'd hate to be a combat pilot with a cold.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Hmmmmm., says Microsoft. We've developed the most expensive video game in history and no one wants to play it. What can we do? Well, the market numbers say no one owns a joystick anymore... but that everyone believes they need one to enjoy AIR OR SPACE GAME! Solution? Remove joystick mode from FreeLancer *entirely*. Promote the hell out of the fact that the game is controlled using only a mouse. Everyone has a mouse, everyone can play FreeLancer!
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I might be wrong about this, but I remember that Freelancer was designed from scratch to be played with the mouse and no joystick, on third person. I remember an old interview with Chris Roberts were he was talking about this new approach in design. So while there was the coincidence (or not) of the decline of joysticks and space combat sims, the decision of making Freelancer a mouse and keyboard game was already part of the design.

But yes, if more space combat sims are to be made, it's expectable that they will be made to play with keyboard and mouse. Game companies make games for the consumers, and the market has spoken.
 
On the marketing issue, Lucasarts decided to make the X-Wing and TIE-Fighter require joysticks. The PR is that they were 'realistic'. Of course, with the use of a fan-made patch it was possible to use the mouse and keyboard and play it just as well.
 
GeeBot said:
Yeah, the Precision Pro is cheap and good (though not DOS-compatible).
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Are you absolutely sure about that? I seem to recall playing DOS games just fine with it.

Though I could be confused, since I have the previous Sidewinder model as well. The first one with the rudder control, 3D Pro or something.
 
Delance said:
On the marketing issue, Lucasarts decided to make the X-Wing and TIE-Fighter require joysticks. The PR is that they were 'realistic'. Of course, with the use of a fan-made patch it was possible to use the mouse and keyboard and play it just as well.
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Then there's the games that go all the way *cough*SteelBattalion*cough*
 
I first bought a real joystick (rather than putting up with the cheapo model we still had from an old 286) for X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, because it required a joystick. No keyboard control, no mouse control; basically, if you didn't have a joystick, you couldn't play the game. This was obviously distressing, so the only solution was to buy a stick that worked. Of course, nowadays you can get a mouse-to-joystick driver if you look hard enough.

With respect to the Precision Pro working in DOS, it's true that it works in a DOS box under Windows, but the Microsoft digital protocol requires a Windows driver (not to mention the USB model also requires a Windows driver), and Microsoft didn't implement an analog emulation feature. I believe this was true of the Sidewinder 3D Pro (the first digital stick), although I think Microsoft made a DOS driver for that one, possibly (as I recall it often came bundled with Mechwarrior 2, to show off the torso twist feature). The plain Sidewinder was an analog stick, and worked in DOS as is.

Basically, you can't really use the Precision Pro with Privateer. :)

--edit--
Incidentally, about the Enterprise-E having a joystick... while widely regarded as a really stupid movie moment, some commentators have pointed out that joystick control makes a lot more sense than having the helm guy push a bunch of buttons on his console (keyboard control?). Even allowing for some sort of 'hand wavy' control (mouse control?), a joystick is a much more efficient device for inputting movement commands. Of course, that's probably why they're always executing Evasion Sequence Alpha-Gamma-Bravo-Delta, because if they didn't program these things in ahead of time with their slow control scheme, they'd get smoked by the Klingons or something.

--edit2--
Another interesting sidenote on this whole thought control business... the Macross anime series actually sorta dealt with this. The original series exclusively used mechanical controls, foot pedals and a billion buttons and joysticks, basically. The mechanical nature of the original series was made absolutely clear by the Macross Plus follow-on, which pitted a conventional fighter against a thought control one (the thought control one had a nasty habit of translating one pilot's surpressed anger at the other test pilot into homicidal action).

Now, the animation in the original series pulls off a lot of manuevers which look much more complicated than mechanical controls should be capable of, and you really don't see the pilots doing much control work; the complicated sequences focus on the exterior shots, with cuts to the pilots only for things like dialogue or someone getting the crap kicked out of them. While this was no doubt mostly a matter of style (realistic-moving giant robots look better than stilted-moving giant robots, and are easier to animate since their motion is "natural"), some people have speculated that the pilot only really provides hints to the machine, which performs most of the fluid motions themselves.

Aka, instead of activating your arms to point a gun at your enemy, you just steer your pipper on target and blast away, and the avionics take care of all the intermediate steps of moving and shooting. This makes a lot of sense, because the pilot, especially in such a complex vehicle, really shouldn't be burdened down with managing all the minutiae of every single step of motion. Of course, you might argue that having a computer take care of everything prevents the best-of-the-best from getting all they can out of the machine.

Indeed, modern fighter pilots grumble in the same way about how fly-by-wire controls prevent them from having full control over their aircraft. On the other hand, fly-by-wire enables aircraft designs which are too aerodynamically unstable to be controlled by a human anyway. These designs are constantly twitching in random directions, which allows them to be much more agile than a stable design when they actually need to turn (like in combat), because they have less resistance to the manuever. So you could say that having the mechanical interface of a giant robot fighter thingy translate a pilot's intent into action, rather than a pilot's action into action, is just a logical evolution of the fly-by-wire idea.
 
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