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Devil Wears Wings posted:I think Microsoft tried something like that with the lovely Shadowrun game that came out several years back. The console players, of course, got regularly annihilated by the PC gaming master race. I read something about Shadowrun having some crazy auto aiming going on for consoles that made it unfair. But yeah nobody played it anyway so who cares.
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Mar 10, 2011 23:46
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Yeah, lets be honest, Dreamcast was more terrible than any modern console for FPSs, and I'm saying this as someone who still owns one. On an upside of UbiDRM, I was able to torrent copies of Splinter Cell Conviction and Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, and since the keys were tied to my account from when I legit bought them, I was able to install and play them no issue even though they weren't my original Ubisoft Store digital downloads that I accidentally lost in a reformat. Combine that aspect with the one time activation Brotherhood is gonna have and it seems like it'll actually be pretty good DRM instead of mindfuckingly terrible. UbiSoft is learning.
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Mar 10, 2011 23:52
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Death Himself posted:I think it happened maybe twice. It never works out well for the console players. I've read this probably 50 times, but even still, every time I read it I get the most massive  face. I'm a terrible person.
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Mar 10, 2011 23:52
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Oh good I thought I was a dick for calling my brother retarded for preferring Halo to team fortress.
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Mar 10, 2011 23:55
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Oh good I thought I was a dick for calling my brother retarded for preferring Halo to team fortress. TF2 or Team Fortress Classic? Because I can totally understand hating the second.
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Mar 10, 2011 23:56
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Oh good I thought I was a dick for calling my brother retarded for preferring Halo to team fortress. I'm glad you recognize that calling someone retarded is probably a dick move.
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Mar 11, 2011 00:01
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Now I'm starting to think about what kind of controls could usurp the mouse+kb. Some sort of motion controls like the wii but done a bit more with FPS games in mind? How would someone playing a game with a VR setup like those goggles+gun stations they have in arcades sometimes stack up against a mouse+kb I wonder.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:06
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The trouble with any kind of gun or Wii type aiming is that they're always going to have precision at an inverse proportion to the distance between the user and the virtual screen they're aiming at. (Which isn't necessarily the same as the actual monitor or TV screen, but usually is.) Or put it another way, a minute finger movement on a mouse equates to a much more minute movement than moving the same distance on a Wii or lightgun, because the surface the mouse is measuring distance against is directly beneath the mouse. Probably the only things that have ever come close are trackballs, which put all the control in your fingertips instead of in your wrist. I've never used one so I can't speak to their overall accuracy or how much of a pain it'd be to relearn muscle memory you built up for a mouse, though. Bobfromsales posted:Mouse and keyboard I'm sure isn't anyhwere near what is technically the 'best' control setup, but it's versatility is what makes it the dominant control method. Except for the vast majority of genres, yes, they actually are. The only real exceptions are games that require multiple forms of analog input - basically flight simulators, racing games, and arguably Devil May Cry style beat-em-ups although frankly you could probably make those entirely mouse-friendly if the developers ever bothered. For everything else the kb+m is either superior (FPS, RTS) or doesn't make any real difference either way because all the input is digital (fighting games, platformers.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Mar 11, 2011 |
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Mar 11, 2011 01:11
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Mouse and keyboard I'm sure isn't anyhwere near what is technically the 'best' control setup, but it's versatility is what makes it the dominant control method. And I think 'versatility' is a trait that draws PC gamers to the platform. If there's a better control scheme for every possible genre i'm really not interested.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:12
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Node posted:I could be blind, but the link to that guys weblog just links back to the moddb download link, which doesn't have the file. He may have taken it down for a bit. It should be up on ModDB right now.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:16
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Death Himself posted:Now I'm starting to think about what kind of controls could usurp the mouse+kb. Some sort of motion controls like the wii but done a bit more with FPS games in mind? Badly. It is much easier to aim with a mouse than by moving your whole body. If you take the time to master it, a track ball is a little better than a mouse, although a good adjustable dpi mouse is still probably unbeatable for 99% of the people. There's a reason the only change to the mouse and keyboard over the past 40 years has been the addition of a handful of extra keys.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:16
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Bobfromsales posted:And I think 'versatility' is a trait that draws PC gamers to the platform. If there's a better control scheme for every possible genre i'm really not interested. There's also the fact that if you don't live by yourself then playing games on the TV set for 4 hours is just not going to happen.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:18
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Taffer posted:I've read this probably 50 times, but even still, every time I read it I get the most massive Yeah that yahtzee sure does some funny reviews bro.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:39
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Death Himself posted:Now I'm starting to think about what kind of controls could usurp the mouse+kb. Some sort of motion controls like the wii but done a bit more with FPS games in mind? I consider it on par with M/KB. More comfortable and natural-looking onscreen but a little slower and less precise. I don't play competitive FPS games though so maybe I'm an outlier.
