Hey
The end goal would be to have good aim and good flight maneuverability, without resorting to HOSAM or keyboard-mouse. Trying to have best of both world here. And even if the stick aim still is never as good as mouse, the immersion is king. Just trying to optimize aim though.
I'd like to discuss how to optimize weapon accuracy on the rotation-axes stick (whether HOTAS or HOSAS setup), but without compromising ship maneuverability.
So far I have seen these possible solutions:
– having some minimal deadzone on the pitch and roll axis
– on these same axis, having non-linear curve as to have more stick movement window for micro-adjustment (I believe it should looks like an S-curve kinda thing)
But I have some doubt about the S-curve. Why?
I used to play some competitive FPS (counter strike), generally one becomes accurate when his sensitivity is very low. That could be explained by the fact that they have to translate their mouse a lot to even achieve a 180, which looks ridiculous (using whole arm across the mouse pad), plus their mouse pad is crazy big. But the point is that with this config, they can make micro-adjustment a lot more easily.
The thing is, there are no such thing as "curve" (no one plays with mouse acceleration), it's 100% linear.
Does it make sense to try to port that FPS idea into a flight sim stick, to improve weapon accuracy in combat?
So is curve even a good idea to become a good flight stick gun aimer ? since it's not a mice, idk. Maybe it is harder to build muscle memory, assuming you have found your ideal curve and don't change it every 2 weeks.
I'd like to illustrate the difficulty of aiming with the default linear pitch and roll axes with the ED training simulation " advanced – ship launched fighters " where you've got to dogfight against a viper in a small fighter ship. This ship you've got is very agile, and use fixed aiming weapon, obviously.
It is pretty hard to aim at the viper why she lightly move in the 3D space, you constantly have to make micro-adjustments. And I would bet these kind of adjustments, if you'd take the full range of pitch and roll linearly, would only be in the 0 to 10%-20% range of movements of these respective axis. Meaning there is a whole 80% which is not really needed to aim, but rather, do flight maneuvers.
Would it make sense to increase the 10-20% range into a 40%, by effectively reducing the sensitivity in that very range of stick motion? I am going to try that. Maybe having a linear with a smaller slope would be sufficient to solve that, with some sort of smooth transition to the normal linear default slope past the 40% max stick range of motion.
Would look like this, without smooth transition. raw idea.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/105fmhb/optimizing_stick_for_weapon_accuracy_curve/
