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Best First Person Shooter Controller
Ahigh:
I've been looking into first person shooters recently, and I wanted to build the ideal first-person shooter arcade controls set up.
I know a lot of you are coin-op and/or mame centric. Is there an existing design from a member here that is considered ideal for fps gaming?
I was thinking Happ 49-way for character movement (instead of asdw) but maybe perfect 360 would be better?
I'm not sure what would replace the mouse. My intuition says Happ 3" translucent trackball with a led setup. But how would you fire? Button on the move joystick? I guess you can get used to anything. Donkey Kong felt weird at first on the left hand, and nintendo has a reputation for ignoring "standard controls." Following isn't the idea I have on this either.
It would also be great to actually design around an existing nice keyboard so that the keyboard was integrated. Those blue-lit saitek keyboard might merge well with led's in other areas.
These are all pretty lame and basic ideas, and I know some people on here are really talented to make mame controllers, I just wanted to offer up this question and see what kind of responses I get.
I hope all you guys are doing well, and sorry for not keeping up lately. I've been busy with the move now for weeks, and we're not done yet as we haven't sold the house (calif house market slowing).
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- Ahigh
AtomSmasher:
They brought Half-life 2 to the arcades a while ago, they used 2 joysticks and 2 pedals. Heres a thread from a while back about it: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=46496.0
Personally I think a joystick, trackball and 2 pedals would work best, but I would use a smaller trackball (maybe 2'') so that your hand can still reach some buttons.
Lilwolf:
I play BF2 a LOT - I would go...
throttle, then a mouse, then an analog flight joystick, then a WASD setup with extra buttons around it (similar to the cyber sniper keyboard).
I don't think you will ever get better then a mouse + keyboard myself... and a mouse works well on a control panel... Trackballs suck... and analog joysticks suck for aiming... And the throttle+joystick is for when you jump into a helicopter.
Now I also have hot swap control panels... so I would only use it for bf2 and similar games. But I would NEVER play an arcade game on the control panel (other then flight games that is)
ahofle:
Personally I think the problem is that there are no arcade controls that are suitable. Hell there aren't even any PC controllers that make FPS play better than mouse+keyboard IMO. FPS games require a vast amount of keys and standard arcade buttons are simply spaced too far apart to work. If you use a standard arcade joystick, then you have to move your hand from the joystick any time you need to press a button. That is unless you use a flight stick with 8 or so buttons on it (but I don't know of any arcade sticks like that). Also, there isn't a good arcade quality optical replacement for the mouse that I know of that preserves the 3 mouse buttons for firing/alt-firing (trackballs take up too much space to have buttons right next to them that can be reached with the trackball hand). The only way I could see it being done properly is to actually design and build your own 'arcade' controls that are suitable.
Just 2 cents from a guy who's been playing FPS games since Doom, heh.
brack:
It has been in my mind for a while now to build a cockpit style machine with a couple of analog joysticks with a pair of buttons on each. The left one could control forward/backword movement as well as strafing, while the right one could control up/down aim and left/right turret. Modular controls could also quickly convert it into a driving or flight machine as well. I doubt I will get to it anytime soon, if not ever.