Aiming with an analog controller...what's the trick?

[Felon]

Still, bear in mind that the game companies actually take this into account when making the games. Aiming generally is more generous than in PC FPSes. Once you practice, enough, you should find it playable. Although if you are a big PC FPS fan, it's always going to feel somewhat clumsy

I hope so. My first game is Lost Planet, and the very first boss is a real problem. Gotta move and look in completely different directions. Kind of like rubbing your head and patting your stomach really fast.

The main thing to do is buy games with decent interfaces. Something like "Lost Planet", which has many awesome ideas, is too big a pain to actually be worth playing because the interface is so clunky. Other games have decent controls but horrific camera positioning (or map layout) that makes it a pain to see where you're going.

I've enjoyed Lost Planet, what little I've played of it, but yeah the interface has issues. The big critters have these small vulnerable spots that require appreciable accuracy.

I'm still on daily playthroughs for MASS EFFECT, and I can really tell the difference when a control-scheme update comes through. Either I readjust for a few minutes and then realize how newly intuitive and awesome it feels relative to the way it felt before, or I start filing bugs about how hard it is to track flying monsters or peek out around cover or, well, anything.

Hey, Mass Effect is the big reason I went with an Xbox. Are you a designer, a tester, or is there a demo I haven't found out about?

 

[Asmor]

Quake? That's at least the 3rd generation of FPS.

Bye
Thanee

Not sure what that has to do with anything. I think you may have mis-read or mis-interpretted what I said.

It'd be like BP or Shell going into car manufacturing - only to findout their cars don't work with their own fuel...

Or like going into a thread about control schemes and randomly bashing a company while adding nothing to the discussion at hand.*

Right, but again my last FPS was on the Playstation, and not with an analog controller either. They used the left and right buttons over the triggers for strafing.

I really need a game that has some kind of training level, that's forgiving of sloppyness. Anyone know of one?

I'd reccommend getting Halo or Halo 2. I'm positive that the first-- and pretty sure that the second-- both start out with you in a room learning how the aiming goes. Probably pretty boring, but it sounds like you could get a lot out of just walking around that first room for a while and getting used to things. Plus, Halo and Halo 2 are both great games.

*the poor quality of that analogy is part of the point

 

[Felon]

Thanks, I'll check out Halo. While we're on the tangent, what made Halo such a massive hit (instead of just another good FPS)?

 

[Asmor]

Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It's just really, really good. It's not especially innovative in any areas, but it doesn't feel stale either. It's extremely well-polished, and the game play is great. Decent story, too. Feels epic in scope.

The one thing I'd say Halo does better than any other FPS I've played is the vehicles, largely because it doesn't try to make them terribly realistic. They're extremely simple to control, and in fact it's a bit counter-intuitive at first, but when you get the hang of it there's nothing like fooling around in Blood Gulch with a Manta or a Warthog. The physics are a lot of fun to play with, too.

Of course, I'm making it out to be more than it really is... Vehicles are an extremely small portion of the single-player game. They get a fair amount of usage in multiplayer, though, depending on the map you pick.

 

[Thanee]

Not sure what that has to do with anything. I think you may have mis-read or mis-interpretted what I said.

Might be. Thought you are speaking of the typical FPS controls, and I think they were pretty much the same from the beginning, and that was way before Quake.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Asmor]

Speaking on the matter of Doom and, I imagine, Wolfenstein 3D (though I have much less experience in the latter, so I could be wrong), the default control scheme was that your right and left arrows (or a and d if using the wasd control scheme... Did they have that in doom? I always used the arrows...) turned you right and left. You had to hold alt to strafe, and I think you could also bind buttons to strafe, but I'm not sure.

Of course, in both of those games you couldn't jump or look up or down, either, so the controls were actually quite a bit different.

I'm not sure about their contemporaries, like Duke Nukem and Marathon, but I'd imagine they were similar... Never played Marathon, and I don't have any memories of Duke Nukem. :/

The first game I personally remember where strafing was the default left/right action was Starsiege: Tribes, which of course was quite a bit later than Quake but I didn't play Quake for a while after it came out. At the time I hated that and changed it to turning, like I was used to... I can't imagine doing that nowadays. Even playing Doom is practically unbearable with the default control scheme.