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Mar 11, 2011 01:53
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... What? I'm willing to admit that Slowbeef is a spaz, and I've never played it myself, but, um, Metroid Prime does not look like a smooth control scheme.
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Mar 11, 2011 07:36
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Bobfromsales posted:Mouse and keyboard I'm sure isn't anyhwere near what is technically the 'best' control setup, but it's versatility is what makes it the dominant control method. It's basically impossible to make a better controller than a mouse at this point. If it were, people would be using them and dominating. You really can't beat a device that can directly convert the entire range of motion your arm through your fingers is capable of into 1:1 input. The control scheme in Metroid Prime 3 / Trilogy is loving pimp as far as console control schemes go, and feels incredibly natural, but it has nowhere near the precision of a mouse. You could have a very high resolution camera and get the same hardware precision as a mouse, but the problem is in 3d space you don't have something to rest your arm on to give you the same level of precision as your wrist on a mousepad. With something like the Wii controller you're basically restricted to just the movement in your wrist, because your arm is too unstable unless you're a brain surgeon. Ultimately there will be games where having some kind of 6 degrees of freedom input is super useful, but right now there really aren't any mainstream games like that.
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Mar 11, 2011 07:58
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If I could think and have a cursor go where I wanted by thinking about it with better precision then they have with those bulky wired implants these days, that would be pimp! Thinking about that though, I think it would be mentally strenuous to learn. With a mouse we use wrist, hand, and finger movements we already know to translate into input. With mental input you have to learn a completely new mode of thought to get the cursor to move. It's like learning to wiggle your ears when you've never tried it before. I did it when I was twelve, it's loving hard to move a muscle when you've never tried direct input to it before. You can't just cheat and use eye movements or something. Try to move your eyes to mimic your cursor when playing a game, it will make you super dizzy in moments. For now, it takes months to learn to move a cursor with lovely precision with your mind alone plus a huge computer rig. I wouldn't be surprised if we got that down to a week or so and the implant minimally invasive and wireless within my lifetime though.
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Mar 11, 2011 09:08
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Nathilus posted:If I could think and have a cursor go where I wanted by thinking about it with better precision then they have with those bulky wired implants these days, that would be pimp! Don't forget that there is an insane amount of noise compared to relevant signal in the human brain and it isn't as though only one, neat little cortical area is relegated to the aiming-with-a-mouse motor action. Mouse and keyboard is just so nice and neat for FPS games :]
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Mar 11, 2011 10:44
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I'd like to see how eye-tracking equipment would fare for FPS use. Using the mouse as it's used currently - crosshair stuck in the centre of the screen which is moved by the mouse, and then your gaze is tracked and used for aiming within the area you're looking at with the mouse. It'd be like the keyboard moves your body, the mouse is your head, and the eye-tracker is your gaze and aim. I've been involved with some eye-tracking equipment recently and even the fairly cheap stuff I've been using should do the trick nicely. Once calibrated it's very accurate and can measure very short fixations. Imagine seeing an enemy appear on your screen and just being able to look at and follow him with your eyes, shooting with the mouse button rather than seeing him, moving your mouse cursor over him and tracking him with your hand whilst shooting. Kind of the reverse of how headtracking is used now - head-tracking moves your character's head and viewpoint and the mouse moves the crosshair within that area, turning when it gets close to the edge. The mouse would be doing the head-tracker's job and your eyes and the eye-tracking would be the mouse crosshair within that area.
