The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hi, I'm a making a SC tribute game.  The original star controls only had keyboard input.  How important is mouse use to this style of gaming nowadays?

Important enough that someone I know who would have liked the game tried it for about a minute, uninstalled it, and said, 'get back to me when it has mouse support.'

That was my original opinion until I really got into it.

Yeah,  I think players now expect it.   Adding it isn't so difficult, the problem is deciding how it should be added I guess.   

In combat, would that be cool to have your ship rotate and move towards the mouse pointer? 

Mouse pointers move fast, ships have limited turning rates and directions. If the cursor had some artificial speed limitation I can see it working for a game with more possible angles than SC's 16, but that's getting dangerously close to geometry wars.

If you have battle system like in the game "Abuse", where you steer your character by keyboard and your shooting aim by mouse it could work. Especially for the ORZ. Mouse is most essensial in the game options and inventory, I think, rather than in the combat itself. Also is useful in dialogues.

For UQM I'd rather be able to use a USB, dual shock, joypad. Typically with 8 buttons. Everybody has 'em these days. Mouse control for melee would be annoying .

The mouse support she wanted was just for the menus. Key control for ship combat is only fair.

Is that really a huge improvement? It isn't that hard to scroll through the menu options using the up/down arrows. The only thing I think it would improve greatly is map navigation. Overall I think the improvements would be kind of minor.

I'd also rather have gamepad support than mouse support.  And now I'm going to stop typing before I start ranting about Direct Input/XInput again.

UQM works fine with a gamepad; I'm using a Logitech Dual Action to play UQM 0.6.2 as I type (just to prove I don't need to give input focus to the UQM window at all). No use of the setup menu was needed other than to map the "escape" combat action to a button and assign the joystick to a player; the default setup allowed navigation of menus using the both the D-pad and left stick (and buttons 1 and 2). You don't really need to touch the keyboard at all except to pause, exit and so on (and this can even be mitigated with a little strategic editing of keys.cfg). However, there is a bug in UQM (that I can't find a Bugzilla entry for; probably because the control configuration system was rewritten, fixing the bug, before the bug was discovered) that essentially deletes any joystick/gamepad from the configuration files if you start UQM without it; to reset this and gain access to your gamepad, delete keys.cfg from your UQM configuration directory.

Wow! Thank you Novus.

That's what I said.


(edited to clarify: that's what I said to her)

Actually, the more I think about it, hyperspace navigation without using autopilot would be pretty near impossible if you used mouse only for navigation. Unless you pointed on a section of the mini map and wherever you clicked the ship went.

Indeed, I would not want to use a mouse to replace the arrow keys in controlling the ship. Using the mouse for the user interface only is fine (it would be most useful in the Hyperspace map).

after mouse (touchpen) support is implemented I could start playing this game  ;D  (damn, first I was happy fiddling this to work on a Pearl VX-35 easy, after the first click came the error ^^)

I would  :-* the humans making this possible and donate them some BEEEER !

(http://pc-not.de/vx-35/weep.JPG)

Mouse support would be great for controlling the Orz turret. Other than that, I don't think it would be much of an improvement.

It would sertainly help on a device without a keyboard, though, which I think is what he's getting at here.

What? (http://www.google.se/search?q=Pearl+VX-35&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:sv-SE:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=sv&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=V61HT-ewKfD04QS3hNnKDg&biw=1680&bih=883&sei=Bq5HT663NsbP4QTcwvi0Dg)


Or have him drive off the road while playing SC II on his navigator. Seriously, what. I get that porting to many different platforms is important, but when can playing this game on a navigator for your car ever be more useful than on your phone or computer?

Maybe he doesn't have a smartphone. Though frankly, if that's the case, he should get a Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) for his gaming needs. ;)

Why would you game on a phone anyway, when you can do it on a proper computer?

Phones are more portable. Same goes for the Pandora or a hacked PSP.

I really don't think this game is very well suited to a phone, though.

What if you had an iControlPad? :P

I've got it installed on my smartphone, Android version. And I agree, maneuvering really isn't very easy. I can't even hit planets properly. Though that might be my lack of console experience. But if you have a proper d-pad or such I think it'd be a lot easier and ight be fun for a long trainride or similar.

Like I said, iControlPad. It's a bluetooth controller that attaches to your phone for gaming controls. You might want to check it out.

Of course, I don't know if the Android port of UQM can make use of it or not.

Meh, I'm a casual enough gamer that peripherals don't really excite me.