Well you guys complain that modern FPSs are too slow, but what modern FPS have you actually played?
List of FPS that I have played which are slow - almost all of them. Even FPS that we like, such as L4D and NS are slow. Even Quake 3/Live! is slow compared to Quake 1 or 2. Every "modern" fps I have played is unbearably slow, such as any Halo, Gears of War, TF2, Crysis, etc. I did play a Call of Duty once either a demo or free beta or something, and it was also slow. I am extremely comfortable saying that COD4 is slow as balls, even though I have no experience with it.
I suppose I've practised more than I'd thought. 2000DPI was eventually neither precise or fast enough to satisfy my uses.
I play modern FPS games and my mind wants to do something I'm used to but games are like "Can't let you no-scope that Fred.". I can't get used to this having to scope into a guy taking up my cross-hair already.
If you had issues with precision with a 2000DPI mouse, then your issues likely had nothing to do with the DPI. The no-scoping issue you mention could be a number of things. It could be that the mechanics of the game make your shots inaccurate when unscoped. If you're having trouble aiming well when not scoped, then you need to have a lower sensitivity setting.
Above a reasonable resolution, sensor data is useless and often ends up including noise or useless granularity.
What has a much greater impact on your mouse use is the software that actually translates movement in the sensor to cursor movement.
For example, most mice auto-straighten your movements based on your speed. If I set my mouse to raw mode, I can see all of the minute corrections and jitters inherent in my own human motion. It's almost impossible to draw a straight line with a mouse, so the software corrects for what it assumes to be your intent to do so.
With fancy software, I could, say, have a mode where it will heavily straighten only along one axis. I call this the "all headshots" mode.
There are other examples, but basically you should be aware that your input into a mouse is heavily processed before it reflects on the screen. Better software gives you more insight into and control over this.
No game has both problems. In games where you can pull a 180 then hit a skulk mid-air with a machine gun without any hesitation you reach the point where turning the mouse speed multiplier means you can no longer aim accurately at distance (Something Tribes 2 handled well with it's instant zoom.).
One of the best games in terms of mouse interface was COD2. Bullets went exactly on your crosshair but recoil sent you way off target, however, you could learn to control it and hold on target against the recoil. Also had great iron-sighting, where it didn't reduce the artificial bullet spread (Because there wasn't one.) but dropped the mouse speed multiplier and held your point of aim steadier (In return for loosing your peripheral vision.).
Also had great iron-sighting, where it didn't reduce the artificial bullet spread (Because there wasn't one.) but dropped the mouse speed multiplier and held your point of aim steadier (In return for loosing your peripheral vision.).
That's good ironsighting in my opinion. It's a more modern equivalent of the crosshair reduction in games like CS, though via control rather than spread.
List of FPS that I have played which are slow - almost all of them. Even FPS that we like, such as L4D and NS are slow. Even Quake 3/Live! is slow compared to Quake 1 or 2. Every "modern" fps I have played is unbearably slow, such as any Halo, Gears of War, TF2, Crysis, etc. I did play a Call of Duty once either a demo or free beta or something, and it was also slow. I am extremely comfortable saying that COD4 is slow as balls, even though I have no experience with it.
Y'know, I've been doing some thinking about this. The only problem is I've no way to speed up a modern FPS to Quake kinda speeds(Or conversely, slow quake down to modern FPS speeds) right now to test the ideas about it that I have, I can only guess.
I remember COD4 supports mods. Perhaps someone could speed it up that way? Or maybe just turn off punkbuster and give everyone speedhacks?
You can, but to the best of my knowlege, there are no mods which do exactly what I'm looking for - to speed the game up to Quake kinda speeds, without changing anything else. Sure, I can remove half the weapons, the killstreaks, the killcam, perks, put it on different maps, increase the player health and speed, remove reloading, and turn off health regeneration, but then, I'm pretty much just playing Quake with a military skin anyway, and it removes the point of the experiment. I don't want to change the game very much, only to ratchet the speed up to Quake speeds, and then possibly to the rose-tinted glasses speeds many people seem to remember(Which range from "Slightly faster than it really was" all the way up to "You're a fucking idiot."). And, I don't have the ability to make such a mod myself. So, I wait till something pops up.
Unfortunately, changing something so fundamental completely unbalances such games. It's really something you have to think of from the start.
Not really, you're missing the point - at worst, Just make a handful of maps which are more amicable to that kind of speed. For completeness, you could also make reproductions of Maps from Quake. And reproduce some COD maps for some games of quake, probably quake 3.
