Flight Controls Changes - Need Feedback

Flight Controls Changes - Need Feedback

• Changes have been made to the way flight interprets input to better support controllers. Because of this change you may notice differences with mouse control. Please report all differences you notice in as much details as possible.
• Our goal is for flight to feel the same as it does on the live servers.

Flying feels clunky on the PTS atm. Pitch up, half the time, feels like it should. But the other half the time, it's only half as responsive and half as fast.

Rolling feels like it's not accepting input directly from my mouse. In fact, the whole Reaver feels that way. At the end of a minor adjustment (a roll of maybe 0.5 to 5 degrees left or right), the Reaver will continue to roll, just a bit, slowly, until it "locks" itself into the position it seems to think I was going for. In truth, I want the Reaver to stop rolling the instant I stop moving my mouse.

Yaw left and right no longer gradually picks up speed as I tap the key. Instead, it jerks the Reaver's reticle in whatever direction I'm trying to aim it. I use the Dogfighting Airframe (it picks off infantry and fast moving vehicles with the nose cannon really easily compared to Hover or Racer), so the yaw issues may be amplified or dampened by airframe choice.

This is just after maybe 10 minutes of flying. I'll try it out more later.

Reposted from this thread.

The biggest change I've noticed is a change to how keys bound for pitch up/down work. ESF pitching movement for keys feels extremely sluggish, noticeable acceleration effect when held down i.e. when holding pitch down, aircraft slowly noses down but starts to go faster the longer it's held down.

The effect is lack of responsiveness in movement and performing maneuvers. Oddly using the mouse instead for controlling pitch is much faster. Please take a look at rectifying that, would be greatly appreciated if it's fixed before it hits live. On a side note, yaw thruster effects on both the tail and the engines of the reaver are currently non-functioning.

Would like to try but the game freezes and crashes 5 seconds after logging in.

I'll leave some feedback on how ESF handles on PTS. I only tested ESF (mosquito and reaver) because I have less experience with other aircraft, so I would not be able to immediately pinpoint the differences in control. However, I also have a request which concerns flight control input, which I will post after the feedback. It would be great if you took a look at it, while you are working on flight controls.


PTS feedback:
1. The most obvious difference is in how yaw handles now. There seems to be some input lag on the yaw buttons. Also, some input is ignored altogether. For example, if you hold yaw left key, then release it and instantly tap the yaw right key, your aircraft should stop turning left immediately. On PTS it keeps turning for half a second or so, just as if you didn't press yaw right at all. Also, if you are tapping one yaw key quickly, it interprets it as if you are holding it. Eg. tapping A makes the ESF turn left as quickly as if you were just holding A.

2. Mouse axes (pitch and roll) seem to be jerkier than on live (it feels as if there was some kind of smoothing applied on live). It is harder to get maximum roll rate, the aircraft just refuses to roll quickly. Rolling seems to have less inertia on PTS, if you roll to one direction and stop moving the mouse, the ESF stops rolling faster on PTS than on live (I know this contradicts what one of the posters above me said, maybe it depends on mouse settings, sensitivity etc).

3. Mouse input now overrides any button input to the same axis. Eg. if you bind pitch up to a button, hold it and move the mouse up or down, the aircraft will ignore the button and obey the mouse as long as you are moving it. In live version buttons have priority.


Now onto my request. First let me describe the problem. This is the same on live version and on PTS btw. Currently, the way mouse input for aircraft is handled has some quirks which many users find annoying. This concerns pitch and roll on all aircraft and also the magrider's horizonal axis (left-right hull rotation). The issues are as follows:

1. There is negative mouse acceleration when you hit the maximum rate of roll or pitch with the mouse. Eg. when pitching up, if you move the mouse too fast, your pitch rate actually decreases. It would be better if, once you hit maximum rate it would stay there no matter how much faster than required you move the mouse.

2. At slow mouse speeds there is positive acceleration which feels like an abrupt step in mouse sensitivity. If you move the mouse slowly, the aircraft responds very sluggishly to a certain point, at which a slight increase in mouse movement speed results in a suddenly faster response. This makes precise control nearly impossible.

To see this more clearly, do the following experiment:
Go to VR Training as NC, grab a Reaver with hover airframe and Vortek, fly to the tower in the South-Eastern corner, place a waypoint on top of it and position yourself around 400m away, as shown in the screenshot. Now hover up and down, around 200m in either direction, while keeping the text (the distance to waypoint) perfectly inside the small reticle in the middle (exactly like it is in the screenshot). This is going to be very difficult because of the issue I described above. This is done on live server, but pitch control on PTS behaves similarly.

In contrast to the above, stuff like tank turrets respond much more smoothly and predictably, while still having things like inertia and turn rate cap. So my request is to have some additional settings available to customize mouse input for aircraft (and the magrider) axes, to be able to get rid of these mouse acceleration issues. Thank you for reading.


