Joystick support?

[Thundercraft]

Most of the popular space combat and space sim games that I can think of either featured joystick control or at least supported it as an option.

 

While the current mouse / keyboard setup isn't as bad as I thought it would be, it is not ideal. I'm sure the lack of joystick support is turning off some prospective players. And I have some good joysticks collecting dust on my shelf...

[cepheni]

From official side there won't be Joystick support, as there a way to many keybindings already to do this in a satisfying way. If it comes only some time in the future.

[Thundercraft]

From official side there won't be Joystick support, as there a way to many keybindings already to do this in a satisfying way. If it comes only some time in the future.

 

I completely understand if it's been decided that there are more pressing issues and more important suggestions. However, no offense, but having "too many keybindings to support joysticks" doesn't sound like a good excuse to me. (You should see how crowded the keybindings are for joystick games like the X-series!) Joystick support would only require the most important 2 or so buttons, which usually comes down to the fire button and afterburners. All the rest of the functions are mostly irrelevant, especially since many joysticks these days are programmable. Most players should be able to use a combination of joystick and keyboard. The difficult part of supporting joysticks is getting the X and Y of the joystick yolk to correspond satisfactorily with ship or aircraft responsiveness. But there are plenty of C++ or C# libraries that support joysticks.

 

Maybe some day, then? But I'm sure there won't ever be a mod for joystick support as that should be virtually impossible for anyone but a dev. You can't just "bind" a joystick's X and Y yolk to Up/Down/Left/Right (or WASD). That won't be responsive enough - players would be better off with the keyboard and mouse.

[Pob]

Actually I was playing around with the alternative controls yesterday and I instantly thought they would work well with joystick&mouse, you'd control the ship with one hand on the joystick and the camera/turret direction on the other hand with the mouse.

[Thundercraft]

I can see how a joystick + mouse combination could work for control. But - per cepheni - there won't ever be official joystick support.

 

I suppose a programmable joystick or joypad could be mapped to up / down / left / right as well as a few important hotkeys. But the vast majority of gamers would be disappointed by the result. Unlike games with actual joystick support, that would completely lack fine control.

 

With joystick support, a game measures degrees of rotation for very precise control. Most joysticks also have a speed or "thrust" lever with similar precision and control. Many sim games like the X series allows players to set their ship's (or aircraft's) speed just about anywhere between 0 and max with this lever.

 

In contrast, keyboard or joypad button presses basically have only two states: on or off. Although I think it is far inferior to joystick control, mouse steering allows more precision than keyboard steering.