Oolite Bulletins

Keyboard Combat Specialists of Oolite - Unite!

I'm not buying a Joystick anytime soon.Mouse control is only in fullscreen mode and I need my 2nd monitor for browsing etc., plus it's tricky as all hell unless you turn down mouse sensitivity.

So what are your secrets for setting up your keyboard for efficient space combat?
What are your ingame secrets to make keyboard combat doable and efficient?
If this has been covered in threads before, please do provide a link, I searched and didn't find much.
Let's not all try to re-invent the wheel each one of us on our own, share your knowledge and help us all get better.







My current thoughts (standard 4-year-old) US model Apple iMac keyboard, which has tiny keys for my big hands (e.g., the Function keys are impossible to keep separate):

1. The "i" key for fuel injection is way too far away from both my right hand on the arrow keys and my left hand on the throttle/firing keys. Same with "m" for firing missiles. Same with "," and "." for yaw left and right, respectively.
The "d" key for jettisoning cargo may or may not be well placed so close to the default throttle keys. Changing everything at the same time may well be good, but it's easier to remember incremental change (trust me, I changed my keybinds a lot during 5 years of WoW pvp and pve and movie-making).

2. My stock Apple keyboard has the arrow keys conveniently close to the NumKeyPad so I can quickly access all the Nav Controls and Station options. I'll keep that but need to get all the other important stuff easily accessible for my left hand.

3. Making the space bar fire lasers frees up "a" - and changing jettison cargo to another key frees up "d" - that's two close keys, not bad for yaw left and right.

4. That leaves fire missiles and fuel injection. "q" for missiles? That way all missile-related keys are on one row to make it easy to remember stuff. "f" for fuel injection? Shift+J for Jettison?

5. If all else fails I can always cheat a little and hit "p" to pause the game and LeftArrow to slow it down to half-speed - it evens the odds a bit when you're having trouble with hyper-sensitive keyboard controls. Joystick players have an advantage with Precision Input settings and the default combat flying controls are extremely sensitive, so I see this as a workaround more than a cheat mode. Hit Shift + F to see exactly how fast you have the game set to, and pause then RightArrow to get it back to x1.0 speed, a.k.a. TAF.

6. At long ranges the keyboard combateur is at a particular disadvantage due to the insane sensitivity of each key press. A simple way to get an accurate shot in is to continuously roll with a target selected - the target reticule will be observed to slightly move in relation to the crosshairs. This will clue you in to exactly what direction to yaw/roll/pitch. You can even do this if you can't seem to target something that's clearly on the radar display - the rolling motion will make it more obvious if your target is above or below the horizontal.

7. A few long laser shots or even just a missile launched can get your target to alter course - either get them off your tail or get them to change course and make your time to intercept that much smaller.

8. One of the most efficient things to learn in Oolite is to differentiate between the sound of a laser hit and a miss. The hit is slightly more "abrasive" sounding.


Relevant threads/links:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... t=keyboard
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite ... d_Controls (keep in mind that on Mac at least, the keyconfig.plist file has "yaw" and "roll" reversed. No clue what's up with that atm.)

Windowed mouse control can be enabled.

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Hidden ... _in_Oolite

I moved my throttle to n(+) and m(-), changed the missile launch to b and Energy Bomb to SHIFT+B.
The fire button is the space bar so I can easily hit that in a moment's notice.
My left hand handles throttle, yaw (rudder), and firing lasers/missiles/other.
My right hand does pitch/roll.

If I need to do more complex actions, I accept that I need to take my hands "off the wheel" to do it.
The old fire button a is now activate equipment and SHIFT+A is prime equipment.

Since I started playing Elite in 1985 I never used anything else than the keyboard, and I became ***Elite*** both on the C64 and the Amiga, and now again in Oolite.

I haven't remapped any of the basic keys (pitch, roll, fire, missiles), and of the additional keys only those which don't exist on a German keyboard. This means that since 1985 I have at least one very odd combination, because as you may know we Germans use switched 'Y' and 'Z' keys. So for me the quite logical "missile block": 'R' activate targeting, 'T' activate missile, 'Y' switch to next missile, 'U' deactivate missile never existed. I have 'Z' zoom scanner in-between, and the 'Y' below the 'A'. But as I've been playing this way for many years I've gotten used to it.

Yaw is a bit of a special case. I don't use it at all during normal flight. Elite/Oolite for me is pitch and roll. It's just another thing I've gotten used to in the course of many years. I have mapped the yaw-keys to ',' and '.' respectively. That's one row up and two keys to the left from the arrow keys, so it's reasonably close that I could try to use them with my "navigation hand". But as a matter of fact I don't use them, except when I'm standing still and turn around myself in order to fire lasers from all sides on a stationary target. I wouldn't complain if the yaw control was removed again in the next version.

