SpaceSimCentral

Morning, space people. Being on another lull from Elite: Dangerous - a lull I think might prove to be quite long this time - I return again to Pioneer, and start getting used to playing a proper space simulation again, rather than the arcade shooter Dangerous has been made into. Fun, but not as immersive, I think. But one thing about Dangerous that I think Pioneer could benefit from - if it doesn't already have it and I've just missed it - is the ability to map translational thruster controls to a second joystick. In Dangerous I have my rotational thrusters (pitc, yaw, roll) on my right-hand stick and linear thrusters (left-right, forward-backward) mapped to the left. Since the left is a cheap two-axis stick I use buttons for up and down, but it still works quite well. It's become quite intuitive to fly like this and I wondered if the facility already existed in Pioneer and if not whether it would be worth suggesting it?

Yeah there have been a couple of attempts to improve the joystick control mappings and it still needs someone to take a long, serious, look into it. I agree that we're really lagging behind other games in this regard. You can do some joystick stuff but I think that you might be limited too a single controller, also I find that the analogue mapping can be a bit broken at times. If you want to try it out and give us some feedback then that'd be helpful, sometimes as developers we're too close to see the flaws in our own software.We're too aware of the problems with it and so instinctively avoid doing things that we know will be an issue, new users however will expect those things and walk straight into them :/ Andy

Thanks, Andy. It's not a huge problem, and to be honest the mouse directional controls are perfectly good. It's just one of the things I did rate in Elite Dangerous (a game I've otherwise been a little disappointed with in terms of the direction it took away from First Encounters) was the 'feel' of the ships. Although it lacks a Newtonian flight model (and suffers badly for it, in my view - but I'm a minority), the ships do feel somehow... heavier? You do sort of sense the mass somehow - and it's not just the fact that they've made them turn painfully slowly unless you're at a particular optimum speed (we're in space, guys, come on!). It's more in terms of how the ships respond to joystick inputs in general. (By the way, this is only a minor thing. It's easy to come swanning in here - as someone who doesn't know one end of a piece of code from the other - and say, "Well, Frontier Developments have done this, so you should too". But don't think I don't appreciate the work you guys do with far fewer resources than a professional development company. I'm a huge fan of what you've done with Pioneer so far.)