 

[-SIN-]

Firstly, my earlier point was that the OP has purchased an FPS machine, with far from perfect controls of the format. And that it is not likely to change. Sorry for the bad analogy, but it was 3AM.

Wolfenstein 3D's default L & R keys turned you. You did have to hold alt to strafe. But I was only 9 or so back then, so used a joystick.
(did anyone find the second secret level? There was one at the end of the first level, and there was meant to be another hidden in another level?... Oh, and did anyone manage to kill Hitler in pt3? I did! YAY!!

Doom's default setup was the same.

Duke3D's default was to turn, though you could change it to strafe. It also had the 'full mouse look' option.

Marathon - I can barely remember - literally all I can remember is 'Smells like napalm, tastes like chicken' - which was the last level I got to. No idea on the control system, but it was the first game I saw that the graphics looked really good - and you could have 2 handguns, and aparently there was a porn cheat too...

 

[takyris]

Hey, Mass Effect is the big reason I went with an Xbox. Are you a designer, a tester, or is there a demo I haven't found out about?

It's pretty much the only reason I've got an XBox 360. I want to be able to play the first game that has my name in the credits.

I started at BioWare a couple of years ago as a designer. I've mostly been working on an unannounced project, but I did some work on Dragon Age, and I came over to ME in October when one of the main writers messed up his back and was gone for a few months. I'm technically listed in the credits as a writer, but it's very technically -- all the other writers were there for a year or more, and I came on, wrote a few roleplaying plots, and did a bunch of playtesting and system implementation (sticking in journal entries, making sure you get experience for completing plots -- all the little things that make CRPGs CRPGs.)

We'll see how it turns out. There are times when I despair of it ever fully working -- on Thursday, the game crashed every fifteen seconds (badly enough that I had to restart the Devkit each time) because someone hadn't implemented the code for the hair correctly. So every time you tried to look at someone with the default hair setting, the game crashed. On one hand, it's darn impressive that hair is that complex. On the other hand, saying, "Our game crashed because of hair," is not always the best morale-improving explanation of the day.

And then there are days when it rocks. Those are the days we aim for.

 

[Thanee]

...the default control scheme was that your right and left arrows (or a and d if using the wasd control scheme... Did they have that in doom? I always used the arrows...) turned you right and left. You had to hold alt to strafe, and I think you could also bind buttons to strafe, but I'm not sure.

Ah, I see. Was more thinking along the lines of mouse+keyboard, not specific keyboard layouts.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Arnwyn]

Another thing I noticed is that the strafe buttons are gone. Now, you strafe with normal left/right movement, and can only turn by using the right thumbstick to position the camera.

The dual analog setup for movement and looking is considered to be a good thing!

Aiming is the real pain in the neck. There isn't a lot of fine control, so while I'm getting shot by AI bad guys with pinpoint precision, my crosshairs are lurching and jerking around trying to draw a bead.

I've come to realize that part of the problem is that I've been just sitting my thumb on the rim of the thumbstick to steer it, trying to "flick" the stick where I want it go. I have to learn to actually seat my thumb over the depression. But even then, I don't think I'm managing anything close to fine control.

Did you modify the X-axis and Y-axis sensitivities? This makes a huge difference, and is probably one of the very first things you should do when it comes to console FPSs. If you feel like you're flailing around way too much, then it's best to lower the sensitivy of the analog sticks - the Y-axis more than the X-axis (lest you end up moving too slowly). This should clear up a lot of your issues. (Now, you may not be able to in the demos... that would result in a "too bad for you!" answer.)

I have to wonder how much of it is me and how much of it is the controller. Am I like a five-year-old struggling to write the oversized pencil? Do they make better controllers than the one that comes with the Xbox?

The 360's controllers are actually considered to be pretty good (consider yourself lucky - we could have ended up with those fat-ass cheeseburgers that were on the original Xbox...)!