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View Full Version : My Trackball Game Pad Concept : Feedback Welcome



eLoup
11-21-2001, 05:39 AM
The Dilemma : mice/keyboards rule, game pads drool.

The reasoning : mice/keyboards rule. Game pads do not allow for the kind of movement that the mouse offers in conjunction with the keyboard. This is especially noticed in games where the player’s avatar must navigate in 3D space. 3D FPS titles often suffer greatly from the restrictions that traditional game pad designs impend on them. Other titles that favor the freedom of the mouse movement is largely Strategy games, both isometric (2D) and 3D RTS benefit from being able to quickly manipulate your resources.



The Diamond In The Rough

Okay guys, I’m no game pad designer, hell, I’m not even a designer of anything. In fact, I can’t even imagine what a game pad designer job description looks like. So in my quest to fill the gap between the rigid, proven PC mouse and keyboard solution as a game controller, and melding the design of a game pad, I put them in a blender and out popped this. Oh, well, it wasn’t really a blender, it’s a figure of speech. I mean, well – you toss the ideas around and… Bah! Here is the results :

http://members.home.com/lutzfam2/xboxcontroller.jpg

Thanks to RedShift, long-time pre-release friend from the online game, World War II Online - my picture has been generously hosted on his server space. Thanks m8!

I was thinking about it, and I even tried a bunch of hand various using an upside-down mouse and like three pairs of rolled up socks (like I said, I’m not a game pad designer ;)). I opted for an optical trackball designer over mouse pretty early on in the game. The reason being that with a mouse you need a good surface to use it on (even optical mice need a nice surface to glide well). The whole point with a game pad is that you can be laying upside down and backwards on your couch and still have full control of your character with both hands in close proximity. So; wham-o, mouse is out of question.



Why this need for mice or trackball you say? Make your time….

Trackballs, like mice, offer very precise aiming of your game avatar or cursor. Movements can be suddenly made and cover huge spaces, stop suddenly and then make hair-fine adjustments. This cannot be done with a d-pad or analog controllers. These have a limit to your motion, and therefor have set maximum and minimum rate of movement you can perform in the game. This is very frustrating; weather your waiting to turn around in an FPS to smack the tailgater or trying to drag-and-drop five hundred galleons in your Spanish armada to invade Mexico in an RTS. Probably the main drawback to trackball compared to mice is that it is incredibly difficult to make broad sweeping movements at a constant (fixed) rate. Not a big surprise, this is actually where the d-pad/analog controllers dominate the input device competition (they just suck it up in everything else!). However, trackballs are well known to allow for finer movement, resulting in quicker more precise small adjustments, perfect for the sniper in all of us =)



The Meat and Potatoes

Now, with trackballs you are presented with a few things. First of all, optical technology is cheap these days, so you’d want to have that for accuracy, and for ruggedness (performs well when ball’s contact points are gritty) and reliability. But because a game pad is supposed to be as versatile as possible, you can’t have the ball practically hanging out of the socket (which can be nice in traditional trackballs) like the Logitech Marble Mouse. This means the ball will be sunk into its socket around 3/5ths of the way. However, like most bottoms of mice, a little twist of a ring around the circumference of the ball and a cover comes off to clean the contact points or whatever. This sunken ball design would allow for the ball to fit snugly and roll equally well however the pad is situated, although lessens the movement compared to non sunken designs.

The button placement wasn’t too hard, and seemed to work with my mouse and socks configuration (I swear!). It allows for quick and dirty access to 4 buttons, A, B, X, and Y : and in my opinion, faster than the standard X-box (USA) controller does. Two up from the trackball, two down.

Now aside from the standard buttons, I was looking at that controller and going: “Good god there is a lot of wasted space in the design. I mean, they give you half a rubber gizmo the size of a small baseball just to fill up this enormous vast of huge-hand design.” So I threw in 6 more functional buttons. These buttons are not your standard quick-to reach variety. These are for those occasions where it sure would be nice to have the leisure of another few buttons for tasks that are a pain in the glute to have to do some funky-butt 5 button special move just to access. Could be something as simple as opening your backpack in an RPG, looking at a map in an FPS, putting the landing gear up in a flight sim, hot-selling an item on an online game, pulling up voice-com options, ….. Whatever! Stuff that you wish you had another button for that could be used when it’s “ok” to lose control of the trackball to push, or the D-pad to push.



