Flight Controls Changes - Need Feedback

Okay. I suppose the only real problem that I found was that no analog throttle worked. I understand your targets are gamepads, and that's fine, but it was difficult to find a button to set the throttle with. With a joystick everything worked well, even the view keys, except the input was not sensitive enough or really scaled properly. That is to say that, it was necessary to set the deadzone very low, and control movements were either too slow or too fast with no way to aptly adjust the sensitivity. This makes any precision while aiming difficult, but it makes flight a lot more fun.

Most of the problem I'd had was not with the controls themselves, but with the airframes. Once during an air battle I was in a 90 degree climb in a mosquito, but I was also being out-climbed by a liberator. The mosquito was equipped with a racer airframe, and there should have been some way to extend the engagement to avoid being flown into, by outrunning the bigger plane. I think if the point of the different airframes is to provide some advantage for certification points, they need to be five times more effective than they are. Part of air combat has always been knowing which advantages that you're likely to have, compared to other airframes, and applying them. Losing an air battle after being out-climbed by a liberator while flying a mosquito shouldn't happen. If you want to encourage dogfighting and not this brutal fly-at-each-other-and-shoot playstyle, than the airframe upgrades each need to have a set of advantages and disadvantages, when compared to the otherwise balanced aircraft.

If you want people to dogfight, and to have fun while battling in air-to-air combat, the airframes cannot be equally balanced. This provides no opportunities for people who are flying the airframes to use any kind of tactical advantage or maneuver, and takes the fun out of the idea of air-to-air combat. In human history, there has never been a fair air battle, and every airframe designed was designed with a specific set of advantages when compared to other airframes from other countries. In the USA, these aircraft mainly relied on horsepower, and in the UK they mainly relied on low speed maneuverability, in Japan the airframes relied on agility, and in Germany they relied on technological advantages that provided either speed or maneuverability depending on the airframe.

Lastly, the only thing this game is missing is an interceptor. A big aircraft designed to go up and engage the Galaxy and the Liberator, doing heavy damage to those, but not so much the other ESF aircraft.

This game is going to fall for the big guys in the air



translation :
I definitely feel like a sad bamba

I imagine that I could move my wings like-this ? :



THANKS GUYS !

i've been testing for, probably an hour (first tthing to point, if you want us to test vehicles, you need to give us alot of nanites so we can deploy a vehicle after vehicle), i feel the same clunky flight like davidr64 points out in the 1st page ... at the first i didn't realised much about the changes but when i went full speed and doing manuevers i then felt that clunky flight

feedback third round;
this goes only for ESF and only for roll/pitch, but i guess its the same for all aircraft:
so i did a little more testing and this time i decreased my flight sensitivity compared to live. this makes the controls for slower movements much better and more like on live, while it is terrible for faster movements, because it there translates to much less rolling/pitching than compared to live. And there it hit me: did you maybe implement something that would be called "expo" in RC flying? because for joystick/controller this would make total sense, while for mouse this is very bad.
What this expo function does is, it lowers or hightens the the output for small stick deflection (depending if it's a positive or negative expo). here is a Link with fancy graphs showing how it works.
These graphs show different positive expos, while it seems to be some kind of negative expo on PTS (more movement for smaller inputs), where on the y-axis there would be ptich/roll rate and on the x-axis stick deflection or mouse movement SPEED, i guess. And there is the problem. For stick inputs this is not problematic, because you can build up muscle memory for stick deflection to pitch/roll rate (even though i think it should be a positive expo). But for mouse input this completely messes with your muscle memory, because the movement output is commanded by the velocity of your mouse movement. With this expo this means the output depends on how fast you moved your mouse and not to what position even while still below the maximum turn rate and then any acceleration is applied even on top of that! So your output will be very inconsistent, which is not good at all.

So how it is now is very bad, because you want to turn down your sensititvity to be able to fine tune your aim, which makes max rate turns a huge hassle, becauce you don't have enough space on your desk to move the mouse fast enough for so long. If at all it should be the other way around (posivite expo), but for mouse input linear translation is definetly the way to go (independend from any acceleration which may be inherent to the flight model (which is also bad btw...)).