P.S.
The test client crashes if I load into VR training, so I had to create a new character to test this. Might be of help to the poster above me.

Suggestion: can the developers let players choose, in the game's options, what device they're using to fly with? Leave the current control mechanics as they are on live at the time of this post for mouse and keyboard, and adjust whatever's necessary for gamepads. Give players the choice.

What about joystick support ?

When I use the middle mouse button to try to free look, the plane that I control still rolls.

I also am having the crashing error. Sometimes immediate, sometimes after as long as ten seconds. In all cases upon loading in to the warpgate in Koltyr.

Other test characters not loading in at Koltyr also crash out immediately, at continent warpgates or in VR training.

I was just wondering the same thing.

Instead of spending a lot of time trying to find some theoretical ideal interpretation for different devices... why not just automatically pick which one is being used?

Prior to my feedback, please make sure your "mouse acceleration" and "Use mouse input" settings are correct for the other pilots. A lot of the awkward acceleration posts I have been seen can be attributed to this being on by default on the PTS. As a general rule, mouse acceleration should be off and you should get your mouse input directly from the mouse and not windows to facilitate better control. Why these are default the way they are still baffles me.

First and Foremost, Liberator weapons are now affected by "Invert Vertical Fly." This is contrary to live, as they behave as vehicle weapons and not aircraft themselves. Needless to say this is a problem.

Second, The Liberator has often had a lot of free play in the controls, like pitching once the mouse or pitch down key has been stopped. This seems to have two separate modes now. One is this trying to "settle" idea that people have been mentioning. After releasing the controls, the aircraft attempts to move itself into a position that it decides and then stops abruptly. The other is that as soon as controls are released, it stops any and all movement. The game crashed (again x3) before I could find a pattern in the reasoning. It seemed as though it was related to the pitch angle.

Third, Yaw has been changed, but do to the slower yaw speed of the High G frame I was using, it was not a big difference. However, it doesn't make sense that such a large aircraft would continue to "sway" after the controls are released as much as it does. Again, game crashed too soon.

Fourth, Pitch up and down keys seem to function but in a less responsive way then live. Also, If the aircraft is pitching up when pitch down is pressed, the craft continues pitching up and waits for the pitch down key to decelerate the pitching up for way to long causing turn around speed to massively slow down overall.


Fifth, roll, As mentioned, I used High G for the duration of my little testing, and roll seemed to behave normal, save for some delay in the execution of the control. Had this been precision bombing, my report may have been different for roll and yaw, as the ESF pilots are reporting.

Um what did you guys do? I can't even say connected long enough to get my damn Reaver before it crashes...

probably should add that if your passing out helmets, make sure people can connect and stay connected..

Crashing within seconds of logging in... and today is my only chance to get on the test server.

For the small amount of time I can remain not CTD, It feels "jittery" And I noticed the drifting after removing input. Getting into hovermode (TR_ESF) seems to happen or not happen.. at least not in a remotely timely manner.

Maybe because of the delays, while flying it sort of feels like the mouse and keyboard inputs are independent of each other.

I am also crashing instant

is all the time falls. Chrashing instant

Always crashing

about new esf sensi and mouse speed cap, was writing a very bad review on your choise devs but i let you a chance, maybe was my "mouse acceleration" and "Use mouse input"since i read there was a pb on it.

will try another time when your crash on newly created character will be solve.
i just try 5mn on old character on amerish, and that was so wrong in gameplay choice, hope was me, really..

Here's my short feedback for ESF controls:

as mentioned before, pitching seems a little faster now, while rolling and yawing seem a little slower. Also when yawing it looks like the movement actually accelerates (like in going faster) a tiny bit for a split second AFTER the yaw button is released before it stops moving.

One major improvement i see in comparision to live is, that this little "Deadzone" for pitching with the mouse is gone! (see point 2.2 in post #5 by Dreckschwein)
To clarify: On live, at low flight sensitivities, when moving the mouse really slow, the mouse input translates to pitch movement at a much lower rate than for faster movement, resulting in more or less no movement at all. Once you pass a certain threshold in mouse movement speed, the translation rate goes up to the normal rate (depending on your sensitivity). This is an awful mechanism and makes fine aiming for low sensitivity users like me really hard. But it seems that this is now gone on the PTS! So please, please, pretty please keep it that way ...please?

What is really bad on PTS now, is the acceleration that is applied to pitching by keybind. The most important use for using extra keybinds besides the mouse input for pitching, is that you can pitch at max rate instantly. this mechanism basically removes this use.

But in comparision to how it was on PTS in the last weeks, it is now much much closer to the live feeling!

Well I could only fly on INDAR - How ever when i Warp to KOLTYR I get instant crash to Desktop.