Control feedback thread

I tend to have the move left/right be with the look up/down, partly as I prefer to use W to move forward, then either A or D to turn.
 
Hey, so I actually had my friends play Srb2 2.1 a couple of times, and then had them play 2.2 again so now I can relay a new players experience with the new controls update.

In 2.1, anyone who picks it up for the first time immediately complains about slippery controls. Keyboard only was actually the biggest offender of new players feeling like the controls were slippery. They also tried mouse and game pad and said it made things only a little bit easier, even with analog mode turned on. In general, the control scheme was a big part of the reason why new players were turned off to the game I believe. In 2.1, it was kind of confusing and hard to control.
Old players can play Srb2 like a sixth sense, being able to do high precision jumps and speed through Gfz1 with their eyes closed. But somebody who has never played this game needs to develop muscle memory of how the controls work. Which brings me to the 2.2 control scheme.

My friends immediately noted it felt a lot better when trying 2.2 on a game pad for the first time. The improvements made helps a new player learn the ropes incredibly fast and it actually feels a lot more fluid and responsive now at least from my perspective. The only thing worth noting is that they had a hard time wrapping their head around thokking in the direction the camera is facing.
While doing abilities in the camera's direction feels intuitive at first, an ability like thok a lot of the time is used as a reaction to incoming danger. As a result, people who play third person games on a game pads main reaction is to use the left joystick to get out of danger. While both modes have pros, I would agree that having an option to turn "only camera direction thok" on and off would be the best outcome to let the user decide what they prefer.
In fact, I'd say have the default direction for the thok be the direction the camera is facing, but have the direction overridden by the left analog stick.

The rest is my opinion so you can skip over it if you'd like, but I would like to say that I agree with SSNTails in saying that I've played this game mostly with a keyboard my whole life. When 2.1 was released, I relied solely on the "strafe on" key to do strafing. When that was removed, it was a shock to get used to a new control scheme but it actually forced me to move to mouse. It helped me play the game way better than I was able to before (especially with mlook). In a way I do miss being able to strafe with one key but without it I would not have gotten introduced to a brand new control scheme that allows me to play the game better.

In general I do agree that having the option to turn on and off features is always better anyway for games but for all the people who miss analog mode, I'd say give it a couple of weeks or a month and see how you feel about it then. It seems to make the game experience a lot easier for game pad users, despite the fact this game is meant to be played as an fps game.

I miss you strafe on :(
 
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In general I do agree that having the option to turn on and off features is always better anyway for games but for all the people who miss analog mode, I'd say give it a couple of weeks or a month and see how you feel about it then. It seems to make the game experience a lot easier for game pad users, despite the fact this game is meant to be played as an fps game.
I think the point we analog users are making here is that we have tried the FPS control scheme, I have tried the game in FPS mode for the last 6 months and while I've gotten better with it, I still can't control my movements and make them flow as well as I can in analog, if that amount of time isn't enough then I'm sorry but I don't want to have to pour more time into learning a control style that just doesn't feel as intuitive for me.

EDIT: This isn't to say that there aren't people who have just turned analog on and not given the FPS control style a go, but I feel the majority of people who use analog already have.
 
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In my case, I can play the game with keyboard/mouse controls competently, but I still preferred analog mode. I also don't have the desk space to move my mouse more than one inch at a time, so analog mode's sudden removal was pretty upsetting, because I couldn't play it in the way the developers' have intended even if I wanted to.

However, I do have to give the team points for making the keyboard/mouse controls a lot more intuitive than they were in previous versions of SRB2. No longer does Sonic turn like a tank, as if Tomb Raider 1 had just released yesterday; literally all of my complaints with the previous system are gone. While it's still not what I prefer, it moves leagues better than it did before, especially now that the character sprites are properly corresponding to your movements. (Instead of only ever showing your character's backside, like before, which I found rather ugly.) The camera lagging and twitching behind you is also gone, I no longer need first-person mode with keyboard controls just for the movement to feel smoother.

Additionally, I have been experimenting with controller bindings all evening, (even tried the Steam controller with little success) and just a moment before I went to write this forum post, found a compromise that works so closely to what I wanted and needed from analog mode, I was suppressing laughter.

Because of how much better the new movement system is, just binding the horizontal camera axis to the X axis on my Xbox 360 controller, along with the movement axis also being on the X axis, gives me a control setup that is very similar to what I liked about analog mode: Simultaneous turning and strafing with the X axis. That might sound disgusting to keyboard/mouse only players, but I can run around in the same ways I used to with analog mode and also turn around on a dime. I went from awkwardly running into every other wall with the default control scheme, to competently navigating the levels as if analog mode had never been removed. I can almost do crawla chain bouncing again already!

It's still not as nice as modern 3D platformers, where you have a literal invisible cylinder that the player has to touch the edges of before the camera will turn or move around, (much like camera borders in 2D games) but the turning is so good with the stick this way, I don't even need the shoulder triggers to compliment my camera turning like I did with analog mode before. I don't even have the triggers bound to anything with this setup!

The only thing I don't like is that the character rotates to face forward after coming to a complete stop, it prevents me from admiring the idle animations at all of the directions they were drawn in.

Now, I can just play the singleplayer campaign with two measly buttons and a single analog stick; it's so bizarre, and as ideally simple to play as you would expect a Sonic game to be. I'm going to try it with my five year old cousin the next time he comes over to play, because he couldn't comprehend having to turn manually with another stick or shoulder triggers, so it was frustrating for him, coming from more modern 3D platformers.

So, I'm thinking if analog mode should ever come back, it needs to be a completely new beast rewritten in context with the new (and only) movement system. I might be wrong, but I feel like you wouldn't need very many changes to bring back what people liked about analog mode, if not an even better setup than what was previously there.