TL;DR
slow mouse movement = faster turn rates than live; fast mouse movements = slower turn rates than live = huge pain

Thanks again for all the feedback.

PSA: please make sure your mouse settings on PTS match your settings on Live. (Use Raw Mouse Input, Reduce Input Lag, Mouse Acceleration)

The small update today will include a yaw fix for the Mosquito to make it use values similar to the other ESFs. A piece of data got missed in our update last week, so the Mosquito essentially had no tuning values.

We have a second iteration in the works to release to PTS on Friday barring any setbacks. Our main goal in the second iteration is to get yaw speed feeling much closer to live. I'll have a more specific breakdown of what we are changing closer to Friday.

I flew it for half and hour and really the one big thing I felt was that the reaver did not respond fast enough to my mouse and because of that dangerous moves like dodging a tree last second was impossible. But else then that I didn't see any big change

I tried in a mossie and it was not very close to what is on live. The pitch up and pitch down felt laggy and took a while to start and then took longer than expected to stop, it was like they were accelerating the longer the button was pressed. This is not acceptable.
The aiming in the cockpit view was much too sensitive. The entire experience felt slow and unresponsive.

Keep trying, or better yet just don't change anything! Does anyone really care about joystick players?

Dear god, I love this game, but please do not make this change. It feels absolutely awful. I remember feeling it and thinking, "There's no way something this bad can be intentional, must be a glitch." Please, don't do this. This would be a horrible decision.

Seriously: Who is testing the controls before putting it on PTS?
Pitch up and down and roll are not 100% but I seem to be the only one to not mind. But that yaw... You only have yaw when you're rolling or pitching (and it STILL is slower/weirder than live), otherwise it takes a year to make a complete turn. BTW, is anyone else noticing anything on momentum? Only saw a couple of people mentioning the lack of it in the first pages.

When I'm trying to yaw up and down with the keybindings but use the mouse at the same time to go left and right, I seem to stop going up and down and until I stop moving the mouse, I can't move up and down. *UNRELATED* There's still the problem with some doorways not being completely solid so you can move through them.

I can't stop laughing, when i see that ... The problems can't be more clear and explicit, seriously ... Listen this guy, please .

I don't want be bad, but i am ... [self-censorship]

R.I.P Prey, OPTR, C150 and all other outfits dedicated to Esf.
R.I.P All good players without outfit.

Roll left / Roll right
Pitch Up / Pitch Down
are still off significantly, especially Pitch Up & Down.

On live Pitch Up & Down is fluid and quick, on PTS it is slow and the speed eases in.

I have the exact same settings as live including sensitivity.

I used same settings as live for my prior post, but WHY would I change my current settings to mouse acceleration to match what you ask above. I do use raw mouse input, but do not use Reduce Input Lag as have never found input lag an issue. Do we HAVE to have mouse acceleration? Acceleration aiming anything, accept perhaps AA or AV stationary turrets, doesn't seem like a good thing.

?

So i suppose that last PTS update was that yaw update allready?

I just tested it with a reaver and hover frame and yaw does feel pretty much the same as on live. The time you keep turning after releasing the button seems the same as on live, but the acceleration i mentionened in my first post right after you release the button seems to be still there, but much much less than before and only barely noticable. Might be imagination as well.

I also did a very rough test (...with a stop watch...) on the maximum turn rates around all three axes. And funny enough the maximum turn rates seem to be all the same as on live:
- a full yawing turn takes around 22 seconds without any mouse input, and 18-19 seconds when wiggling the mouse up and down, both on PTS and on LIVE!
- a full barrel roll at full rate takes around 2,5 seconds
- a full pitch down roll (looping...?) at full rate takes around 5 seconds
All this was tested on PTS and on live with a reaver with hover frame 3 and all in hover mode (as in not having any forward momentum) and without pressing space during the barrel roll and pitch roll (and all with mouse and keyboard, obviously).

But it has to be pointed out that pitching does not feel anything like on live (didn't pay too much attention to rolling, but i think it may have the same issue). The reason is probably because the interpretation curve has changed (see my third post). I don't know if it is linear on live now, but it is definitely alot different from PTS right now.