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Mar 11, 2011 12:44
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Corbeau posted:Metroid Prime does not look like a smooth control scheme.  It's completely different on the Wii.That said, it doesn't look particularly good in videos. I wasn't very impressed until I played it.
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Mar 11, 2011 16:15
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Mu Zeta posted:I read something about Shadowrun having some crazy auto aiming going on for consoles that made it unfair. But yeah nobody played it anyway so who cares. I believe what they did was give consoles auto aim and PC players got in-game mouse sensitivity settings removed. You had to bump it up in your mouse/windows settings. Rahul Sood formerly of VoodooPC fame and formerly of HP's Gaming Exec fame mentioned that he knew some cross-platform play going on between pro console gamers and average joe PC gamers. http://www.rahulsood.com/2010/07/console-gamers-get-killed-against-pc.html Despite all this talk about PCs becoming the lead development platform it's still like someone mentioned to me. You aren't going to get that full PC game experience because it'll still be a game that's designed with consoles in mind.
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Mar 11, 2011 18:17
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On PC, you don't really have to aim. Unless you're sniping or just absolutely terrible, knowledge of the map, how to react to different situations, and the psychology of the enemy is what helps you succeed. Those factors exist on consoles as well but because the controller isn't nearly as precise as the Mouse, they effectively have to fight the controls too.
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Mar 11, 2011 20:58
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Tufty posted:I'd like to see how eye-tracking equipment would fare for FPS use. Using the mouse as it's used currently - crosshair stuck in the centre of the screen which is moved by the mouse, and then your gaze is tracked and used for aiming within the area you're looking at with the mouse. That wouldnt be a good idea. Even when you are focusing intently on something your eyes scan other areas. It would also make it impossible to shoot at one thing while looking at your health bar / ammo counter without shooting the ground.
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Mar 11, 2011 21:08
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:UbiSoft is learning. Everyone said the same when they got rid of Starforce. They'll come up with something even more terrible in a couple years, just wait.
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Mar 11, 2011 21:37
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Haven't noticed this posted yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM It's Epic's real time demo of an upgraded Unreal 3 engine running on 3 GTX 580's in SLI. Since PC games lately have just looked like console games with more resolution and anti-aliasing it's nice to see something that really takes advantage of monstrous hardware.
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Mar 11, 2011 21:54
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angry_keebler posted:That wouldnt be a good idea. Even when you are focusing intently on something your eyes scan other areas. It would also make it impossible to shoot at one thing while looking at your health bar / ammo counter without shooting the ground. How are you shooting at something in the centre of the screen using your mouse if your eyes are in the corner of the screen looking at your health or ammo?
