I always felt that there was much to be desired from controlling vehicles in some of the top shooters.  I remember playing some of the first shooters where I could control a fighter plane.  I think they got a lot of things right in that the controls weren’t incredibly responsive like usually how driving a car would be.  Turning was slow and difficult, risky even.  Sure, it’s close to reality but that doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable.  Maybe there wasn’t enough intermediate feedback.  Either way, it’s concerning because vehicle driving is a core gameplay element in GoI: Online.

Of course, we want piloting a ship to be extremely engaging and full of interesting strategic and tactical choices.  Part of the strategy and tactics are going to be solved with weather objects like storm clouds and thermal currents (more on this some other time).  However, the second to second interaction with the ship and the feel is the most difficult to solve.  What I’ve done is first take a look at what the player’s hands are doing.  We have the left hand on WASD and the right on the mouse.  We had a prototype where everything was controlled with WASD.  Even though turning needs to accelerate and decelerate, WASD provided the user with a kind of fine control over the ship.  The underlying code does not support fine control simply because that isn’t the nature of the driving something with so much mass (more mass means more momentum means more force required to move said mass and velocity!).  So the keyboard-only controls worked against us in that it provided fine control in terms of mashing A and D to maintain a straight line.

While we wanted it to be difficult to maintain a straight path, bashing keys was not the solution we were looking for.  You and I have watched several pirate and fighter plane movies.  In the heat of combat, ship spinning out of control, the boat veering into a cliff face, what was always the pilot’s reaction?  A steady hand taking control of a steering wheel spinning out of control, clutching tightly to a yoke to bring a plane’s nose back up.  We never see spastic button mashing antics in these situations.  We saw that the mouse had to come into play.

Right now, we’re still testing out control scheme but we’re feeling quite good about what we have so far.  There’s a chance it’ll change but I think we’re heading the right direction.  The formula is something like this: constant smooth actions and attenuation to flight in order to create the best experience.  General steering is going to be like ships at sea, large arcing circles.  Skills is where acrobatic maneuvers will be handled.  Kind of like doing a short button combination to somersault or even a barrel roll! Lulz.