The main problem with speeding up a lot of these modern FPS is that they are very horizontal and tight. Halo might be able to do it, depending on the map, but not any of the realistic-ish military games. Tribes had gigantic maps with wide open terrain. Quake maps had ups and downs and tall rooms and hallways and outdoors and indoors. The really fast game really only works when you have room to move in all three dimensions. Even if you made a COD-like game fast, there's also no way I know of to achieve big air. There are no jump pads or rocket jumps or anything. Even in NS where you have jet packs, and usually have some room to use them, they just hurt you in a lot of places.
The main problem with speeding up a lot of these modern FPS is that they are very horizontal and tight.
That is a problem I've thought of. It's part of the Psuedo-realistic setting - because the sort of combat they're trying to imitate would be less fun to the majority of people on the massive kinda maps tribes 2 had. ARMA 2 has that sort of massive map thing going on, and compared to the COD games, it's a tiny minority of players. They do have multiple levels - it is three dimensional, and there are usually ways to get higher or lower than ground level - but it's more limited. No Tribes style bases in the sky, more like "Hey, that guy's on the second level of that house, instead of ground level."
In fact, I recall people complaining about Crysis 2 because of this - one particular image complaining about it had a COD map, with a mapping out of sight-lines where you could kill people, and hotspots for where people tended to die, and it had a few lines about, roughly where you'd expect them. Crysis 2 looked like a printout of one of the maps from overhead, and then dunked a handful of spaghetti in paint and dropped it on the printout. If you examined the lines, you could see that they all made sense, but they were all over the place like a madwoman's shit. I recall once during the demo, I was skulking about with my sniper rifle, and I found a good spot up on a greenhouse roof, pretty much the top of the map, and started dominating. Someone actually reported me for cheating, but the only reason it worked was simply because I did something that was trivial to achieve within the game, and perfectly within the "Rules" of the game - the spot was set up so that it was an excellent sniper spot, but also left you very vulnerable to anyone who figured out you were there - but nobody even thought to look for me there. Many people were running around and only looking within a few feet of horizontal, because that's what they were used to with COD.
Quake maps had ups and downs and tall rooms and hallways and outdoors and indoors. The really fast game really only works when you have room to move in all three dimensions. Even if you made a COD-like game fast, there's also no way I know of to achieve big air.
I did also think of that - the second part of the idea involved testing that, and making COD more quake-like, allowing rocket jumps and the like(sadly, I don't think jump pads can be put in easily), but that would be further on from the initial sheer speed phase. Doing it in stages would provide more useful data than doing it all at once.
Tribes had gigantic maps with wide open terrain.
And don't forget, it also had methods of moving around that map really, really fast - namely jetpacks, skiing and vehicles. A skilled player can move incredibly fast in tribes, but in COD, that's not possible - those things are not part of the setting they're using(Apart from vehicles), and there are no vehicles in the multiplayer part of the game, so having a huge map would make it a boring game of hiding indoors, trying not to get wiped out by a sniper - which is less fun, because you have no combat, you have hiding and hoping you don't get picked off by an essentially invisible assassin. Even if you added vehicles, it'd become much the same, with half the team playing invisible assassin, and the other half camping out with anti-vehicle weaponry near every road, just waiting for a jeep to come along, so that it can die under a hail of rocket fire.
Halo: Reach is the best bet, as well as being much more tribes like - well, compared to COD games - with large, open maps, often with a mix of indoor and outdoor, jetpacks, Vehicles of various types ranging from fast and light to heavy and deadly, and I think you can actually ramp up the player speed, along with the health and shields, enough to make it more Tribes-like at the least, maybe more quake-like on some maps. But, then I run against the problem of not having anyone close enough, nor that we have enough equipment, to try an 8-16 player game without going to xbox live, and therefore losing control of some of the variables in the experiment, not to mention the somewhat chalk and cheese comparison between console and PC FPS. At least, until we get a PC port, which will be arriving roughly never.