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Mar 11, 2011 22:06
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Tufty posted:How are you shooting at something in the centre of the screen using your mouse if your eyes are in the corner of the screen looking at your health or ammo? Your brain can fill in the gaps if you're not staring at something, if you look away for a split second your brain is actually just guessing what's there, it's just pretty good at it. If the technology relied on your eyes it'd be a lot harder.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:10
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Tufty posted:How are you shooting at something in the centre of the screen using your mouse if your eyes are in the corner of the screen looking at your health or ammo? Normally or using the proposed vision-tracking system? In the latter case, you can't, that's why it's dumb. In the former, very easily - you do it all the time, just quickly enough that you don't consciously notice it.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:11
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Doctor Meat posted:Haven't noticed this posted yet: Here's a higher quality video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&feature=player_embedded Games are gonna be awesome in 5 years.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Normally or using the proposed vision-tracking system? RagnarokAngel posted:Your brain can fill in the gaps if you're not staring at something, if you look away for a split second your brain is actually just guessing what's there, it's just pretty good at it. If the technology relied on your eyes it'd be a lot harder. In that case, display vital information around the crosshair so that it's constantly in the very start of your peripheral vision, or have it so that it takes 200 milliseconds or so for the crosshair to jump to the new position. You can glance down at your health and ammo and glance back up at the same speed you usually do but you're also doing it quickly enough that the eye-tracking equipment doesn't notice it. Or set up a point of interest over the UI elements which prevents the crosshair from moving to those areas. When you glance down at your ammo, the crosshair stays in the last location you were looking at before looking down, and then when you look back up you may not fixate on exactly the same point as before, but it'll take less than a quarter of a second for you to look at exactly you want to be aiming at again. It's a bit of a silly point anyway. I'll admit I don't play a whole lot of FPS games, but how often when playing CS:S for example do you look at your health and ammo while an enemy is directly in your crosshair and you're actively clicking to fire at him? I'm not talking about "in a combat situation/in an encounter with another player" I'm talking about the moment after you've spotted him and moved the mouse to target him, the time period between when you fire your first shot at him and when he dies/goes out of view/you die. I think you're also underestimating exactly what the eye-tracking equipment would and could do. It's not a cumbersome mouse pointer or crosshair that follows your gaze, it knows precisely where your pupils are looking at at any given moment in time, measured very accurately both in terms of location on the screen and the length of any given fixation. You notice an enemy in your peripheral vision, you look at him as you would do when playing with just a mouse and keyboard, and you're simply skipping the step of moving the mouse to be aiming at him too, your eyes are doing it for you. Just looking at him is enough. Edit: Here. Imagine this, but with the yellow circle showing gaze being the mouse cursor. He looks at what he wants to research and you can see his gaze and then the mouse follows and clicks on the desired item. If the gaze WAS the cursor then it's just as elegant an interface but much faster. Now transplant that into an FPS where the cursor or the crosshair is your gaze which is free to move around the screen, and the mouse controls the viewpoint shown on the screen in the way it does now. Note also that the linked video is a few years old and the technology has improved since then. In a few years it'll be even more accurate and potentially affordable as a gaming/computing peripheral. Why the hell wouldn't you want to replace your mouse with a little controller with a couple of buttons and use your eyes as a cursor? Tufty fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Mar 11, 2011 |
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Mar 11, 2011 22:39
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Here's a higher quality video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&feature=player_embedded Definitely. Consider that the equivalent ultra-high-end card to the GTX 580 five years ago (circa-March 2006) was the Radeon X1900 XTX, which in a tri-Crossfire setup would get clobbered by a single $200-ish GPU today. Our mid-range setup five years from now will be able to easily render, on the fly, eye candy equivalent to that in NVidia's benchmark.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:46
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Here's a higher quality video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&feature=player_embedded 5 years? I'm thinking more like 2-3 years at the latest. A lot of people have this mindset that next-get consoles are still 5+ years away. I personally predict announcement of next-gen consoles at this year's E3, then their unveiling and E3 2012, then probably launch by holiday 2013. I also have this gut feeling that Nintendo will try to get the drop on MS and Sony with a Wii HD in 2012 though.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:53
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spasticColon posted:5 years? I'm thinking more like 2-3 years at the latest. A lot of people have this mindset that next-get consoles are still 5+ years away. I personally predict announcement of next-gen consoles at this year's E3, then their unveiling and E3 2012, then probably launch by holiday 2013. I also have this gut feeling that Nintendo will try to get the drop on MS and Sony with a Wii HD in 2012 though. It's not like PC game eye candy is going to change overnight when the new consoles launch. It generally takes developers a couple of years to squeeze all of the graphical flair that they can out of new consoles, and console hardware is always weaker than PC hardware at the time besides. (The PS3, for example, launched in late 2006 with something roughly equivalent to an even-then-outdated 7800 GT, while the 360 uses something similar to a gimped Radeon x1650 XT. And both have to make do with a measly 256 MB system RAM at a time when gaming PCs had at least 1 GB.) Maybe we'll see a Crysis-equivalent come out in a few years that requires a high-end GPU for all of its eye candy, but 5 sounds about right for that level of graphical detail to hit the mainstream.
