Flight control - Freelancer/X3 Style

[Riph]

I'm curious if anyone knows if there are plans to add a control scheme akin to Freelancer or X3.

For those of you who haven't played (or just don't remember) Freelancer and X3 feature a control scheme where the player's cursor's distance from the center of the screen is used as your turn value, allowing long, banking turns without dragging your mouse over miles of mousepad. When the turn is finished, you move your mouse back to the center and you stop turning. It's really nice, and doesn't lead to nearly as much repetitive wrist strain as default Starmade controls do. My wrist actually hurts right now from a Starmade dogfight. (Yes I cranked my mouse sensitivity up

I would pay money for this feature.

 

[Mr.Steam]

I really liked the turning mechanism in freelancer, it allowed for great smooth turning. Being able to make long turns without moving the mouse was really nice. Sometimes remembering to turn free turn on and off with the space bar was annoying (or holding down the RMB for free turn).

What I really miss is the ability to control speed by rolling the mouse wheel. It allowed for fine control over the ships speed. If collision damage ever gets set to default it would be really great to be able to set the speed to exactly where you want between 0% and 100% so you can gently ease into a spacedock. Right now I jam a popsicle stick in the keyboard to hold down the W key to maintain max throttle. If you want to go a middle speed you must pulse the W key.

I haven't used a joystick so I don't know how the throttle works with it.

 

[Riph]

Bumping, hoping for more comments from users or ideally a devpost. I'm so tired of my targeting cursor constantly dragging itself toward the center of the screen. It makes turning harder, and makes hitting small moving targets with my cannon really frustrating. I'm starting to really worry here that because War Thunder did it, this is going to become the new standard in flight control and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns.

I'm seriously about to quit Starmade because the flight control is so uncomfortable.

 

[CyberTao]

Would be a nice feature, though there would hopefully be an option for this and the old. Could also maybe get it modded in as we, since all you would have to do is remove the mouse moving to the center of the screen during turns.
Throttle would be nice, but would have to make it disable when people fall/get out of the core (runaway ships and all).

 

[Riph]

would have to make it disable when people fall/get out of the core (runaway ships and all).

There's all kinds of stuff we're not doing for fear of runaway ships. What's got me scratching my head is that all these problems go away if players simply grapple/align automatically to any ship core they step out of. Problem solved, right? Now I can set a course, put throttle to full, and go wander around my ship halls, tend my bonsai tree, whatever.

 

[CyberTao]

simply grapple/align automatically to any ship core they step out of. Problem solved, right?

That only works with falling out, which would be nice as well. But since player positions are saved separately from the ship entity, there is still that problem when you crash.

They could probably tie in autopilot only being functional when there is a player within the bounding boxes (Log off, leave or crash? Ship drifts to a stop).