Re: Bullet Haven, a new shooting game!
BGT's joystick support sucks.
But let's take a look at this, "Using a mouse is a chore", premise, shall we. First of all, unless you have a gaming mouse, most of them are fairly lightweight, so, unless you have a motor or neural disability such as cerebral palsy, you have no excuse in that department. Second, the OS detects the mouse no matter when it is plugged in. This means that if you start up the game and think to yourself, "Damn, I forgot to plug in the mouse", you can simply do that and it will respond almost immediately. Third, let's tackle movement. If you move the mouse left, you aim left, if you move it right, you aim right. We're not on an alien planet with backward rules. Back in the days of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, it was very common to have your vertical axis flipped, and most games honor this by giving the user the choice. This doesn't really apply to most audio games, as they do not use the vertical axis.
As most of you are too young to remember this, allow me to regale you by telling the tale of the old PS/2 style ball mice. No, not track balls, those are different. These are mice, but with no scroll. The wheels came later and maybe the fanciest of those old ball mice had them, but nothing us commoners had. So, instead of a light shooting out the bottom of the thing, what we had was a rubber-coated steel ball. You needed a surface that would lend friction to the ball, allowing it to roll, which in turn, moved one of two roller wheels along the inner rim that the ball made contact with. One of these rollers represented the horizontal axis, another represented the vertical. Over time, the mouse would jump and stutter, or in some cases, barely work at all. when this happened, what you did was turn a plastic retaining ring counter-clockwise about a half turn and it would come loose, allowing the ball and the ring to fall out into your hand. You would then clean the ball. See, that's where most people went wrong. The ball being dirty in and of itself wasn't really the issue, it was just the catalyst. What really was going on here is that dirt would get in behind those little rollers, gumming them up. So sometimes, cleaning the ball would help a little, but if things were bad, you had to do a deep cleaning.
Now, all mice are optical and have a wheel. The tracking is so good that in most cases, you don't even need a mouse pad. Hell, some of these mice will even track on glass, such as what you'd find on the tops of some coffee tables. And, if for some reason, you need a pad, they're like $5 bucks, and now you have a smooth operating experience.
Of course, everyone has their preferences. But you'll never make me believe that you can be better in swamp with only the keyboard when the mouse is so precise, especially since it seems like you need to be right dead center on their asses with little margin of error. Joysticks / gamepads are nice, but most people just slam the stick to one side, which means they're not even using the analog nature of it, so the precision is lost.
That reminds me of this one time in one game my brother was playing, you had to shoot the nose wheel of an airplane as it was rolling down the runway. He couldn't do it, but I could. His problem was that he was trying to snipe, but always jamming the stick to one side or the other, which meant that his aim was at the fastest speed. I didn't do that. Instead, I used it as intended, moving it fully to one side only to make the most broad adjustments, and dialing it in little by little until I was right there.
So, when I hear people bitching about using a mouse - a device that has been used in gaming for nearly 30 years, the only thing I can think of is laziness or stubbornness.
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