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Mar 11, 2011 23:11
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Tufty posted:In that case, display vital information around the crosshair so that it's constantly in the very start of your peripheral vision, or have it so that it takes 200 milliseconds or so for the crosshair to jump to the new position. You can glance down at your health and ammo and glance back up at the same speed you usually do but you're also doing it quickly enough that the eye-tracking equipment doesn't notice it. A 200ms latency between cursor refreshes would enable the player to target 5 stationary objects a second, which is already trivially easy to do with a mouse. If you had to adjust your aim more than five times in a fight with some dude jumping around you in circles, which you certainly must, you'd lose. Adding even 50ms of latency is often a make or break condition. As for adjusting focus during a fight, I'd conseratively estimate that at least half of the time I'm not looking directly at my target. In actuallity it might be a much higher percentage of time. There is a lot of scanning the area for enemies, checking ammo and health, and watching a target's legs/gun while aiming at the head. If you're playing a pyro or a machine gunner in a game like team fortress, it's often advantageous to sweep your cursor fluidly across the screen, which is something your eyes can't do. I'm not trying to poopoo your idea, but even if an eye tracker could be made just a good as a mouse, which I doubt, it would then be a very expensive replacement for a 30 dollar mouse. Maybe in flight sims where you would concievably require both hands to operate the plane it might be more valuable.
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Mar 11, 2011 23:44
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Here's the problem with eye-driven aiming in games: seeing the far mountain. I'm not sure what it's called in popular terminology (panoramic vision, maybe?), but that's the term I remember from Kendo. The technique is to never focus on any one portion of the opponent (or, in the case of gaming, one portion of the screen), which permits you to see the whole without moving your eyes. To a Kendo opponent it looks like being focused on something behind them, hence the name. In practical terms it allows you to watch everything at once, though you mostly notice movement. It's also obscenely helpful in awareness-based FPS games, and would be impossible with eye-aim because you're never actually changing your eye position.
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Mar 12, 2011 01:33
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Corbeau posted:Here's the problem with eye-driven aiming in games: seeing the far mountain. I'm not sure what it's called in popular terminology (panoramic vision, maybe?), but that's the term I remember from Kendo. The technique is to never focus on any one portion of the opponent (or, in the case of gaming, one portion of the screen), which permits you to see the whole without moving your eyes. To a Kendo opponent it looks like being focused on something behind them, hence the name. In practical terms it allows you to watch everything at once, though you mostly notice movement. It's also obscenely helpful in awareness-based FPS games, and would be impossible with eye-aim because you're never actually changing your eye position. I think a bigger challenge is the fact that even with this sort of zen like looking behind things your eyes are making positional adjustments faster that you really perceive in order to keep your binocular vision aligned. This would probably translate into the cursor basically jumping all over the place.
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Mar 12, 2011 17:43
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What's a good flight stick/flight controller? I'm currently looking at the Saitek X-52 was wondering if the price difference between the Pro Flight and the normal version is worth it. Also if you can recommend a better one that's cheaper that would also be appreciated.
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Mar 13, 2011 20:18
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This is probably a really goddamn stupid question given it's a Blizzard product, but is Diablo 2 worth getting back into? I've been trying to lure a friend into the game with me but I fear we won't find anyone other than the absolute obsessives playing it nowadays.
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Mar 13, 2011 20:46
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poptart_fairy posted:This is probably a really goddamn stupid question given it's a Blizzard product, but is Diablo 2 worth getting back into? I've been trying to lure a friend into the game with me but I fear we won't find anyone other than the absolute obsessives playing it nowadays. Check out the Eastern Sun mod, it really revitalized the game for my friends and me. There's a thread for the new goon server with instructions on how to install everything on the first or second page of this forum.
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Mar 13, 2011 20:55
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Haha, poo poo, yeah. I just noticed that thread. My worry is that he would be a complete newbie to the game - he's only ever played Torchlight - so I'm a bit  he'd be overwhelmed by a mod like this.
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Mar 13, 2011 20:57
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