Oh, I get what you mean. So you want something like analog input for movement.
Hmm. I think that a lot of FPSes use the mousewheel for “cycle weapon”. I guess you could have some kind of chording support, but I think that the problem is mostly that there isn’t a free analog input on keyboard+mouse for it.
The other thing would be that you only get one analog axis then, and a lot of games will need two analog axes for analog movement.
I was just reading the other day about some keyboard that apparently had keys with pressure-sensitive switches. I have no idea how many games actually support it, and bet that it’s obscenely expensive, but that’d provide necessary analog inputs, assuming that games add support.
googles
Ah, apparently it’s a thing with “gaming” PC keyboards right now.
You know, honestly, I think that this is at least partly a special case of what a lot of the other comments have asked for, which is basically a more-powerful input layer on the PC sitting between my devices and the game. Like, if I have a bunch of keyboards and joysticks and mice or whatever, let me attach axes and buttons however I want to functions in the game, do macros, whatever.
I had a comment complaining that I had a controller with two extra buttons than a standard XBox controller, but that most games can’t take advantage of that, even though they provide extensive support for rebinding keys on keyboards.
Someone else wanted to be able to bind any input to any game function, wanted macros and stuff.
You’re wanting the ability to link an analog input to existing code in the game that can take an analog value.
Several people have asked for the ability to rebind controller keys.
I also recall seeing, in a past discussion, a handicapped user talk about how the ability to rebind was important to them for accessibility reasons.
I always thought that it was intended to either simulate an old television or to make a scene look scarier, but looking at the wiki page I’ve linked to, it looks like there are a number of stylistic uses.
I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn’t great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.
It also wouldn’t have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.
Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don’t believe was possible on the original XBox release.
There’s actually legitimately at least some functionality required there that exists on the console there that doesn’t on the PC. The consoles already have a console-level concept of a player-to-controller mapping. That doesn’t exist on the PC, so the individual game would need to implement it – it’s not entirely free.
A common approach on the PC to handling controllers is to assume that there is one player and that whichever controller is receiving input last is the controller to use. This deals nicely with the case where there are multiple specialized controllers used for different software packages, like “the user has a steering wheel, a flightstick, an XBox controller, a Playstation controller, and a Switch controller plugged in” case. Problem is, then you can’t go just assume that Controller 1 is the Player 1 controller, and Controller 2 is the Player 2 controller. That case doesn’t come up on consoles, because they constrain the controller situation so that you can’t do that, so the problem doesn’t arise on consoles.
Hmm. I guess that’d work if you have a per-save-game list of cinematics. I was thinking of this more in the sense of games that have cinematics that are unlocked and accessible from the main menu.
Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important.
At one point in my life, during the pre-Tivo era, I lived directly beneath the approach route for an airport. It wasn’t the highest-traffic airport out there, and you learn to just tune the airplanes out for most things – but the one thing that there wasn’t a great workaround for was the occasional snippet of television shows getting drowned out when they decided to have a critical bit of plot right when the 8:00 PM flight was coming in.
Modern video games with voice-acting do tend to mitigate this by having subtitles and turning them on by default, though. And video games usually do let you roll back to an earlier save, maybe lose a few minutes of play, but if you want badly enough to hear the thing, you can. So it’s not quite as bad as the television show, where missing the critical bit of a plot could be really irritating.
The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, though I’d at least like a toggle.
I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.
I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that’s a very legitimate use case where you’d want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.
On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I’ll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don’t want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I’d like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It’s really annoying when a game developer tries to “helpfully” auto-pause the game, when I don’t want that. I’d be fine with that as a default, but if there’s no toggle, it’s really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).
On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it’d be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you’re not pushing buttons, is be playing music.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Unciv, but it’s a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series – not that that’s necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it’d be nice to have battery-friendly games.
High FOV gives you more peripheral vision, which – if you can get used to extremely-high FOVs – is a major advantage in competitive multiplayer FPSes. I know that users used to play with very high FOVs on Quake and the like; I don’t know if that’s a thing today. That’s an argument for constraining FOV in competitive multiplayer environments. Marathon used to incorporate this into the game, have a fisheye powerup that temporarily provided better peripheral vision. So if you want a level playing field for competitive multiplayer games, you cannot let it be changed by players. If you want a level playing field, the only thing you can do is adjust where their head is relative to the display, help them calibrate their head placement.
Even for single-player FPSes, it has some degree of impact on difficulty. Having a high FOV will generally make a game easier, since having more peripheral vision is advantageous.
Games virtually always use a higher FOV than would be accurate for the real world, based on the distance from the eye to display and the size of the display. In the real world, your monitor or TV screen – if at a sane distance from you – provides a very limited field of vision. Trying to play an FPS through a tiny window into the world like that would be a huge disadvantage. They just try to jack it up to a level where it won’t actually make people sick.
The “optimal” FOV will differ on a per-player basis (some people can handle higher FOV without being sick). What would be a physically-accurate FOV also depends on the size of the display and how far away from the display the player is sitting, which the developer does not know and varies on a per-player basis (unless the player is wearing a VR headset).
For consoles, I’d argue that this should probably be implemented at a console-wide level, maybe on a per-user basis, since what a user can handle and where their head is relative to the display should be constant across games. Doesn’t make sense to require a player to set it manually on a per-game basis, since they’re just going to have to be setting the same number.
I mean, if a game publisher wants to try to offset the game price via adding advertisements or to try to market the game via your social network or whatever, fine. I’m not going to try to tell game publishers how to do their business.
However, as a game consumer, I’d like to be informed before I buy a game whether game publishers are doing this in a game before I purchase it, so that I have the opportunity to opt out of buying it. Personally, I’d rather that they at least offer a “premium” version without stuff like this; the mobile video game industry often does an “adware and a premium no-ads” model.
Steam defaults to notifying people on your friends list what games you are playing, though they let you turn it off. I doubt that any user wants that on, all else held equal, other than the specific case of multiplayer games where users play multiplayer games with their friends. It might help a game publisher market their game to other users, but I’d rather just pay whatever extra it takes to make up the difference. I’m not going to say that it’s worth it to every user to pay a little more to maintain game immersion, but it is to me.
If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don’t want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card “give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now”.
For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.
It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don’t want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I’m looking at in the dark.
To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.
I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.
But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.
I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.
And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.
But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.
Which is why my above suggestion is adaptive to individual computers.
I got exasperated when I ripped out a “fake” progress bar in a commercial product – not a game – that another dev had previously added that I was working on and put in a real one. I don’t agree that this is some insumountable problem.