SCG-Essential Feature!

[Silh]

(Wow, been a while since I've been around these forums, but going to chime in here).

yeah, I disagree - sorry, don't take it personal, but I do play PvP competitive and there is no way that a joystick (even with the 'tuning' and 'fidelity') will beat a mouse in games like Elite Dangerous.
your dexterity in arm is not comparable to dexterity in hand/fingers (i.e. fingertip grip) - sure you can have an immersive experience and a lot of fun, but you will be beaten by the top 10% of kb/m gamers (competitive PvP).

I completely agree with you about aiming being better with mouse, but just want to point out one thing that doesn't always get mentioned, and disagree about it being finger vs. arm dexterity.

A mouse being used for pointing is a zero-order control system. Your movement of the control device (mouse) maps directly to your aim movement in game. You move the mouse left A centimeters, your aim responds by moving left X pixels. When you stop moving your mouse, your aim stops moving.

Using a joystick for pointing is a first-order control system. Your movement of the control device (flight stick) maps to the velocity of your aim movement in game. You move the joystick left A centimeters (or degrees or whatever), your aim responds by moving left at X pixels/s. To stop moving your aim, you have to move it back to the right, to get back to center, to return the aim movement velocity to zero.

Different control orders may be better or worse for different purposes. Zero-order is great for aiming, and you'll pretty much never beat it with a first-order system. In comparison, first-order is better for general flight control--imagine having to keep on moving a mouse right over and over to do that 360 degree turn in a (real) plane. Or say, an analog throttle for vehicle velocity control--first order; it wouldn't make much sense to have to keep on moving a mouse forward continuously in zero-order fashion to keep your car driving forwards.

(Further orders exist as well; can't think of any examples off the top of my head)

[will]

I like that distinction of zero-order and first-order, that's really useful.

And for completeness (and philosophy; this is really unrelated to the SCG topic), I've observed that zero-order and first-order can also be independent of the actual control device. I've seen flight-ish games where the mouse is used to control pitch and roll in a first-order way, eg having the mouse move a cross-hairs cursor, where the farther the cursor is from the center of the screen, the faster the pitch/roll is changing, and moving the cursor back to the center of the screen has it stop changing.

And then I remember in the original Mechwarrior 2 games, the joystick was actually used in a zero-order method for torso twisting -- twist position was mapped directly to the stick offset, instead of using velocity/deltas, and so when you released the stick the torso returned all the way to center instead of staying where it was positioned. It was kind of insane and impossible to use, but that's what they chose to do and defended their choice (and I ranted a lot about it at the time because it was so unusual and such a pita).

So indeed mouse is usually used in a zero-order way (and great for it) and joystick is usually used in a first-order way (and usually much better than for zero-order), but it can also happen in the other combinations.

[Silh]

I remember that from MW2!

Now what would work well with that is a stick without centering springs and higher friction... (and from what I've run into, there have been a few who have been running custom controls like that for MWO)