Regarding this interpretation curve there is one thing i don't get: It is probably much more complex than this, but does the mouse input and stick input use the same interpretation curve? Because if so, what does the Joystick Sensitivity slider acutally set? Since for my understanding, the max turn rate for full stick deflection should always stay the same, no matter the sensitivity. So this slider should actually set this very interpretation curve for stick input, lowering its gradient around the neutral position for low sens and increasing it around the neutral position for high senses. (see the graph and futher explanation from my third post). If the slider acutally does this, the interpretation curves for mouse and stick have to separated, as changing the slider does not affect the the mouse input.
But why not actually link the interpretation curve for mouse and stick and let us set it for mouse input as well? only the caption for the joystick sens slider would need to be changed and some coding needs to be done.
...but since you obviously are fiddling around with that very piece of code right now anyway...?
With this everyone could set up the interpretation curve to their preferences for mouse as well and everyone should be happy!
...oh wait ...i obviously forgot that there are ppl that have to play infantry and ground vehicles with a controler as well, so this slider does definitely more than just set the interpretation curve for flight controls... but you get my idea and maybe it is actaully possbile...?

No matter what, i think the next steps should be:

1. get the interpretation curve for mouse input like it is on live, or let us set it ourselfs

2. remove the ramping up function for pitching by keybind

3. when this is done, fine tuning for stuff like inertia will be much easier, if necessary at all

Changing the stick sensitivity just reduces the final value. If the input curve is y=x, setting it to .5 gives y=1/2x, reducing your maximum turn rate by 50%. I agree that sensitivity should not affect the maximum turn rate and simply increase the 'soft' area, but we seem to have a much lazier implementation. Sensitivity adjusting the curve rather than the magnitude would make me so happy. Or give me another dial. Currently I can adjust the m in y=mx, I'd like to adjust m and n in y=mx^n.

Hi Luke,

I'm happy to see you guys are looking in to flight controls for better support of controllers, but also still very disappointed it has take so <bleeping> long to fix all controller issues that got introduced when the PS4 code / controller changes where made almost half a year a go.

I also hope you guys will be looking in to the reported issues like PS-575, Addition Joysticks/Controller not being detected
and PS-726 - Centering joystick doesn't stop previous applied movement it bleeds it away slowly.

Multiple controllers not being detected, is still an ongoing issue even on the test server now and the only way I can get a single joystick to work is by disconnecting all other controllers and some controllers only partially work. The game is also still interpreting every single a controller as a game pad when mapping buttons.

Dont add that patch. If you cant get the game to work with joysticks then dont add that too ps2. Its better you work with ps2 to ps4 or trying to fix something else with your game. But dont try to fix something that isnt broken.

OK. flew reaver and scythe after patch...feels better, easier to aim w/fine movements...even though feels like {to me} there's still more acceleration on yaw {I never realized till these tests, how I'm making fine adjustments with yaw for my aim, regardless of orientation/movement/maneuver}. Not only feels better for fine movements, but smoother and more precisely changing direction when full on. It still feels to me that yaw is more sensitive, especially in a Reaver...go fly dogfighting frame....but imho, might be a good thing or not disliked by all. I couldn't use dogfighting frame on Reaver anyway...lol.

I also want to thank you guys. ESF's are the best virtual craft I've ever experienced....but all the vehicles in this game, wow...ty, you don't get enough praise...

I' ve downloaded the PTS this nightand all that I feel : it's my reaver was simplified in the worst way for the unskilled guys, his charm was wiped, he's totaly broken, any mass, a really bad inertia irrealistic ( hence the restrictions in movements ), worse than mosquito( I exaggerate barely ) , compensate with the push up/down has become almost useless

Good point ?

better acceleration, reactivity and maximum speed with the racer chassis, logical with the mass change, we need a nerf for that now ( It's totaly ironic, don't listen me ^^ )


I hope you enjoy my crappy English

P.S: i' have 24days and 12 hours of flight in this wonderful reaver, just on my main character .. in the name of Jesus Christ reverse/delete this code, please, i love this game :'( .