Also, I've said it before, but Crysis 2 might actually be the best modern FPS - according to the standard laid down by games like Quake and Tribes. It does have some small maps, and some Larger maps, but it handles both competently, it's fast-paced compared to most other modern FPS, the maps have great vertical variation as well as big, wide open spaces. It does lack jump-pads and rocket jumps, but it does make up for it by having the nanosuit, which gives you equivalents like Strength jumps(Like a rocket jump, but without rockets, and you can do it nearly anywhere, at any time you chose) and Speed jumps(Like a jump pad, but you can do it damn near anywhere). The gunplay feels just right, and while it does have a bit of that unlock shite, it's not as intrusive as COD games, where it's you with some pissweak basic weapons, and some guy comes along with dual lever action shotguns or a javelin missile and wipes you out instantly - The suit and variation between weapons provides balance to the unlocks, and allows you to customize to your play style.
PS - Ignore all the bollocks from people about it - Most of the whinging is by entitled, elitist fucks, who would prefer that only PCs would get decent games, and consoles get nothing but shitty shovelware(More consoles than just the wii) if someone mentions the name of a PC game on, say, Xbox live, their console will detonate like a bomb and kill everyone in the room. Most of these people are - as one would call in the trade - stupid, spoiled fuckwits. The worst of the bunch, as it were.
It's the current second place for me overall, but if you hold it up using Quake and Tribes as basically the bar, it becomes a very distant second place. An honorable mention, really.
Has anyone had hands-on time with Nexuis? It's an old Quake mod being recoded on the Crysis engine for Steam/XBLA/PSN. I had a brief convo with their marketing people at PAX Prime last year and they pitched it as the modern game for people who still long for Quake-style gameplay. I was never big PC FPSer back in the day so I couldn't verify (I had Quake III Arena for Dreamcast, which was an awesome port but still no PC). I didn't check to see if they were showing it off at PAX East this year.
Has anyone had hands-on time with Nexuis? It's an old Quake mod being recoded on the Crysis engine for Steam/XBLA/PSN. I had a brief convo with their marketing people at PAX Prime last year and they pitched it as the modern game for people who still long for Quake-style gameplay. I was never big PC FPSer back in the day so I couldn't verify (I had Quake III Arena for Dreamcast, which was an awesome port but still no PC). I didn't check to see if they were showing it off at PAX East this year.
Hmm. I have played Nexuiz, but not that one. I remember it being an open source FPS, which was basically a Quake clone.
Has anyone had hands-on time with Nexuis? It's an old Quake mod being recoded on the Crysis engine for Steam/XBLA/PSN. I had a brief convo with their marketing people at PAX Prime last year and they pitched it as the modern game for people who still long for Quake-style gameplay. I was never big PC FPSer back in the day so I couldn't verify (I had Quake III Arena for Dreamcast, which was an awesome port but still no PC). I didn't check to see if they were showing it off at PAX East this year.
That looks like something that might destroy me. ^_^
Jeremy's old Razer Naga crapped out on him, so I decided to upgrade my Imperator to the Naga Hex (green). I was thinking about the Taipan, but I like how the Hex has more buttons.
I like how there is a slot for my right ring finger to comfortably rest.
Jeremy's old Razer Naga crapped out on him, so I decided to upgrade my Imperator to the Naga Hex (green). I was thinking about the Taipan, but I like how the Hex has more buttons.
I like how there is a slot for my right ring finger to comfortably rest.
I used to have some Razr stuff. I think I had the Naga? It's the one with two thumb buttons, right?
Now-a-days, I'm rocking the G700. Fits comfy in the hand, buttons in all the proper places, amazing scroll wheel. Battery goes flat a bit quick, but it's got a charge-and-use cable, so I don't have to care.
Comments
I play modern FPS games and my mind wants to do something I'm used to but games are like "Can't let you no-scope that Fred.". I can't get used to this having to scope into a guy taking up my cross-hair already.
The no-scoping issue you mention could be a number of things. It could be that the mechanics of the game make your shots inaccurate when unscoped. If you're having trouble aiming well when not scoped, then you need to have a lower sensitivity setting.
What has a much greater impact on your mouse use is the software that actually translates movement in the sensor to cursor movement.
For example, most mice auto-straighten your movements based on your speed. If I set my mouse to raw mode, I can see all of the minute corrections and jitters inherent in my own human motion. It's almost impossible to draw a straight line with a mouse, so the software corrects for what it assumes to be your intent to do so.
With fancy software, I could, say, have a mode where it will heavily straighten only along one axis. I call this the "all headshots" mode.
There are other examples, but basically you should be aware that your input into a mouse is heavily processed before it reflects on the screen. Better software gives you more insight into and control over this.