As for key sensitivity, yes, it's an issue, but it can be dealt with in two places: first, depending on what ship I fly, I have sometimes lowered the pitch rate in shipdata (I can now handle pitches up to 1.4, though). Second, it's the are of just tipping the key, not really pressing it down. This is how precision can be achieved. That doesn't work very well with low frame rates, though, and also is totally wrecked if the game has a small stutter just when I tip the up- or down-arrow key. In these cases I have done a 90-degrees pitch before I even realize what happened.

I stick pretty much with the default Oolite key map. The only exception with this is the cloaking device key, which I tried to map to '0' on my number pad. That didn't seem to be possible, but whilst trying to do so, it ended up on '#', which is fine. I don't really use much in the way of primeable equipment, but if I start to use oxps such as the railgun, I may end up remapping that one to somewhere else...

I've looked at remapping roll pitch and yaw onto the keypad (ideally I wanted 1&3 for roll, 4&6 for yaw and 5&2 for pitch). Having looked at it, squinted a bit, looked again I've decided that I can't make head nor tail of how to do it and just left it as is.

Fortunately I did find that roll pitch and yaw are already on the numberpad, just not exactly as I'd like; 4&6 is roll, 8&2 is pitch, 1&3 is yaw. This leaves a large space in the middle where 5 is when you want to switch between pitch up and pitch down, so most of the time I just use the arrow keys unless I feel the need to yaw.

I edited keyconfig to match keyboard play on the C64. Did the same for NES Elite which was run on an emulator. Guess I'm stuck being comfortable with the keyboard. I remapped a few other keys: Cloaking Device enable/disable to "K" because of it's proximity to my right index finger which normally resides on the "," key (roll left), fire missile to "F" because default key is too close to "K", Galactic Hyperspace to SHIFT G, and map HOME to "9" because for some reason the Home key did not work on my keyboard. This is my two handed flight control setup:



If anyone thinks this is screwy, it probably is but works for me.

Switeck wrote:

I moved my throttle to n(+) and m(-), changed the missile launch to b and Energy Bomb to SHIFT+B.
The fire button is the space bar so I can easily hit that in a moment's notice.
My left hand handles throttle, yaw (rudder), and firing lasers/missiles/other.
My right hand does pitch/roll.

If I need to do more complex actions, I accept that I need to take my hands "off the wheel" to do it.
The old fire button a is now activate equipment and SHIFT+A is prime equipment.

Just wondering, how do you set the fire button to the spacebar? I am very new with keyboard controls editing, and I have a feeling I will be completely redoing my setup.

Hy Guys,

The only thing I changed was f for fuel injectors (so I can use em more easily in combat)...

Greetz,
Onno.

RyanHoots wrote:

Just wondering, how do you set the fire button to the spacebar? I am very new with keyboard controls editing, and I have a feeling I will be completely redoing my setup.

With this:
key_fire_lasers = " ";

Switeck wrote:

RyanHoots wrote:

Just wondering, how do you set the fire button to the spacebar? I am very new with keyboard controls editing, and I have a feeling I will be completely redoing my setup.

With this:
key_fire_lasers = " ";

Ok, looks like it would work but I wasn't sure. But how about the Backspace key (to eject cargo)?

RyanHoots wrote:

Switeck wrote:

RyanHoots wrote:

Just wondering, how do you set the fire button to the spacebar? I am very new with keyboard controls editing, and I have a feeling I will be completely redoing my setup.

With this:
key_fire_lasers = " ";

Ok, looks like it would work but I wasn't sure. But how about the Backspace key (to eject cargo)?

You could try
http://www.ascii-code.com/

Disembodied wrote:

You could try

Code: Select all

key_dump_cargo				= 8;

http://www.ascii-code.com/

Thanks, I'm going to like that. No more accidentally pressing d.

Commander McLane wrote:

As for key sensitivity, yes, it's an issue, but it can be dealt with in two places: first, depending on what ship I fly, I have sometimes lowered the pitch rate in shipdata (I can now handle pitches up to 1.4, though). Second, it's the are of just tipping the key, not really pressing it down. This is how precision can be achieved. That doesn't work very well with low frame rates, though, and also is totally wrecked if the game has a small stutter just when I tip the up- or down-arrow key. In these cases I have done a 90-degrees pitch before I even realize what happened.

Is there a simple way to decrease the key sensitivity across the board? An OXP with a built-in graphical sensitivity interface would do wonders...