Hi EA Tom,
I've am a veteran of X-Wing, Tie Fighter, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Wing Commander, Freelancer, Descent Freespace, most of the X series of games (X2, X3, X4 etc), and countless more terrestrial flight combat sims and FPS games with vehicles. I've been away from the space sim genre for a little while so have missed some of the more recent games in the genre (Elite Dangerous). I played most of these games with mouse and keyboard and had no difficulty shooting accurately on a 286 PC playing X-Wing at sub 20fps.
I was so excited that Squadrons was coming out, but then the reality of my experience has been a considerable disappointment. The most significant of the issues is that the implementation of the mouse and keyboard controls is by a considerable margin, the worst I have experienced in any flight game ever.
However, I would sincerely like the game to be successful so I'll try and be constructive...
I don't use any special hardware, no special monitors or mouses, no special software that I've tweaked. I've tried a number of different sensitivity settings in Squadrons and nothing feels right. My last attempt was to turn motion range to near 0 and sensitivity to something mid range and then just repeatedly spam the centring button. Was surprisingly effective for the obstacle course but too much to keep spamming a keyboard button while in combat.
My preferred method of mouse control is direct input. I have no real issues with picking my mouse up and putting it down again when I run out of room. Just about any time you are controlling anything in a 3D environment with a mouse you expect that motion will be directly coupled to your viewpoint. Virtual stick decouples this.
But if we must use a virtual stick...
Provide an option to turn off the mouse indicator. I play with controls inverted and it is a massive UI fail to be moving the mouse in one direction and seeing a cursor moving in the opposite direction. Your brain is wired to expect a cursor to move in the direction of travel of the mouse. I invert the controls because my brain is wired to expect pulling back on a stick to increase pitch. These two things can't coexist in an interface. I honestly think you can turn the indicator off altogether, there is enough background information (starfields, obstacles etc) that you can judge your relative motion without needing a cursor to tell you that.
As many people have said, finding the deadzone is really hard, particularly snapping to it. I think it could benefit from a more non-linear mapping from virtual stick position to rotation rate. I assume at the moment it is set up so that the max cursor position corresponds to max rotation rate, then linearly varies the rotation rate with cursor position down to zero as you reach the tiny deadzone. I think people then skip right over the dead zone and end up with a high rotation rate in the opposite direction and end up overshooting and oscillating about the point they want. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have a small deadzone as you want to be able to make small adjustments to your aimpoint without having to have a big movement to cross the deadzone - so I think there are other solutions than just a bigger deadzone.
1) You could try a nonlinear mapping from cursor position to rotation rate so that it is much slower near the centre and much faster near the edges. This would give you more precision near the middle where you need it while retaining the ability to get to max rotation rate quickly.
2) You could try a blend between direct input and virtual stick - not sure how you'd mix them though so it might need to be a user input to hold it.
3) Some kind of smart autocentre whether it is snap to centre, or just have the mouse cursor position decay to the centre automatically over time with the decay time based on the cursor position.
A lot of people complain about not being able to swap yaw/roll between mouse and keyboard. I grew up with X-Wing which was default yaw on the mouse so I don't mind either way. As a professional flight controls engineer though, I would definitely say that roll on the right hand is far more natural... people should at least have the option to switch it to what they want.
