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
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