Topic: Descent: Underground controls?

[D2Disciple]

Just bought my way into the Steam early access tonight.

I know it's a pre-alpha, so I'm taking that into consideration here... But what the heck is up with the controls? They're somewhere between "lackadaisical" with the joystick and "virtually unplayable" with the mouse. It seems to be directly related to the pitch and yaw movement speeds - the yaw moves roughly twice as quickly as the pitch does. I understand that might be the way a few people like it, but in a 6DOF game, creating different pitch and yaw speeds (at full tilt) is completely hamstringing the gameplay. I'm having to crank up the sensitivity and curve on the pitch to match the yaw acceleration speed, but still - making a 360-degree loop at full pitch speed takes twice as long as a 360-degree spin at full yaw speed.

Worse yet, ships seem to carry way too much momentum, as changing direction quickly and effectively, or even juking with the slide controls, feels abnormally slow.

This could be something only I'm experiencing, but if it's a design direction, it's the kind that could literally be a game-breaker for me, as much as I hate to say it. 


EDIT: I went back and measured it in the original Descent... turns out it, too, has different rotation speeds for the X and Y axes. I never noticed. After going back to D:U, it's definitely related to the acceleration of axis speed. It just doesn't feel natural, for some reason. I did manage to fine tune it to feel a little more like Descent, with the curve for both set at 1.45 and the sensitivity for the Y axis at 1.75 and the sensitivity for the X axis at 1.10. After that, the Typhoon came alive. It feels most Pyro-like, at least to me.

I also read the "known issues" portion of the launcher and realized that part of my problem with momentum feeling off is related to bi-and-trichording apparently not working at this time. That explains a lot. I know trichording is definitely a key gameplay element for the dev team, so I feel sure movement will feel much better when that gets implemented.

The game is getting a lot more fun when I'm able to control my craft a bit better.

[-<WillyP>-]

Agreed. And there was something posted in the last update about a virtual joystick, but I haven't had time to see what that's all about.

[Scyphi]

The controls in DU I've found are highly customizeable and can be very precisely tweaked...but tweak 'em wrong and the game will play very differently from how you'd expect it to. I found it took a little trial and error before you get it just right, and I'm sure it'll vary greatly on both system and player.

It's actually a good thing to have for the really hardcore players that like that sort of control, but I do miss the more simple settings previous Descent games had, so I have conveyed to the Descendant crew the desire for a "layman's" version of the customization controls. They say they've taken note of that, so they could be working on something like that to include in the end, probably for the final release.