Yell At Me or Something!

Yeah, I want feedback. I got my Teflon undies on, so give me a scorcher if that’s your bag, baby.

Thanks.

~

eLoup

Reverend Love
11-21-2001, 07:40 AM
Great idea! I agree with you totally on the limitations of stupid gamepads. For certain games they're just fine, however for those which require a finer touch they're just too **** clumsy.

However they’re a few things which concern me about the trackball idea. First of all there is no axis on a track ball, it's total free motion, which could kinda screw you up when playing racing, flying fighting games. The second is for games like tekken, Street Fighter and others which require certain combinations and charging motions. Now granted these same moves could be preformed, but with an added amount of difficulty because of the trackballs free motion....

I think the best we're gonna see on a game pad is those little analog thingies. When playing GT3 and Madden 2002 that's all I use, screw the pad.

With some tweaking though I think you could be on to something.

Reverend Love

Tazilla
11-21-2001, 11:17 AM
A trackball controler would be Schweet for RTS games and and even sports games,... I owned 2 atari 2600 roller trackball controllers and 2 Atari 5200 roller track ball controllers,.. they are nice for certain kinds of games,.. back in the day,.. missle command and centipede absolutely made you nuts without it

plus after all the beer I drink,.. it would also make drunken boxing on DoA3 a lot easier.

scarecrow kfj
11-21-2001, 11:35 AM
A track ball would be sweet. Imagine playing golden tee on the box with a track

l Maximus l
11-21-2001, 11:38 AM
Mmmmmmm....Golden Tee, Track Ball, and Beer :D

Tazilla
11-21-2001, 11:39 AM
I'd really like to see the pic of the controller concept that is in the first post,..

eLoup,... I'm gonna email ya mah buddy,.. I would really like to see the pic,...

eLoup
11-22-2001, 12:33 AM
Thanks to a few online pals that know a whole heck of a lot more HTML than I do, my Trackball Game Pad Concept picture is now up!

Check it out, scrutinize, and reiterate!

Can ya dig it?

P.s. Yes, the pict certainly isn’t Rimbrant. It was done in PhotoShop and just kind of assimilated to give a rough idea of the concept of this controller. That’s my fancy way of saying I suck at PhotoShop.

~

eLoup

eLoup
11-23-2001, 10:03 PM
I'm gonna do a final bump to catch any other persons interested in the idea of a controller that excelled in fast, precise movement without the drawbacks of the standard mouse / keyboard PC set-up, which is thought by many, a superior input device scheme for gaming.

As for the pict, now up – what do you guys think of the button layout? I know the 6 extra buttons are a little iffy… Not the buttons themselves, but the placement. The ones I’d like to hear most about is the “A, B, X, and Y” buttons which are halo-ed by a yellow circle. I was trying to come up with a scheme that wouldn’t penalize the track-ball position too much. The thing about the trackball is that your thumb is controlling it, along with the primary 4 buttons. So you need access to your control (trackball) and your buttons in an easy and effective way. I thought the 2 above, two below method might work. And you?

~

eLoup
Seattle

Tazilla
11-23-2001, 11:10 PM
I think that the Button layout should be reverted back to the normal placement that is on the standard cotroller that we have now,..
as for the location of the trackball,.. I feel that it sould be located in the same area that the right anolog stick occupies currently,..

the extra buttons idea is nice,.. but I feel that they should be in a more natural location,...

for instance,.. maybe one at each "shoulder area" where my index fingers currently rest along the top left and right sides of the controller,...

I have some more ideas for this eLoup,.. but I need to learn a little more about photo shop before I put out some graphics,..

try to incorporate some of my suggestions,..

a beer button wouldn't hurt