One of the best games in terms of mouse interface was COD2. Bullets went exactly on your crosshair but recoil sent you way off target, however, you could learn to control it and hold on target against the recoil. Also had great iron-sighting, where it didn't reduce the artificial bullet spread (Because there wasn't one.) but dropped the mouse speed multiplier and held your point of aim steadier (In return for loosing your peripheral vision.).
In fact, I recall people complaining about Crysis 2 because of this - one particular image complaining about it had a COD map, with a mapping out of sight-lines where you could kill people, and hotspots for where people tended to die, and it had a few lines about, roughly where you'd expect them. Crysis 2 looked like a printout of one of the maps from overhead, and then dunked a handful of spaghetti in paint and dropped it on the printout. If you examined the lines, you could see that they all made sense, but they were all over the place like a madwoman's shit.
I recall once during the demo, I was skulking about with my sniper rifle, and I found a good spot up on a greenhouse roof, pretty much the top of the map, and started dominating. Someone actually reported me for cheating, but the only reason it worked was simply because I did something that was trivial to achieve within the game, and perfectly within the "Rules" of the game - the spot was set up so that it was an excellent sniper spot, but also left you very vulnerable to anyone who figured out you were there - but nobody even thought to look for me there. Many people were running around and only looking within a few feet of horizontal, because that's what they were used to with COD. I did also think of that - the second part of the idea involved testing that, and making COD more quake-like, allowing rocket jumps and the like(sadly, I don't think jump pads can be put in easily), but that would be further on from the initial sheer speed phase. Doing it in stages would provide more useful data than doing it all at once. And don't forget, it also had methods of moving around that map really, really fast - namely jetpacks, skiing and vehicles. A skilled player can move incredibly fast in tribes, but in COD, that's not possible - those things are not part of the setting they're using(Apart from vehicles), and there are no vehicles in the multiplayer part of the game, so having a huge map would make it a boring game of hiding indoors, trying not to get wiped out by a sniper - which is less fun, because you have no combat, you have hiding and hoping you don't get picked off by an essentially invisible assassin. Even if you added vehicles, it'd become much the same, with half the team playing invisible assassin, and the other half camping out with anti-vehicle weaponry near every road, just waiting for a jeep to come along, so that it can die under a hail of rocket fire.
Halo: Reach is the best bet, as well as being much more tribes like - well, compared to COD games - with large, open maps, often with a mix of indoor and outdoor, jetpacks, Vehicles of various types ranging from fast and light to heavy and deadly, and I think you can actually ramp up the player speed, along with the health and shields, enough to make it more Tribes-like at the least, maybe more quake-like on some maps. But, then I run against the problem of not having anyone close enough, nor that we have enough equipment, to try an 8-16 player game without going to xbox live, and therefore losing control of some of the variables in the experiment, not to mention the somewhat chalk and cheese comparison between console and PC FPS. At least, until we get a PC port, which will be arriving roughly never.
Also, I've said it before, but Crysis 2 might actually be the best modern FPS - according to the standard laid down by games like Quake and Tribes. It does have some small maps, and some Larger maps, but it handles both competently, it's fast-paced compared to most other modern FPS, the maps have great vertical variation as well as big, wide open spaces. It does lack jump-pads and rocket jumps, but it does make up for it by having the nanosuit, which gives you equivalents like Strength jumps(Like a rocket jump, but without rockets, and you can do it nearly anywhere, at any time you chose) and Speed jumps(Like a jump pad, but you can do it damn near anywhere). The gunplay feels just right, and while it does have a bit of that unlock shite, it's not as intrusive as COD games, where it's you with some pissweak basic weapons, and some guy comes along with dual lever action shotguns or a javelin missile and wipes you out instantly - The suit and variation between weapons provides balance to the unlocks, and allows you to customize to your play style.
PS - Ignore all the bollocks from people about it - Most of the whinging is by entitled, elitist fucks, who would prefer that only PCs would get decent games, and consoles get nothing but shitty shovelware(More consoles than just the wii) if someone mentions the name of a PC game on, say, Xbox live, their console will detonate like a bomb and kill everyone in the room. Most of these people are - as one would call in the trade - stupid, spoiled fuckwits. The worst of the bunch, as it were.
I like how there is a slot for my right ring finger to comfortably rest.
Now-a-days, I'm rocking the G700. Fits comfy in the hand, buttons in all the proper places, amazing scroll wheel. Battery goes flat a bit quick, but it's got a charge-and-use cable, so I don't have to care.
Bought the 2013 version because parts of the 8 year old one are covered by a layer of skin cells.
I know, eww.