Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

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Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

Postby Zozobra » Tue Jan 20, 2015 8:25 am

A few weeks ago I bought Elite Dangerous on a whim. It has been all I have played since. It is awesome for a multitude of reasons, the greatest of all being that the game is as stressful as you want it to be.
Want a nice relaxing pootle about space having a look around? Stick to federation space and you're fine
Love trading stock for big dollars? It's there
Want to blow motherfuckers into the next life? We have that in spades
Want to eschew being sensible and want to learn to fly a spaceship with no assists in 6 degrees of freedom? In combat situations? It's your funeral.

The latter is where I'm going with it and it is taking me down some very odd roads to get a satisfactory solution. While the typical HOTAS set up works reasonably well it still doesn't really offer a great 6DOF (especially for the price of an X52) solution. The way to do it looks to be to fly with two sticks. One stick mapped to traditional flight controls (pitch/roll/yaw) and the other to translational controls (up/down/left/right/throttle).

I already have a Saitek Cyborg Evo from when I used to fly helos in Battlefield2. The Evo isn't that great as it has a very stiff centering spring and the deadzone is a bit poor making sucky for accurate pitch and roll manoeuvres but it will be fine for translational controls where the penalty of overshooting isn't so great. For stick two I've ordered a Defender Cobra M5, which is a Russian made stuck with hall effect sensors for hight accuracy pitch/roll, which will be my right stick.

Here are what looks to be the best binds (near 40 controls!) I can think of without actually testing them out. Subject to change :panic:
elite_2stick.png
elite_2stick.png (255 KiB) Viewed 2498 times


This will take some getting used to but the benefits are immense for ship control and above all enjoyment of the game. I can also fly with just the right stick for mooching about.
The astute amongst you might ask why mouselook if both hands are on the sticks? I have an EDtracker which is an arduino based mouse emulator using a gyro/accelerometer that straps to my head which is nearly as good as TrackIR and 1/5th of the price :lol:

Anyway some cool shit can be done with this set up


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Re: Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

Postby chris_d » Tue Jan 20, 2015 9:57 pm

Fantastically OTT nerdy to play a video game that requires two joysticks for one player.

That is okay, for a while i was considering DIYing a rudder pedal setup for playing Rise Of Flight. And in troof, that is why i was fucking with headtracking in the first place back then. Impossible to fight other aircraft very effectively without the correct shit to control and view the thing.

I will be viewing this thread of sim nerdiness with interest. :isay:
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Re: Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

Postby Zozobra » Wed Jan 21, 2015 10:11 am

The best thing is that people pilot ships perfectly fine with the keyboard and mouse, but, oh no, that's not good enough for me :lol:
Give me just analogue 6DOF or give me death. Or indeed, give me analogue 6DOF and death as this set up is pretty committed to flying without flight assist.

Ah the lengths some people will go to in order to disadvantage themselves, at least initially. I see it as much the same as the revelation that was using a 900° wheel with a clutch and h-shifter was to my racing simming. Having more control (and the resultant opportunity to fuck up horribly) made me analyse my technique, upping my game immensely through constant ironing out of errors that would go unnoticed in a less demanding environment. Having to pay more attention to what I'm doing is for me at least, a good thing. I hope the same can be said of dual sticking. Although missing an apex or fluffing a downshift in Assetto Corsa will be less punishing than aimlessly floating about in an all out space war :poop:
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Re: Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

Postby Zozobra » Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:25 am

Image

Stick = awesome
Physics = hard

This will take a week or two to get get cracked but I can feel thinking how to input 6DOF becoming more natural with each encounter.
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Re: Elite Dangerous and technology whoring

Postby Devtron » Sun Apr 12, 2015 12:14 pm

I've been thinking of picking this up for a while now, but I would only use mouse and keyboard. But goddamn is that fantastic.
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