That's my feedback, devs, hope it's- well, insightful about what people wanted from analog mode in any meaningful way.
 
Now to put my two cents

Analog is good, but I feel that the main thing that's killing it is the lack of intuitive camera controls, having a Z-target or something similar, I think, will alleviate a whole bunch of the issues that analog mode brings.

In terms of the controls in general, I find SRB2 to be very weighty and precise, which is fine and makes a lot of the platforming-centered challenges fun and worthwhile.

Another thing that might be good is to give players more options with how they want to control the game.
Giving many options with how they want to control the camera, how precise their jumps want to be, how fluid their movement is, etc.
 
When combining that camera movement trick/workaround to left and right as Knuckles,climbing is very awkward and complicating when going left and right on a wall.
 
I'd previously been an analogue mode user for the entirety of my time playing this game, but I didn't have much trouble learning the new directionchar layout. The whole twinstick platforming thing reminded me somewhat of the Ratchet games post Up Your Arsenal. The one thing that did give me a few grievances was the thok not respecting the angle of the character.

I'd constantly try to use it to avoid obstacles or correct misaligned jumps by flying towards a direction I knew was safe, only to thok directly into a hazard instead. This likely isn't as bad on mouse+keyboard, since the camera turning is way faster there, but on a controller doing 180 can take a while.
 
I wasn't going to post in this thread, because I've gone on and on and on about it on my blog, either to positive or negative effect to how my opinion is viewed around these parts.

My issue is that I don't understand how the new mouse controls are intended to be better. And I don't understand the claims that new users somehow found the old analog controls to be "confusing."

To me, the old analog controls work like a 3D platformer do. The camera is a little rough around the edges, but it's the Doom Engine, and you're turning a first person shooter in to a platformer. Given that it was at least on par with Sonic Adventure I think that's a pretty impressive accomplishment, all things considered. And given the state of most official modern 3D Sonic games, where you don't get any camera control at all, the camera system in SRB2's analog mode was definitely more functional than they were. If you could bind analog mode camera rotation to the right stick axis... I won't say it would be "perfect" but it would be the best I could personally hope for from this project.

Similarly, I have absolutely no idea how any of the new controls are actually beneficial in any way. They feel explicitly and exclusively like features that are maintained by people who are more comfortable playing SRB2 like a shooter in multiplayer and they do not factor in any way shape or form in to the single player campaign, outside of a few very annoying sections in EggRock Zone (which as I understand are due for a remodel).

The entire game, front to back, top to bottom, is functional and enjoyable with the old analog controls. It works like a 3D platformer because that's what it is.

Never once did I ever feel like I needed to strafe. Never once did I think to myself, "I wish I could move and look at objects in different directions." Occasionally I wished the bosses had a standard 3D platformer "boss camera" where the view tracks the enemy, but never anything more complex than that. Seeing Mystic in this very thread try to claim that strafing "was not optional" is absurd to me on a lot of different levels because clearly he's viewing the game from a very different perspective than I am and as far as I can tell there is absolutely nothing wrong with mine.

Hearing that people found the old analog controls confusing and yet seeing the tutorial open by explaining at length how SRB2 breaks 3D platformer standards feels incredibly contradictory to me and makes me question who exactly found the old analog controls to be confusing and in what context.

In particular, I find the new controls hard to work with because I am now expected to hyper-micromanage camera position in order to constantly maintain an invisible crosshair because somebody tied special ability angles to the camera direction instead of the player direction. No longer is it as simple as "hold left, thok left" -- now I'm expected to aim Sonic like a bullet in a game that's often even faster than Doom itself. That's possible, sort of, when using a mouse, but when using a controller, it feels ugly, clumsy, and frustrating, because it's going against standard action game control practices. It just does not make sense to me.

And you control Sonic with a controller. Period. It's not as though KBAM platformers took off as a popular genre on the PC in the last 20 years, you know? They were always console games, using analog sticks attached to controllers. That's the Sonic franchise's bread and butter, good or bad. Otherwise it's like, yeah, you could play Forza Horizon on a fight stick, and eventually you'd even get good at using it, but would there be a tangible benefit? It's a tough sell.

In terms of raw, precise control feedback, if you're truly going to get rid of the old analog mode, what I'd ideally want:

  1. Reattaching things like thokking, gliding, and spindashing to the character's input direction instead of the camera's direction. This is the number one thing I'd like to see an option for.
  2. Characters should no longer automatically rotate to face forward when standing still (all those idle animations and all we see is their butts...)
  3. For characters to be ever so slightly less sensitive to analog stick input. In both new and old controls, Sonic can feel super touchy. Somebody earlier in the thread mentioned an analog deadzone option -- that might help. Also, maybe just a teeny tiny bit more weight to rapid changes in direction. It was also mentioned earlier in the thread that characters feel slippery; that can be other causes like animation speed effecting game feel rather than acceleration/deceleration values.
Whatever the case may be, I've said a lot about these problems by now. Take it or leave it.
 
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I use fps controls and I never encountered any serious issues with the controls that couldnt be fixed with a nice OpenGL renderer and drop shadows.
 
(this post is quite long and it's redundant to have it on the page twice so have this placeholder text instead)
I honestly wanted to leave my input (heh) in this thread but it appears Blaze has said just about everything that I already wanted to so I guess I'll second this argument.
Adding onto that, I've been in multiple instances where I intended to thok towards the camera to correct where I was landing, however I ended up careening into a bottomless pit thanks to the new controls. I'm not going to criticize SRB2's preference of keyboard/mouse, as it is a PC game after all, but working towards having an acceptable input configuration for every setup should be an end goal. After all, there are ports of the game on platforms that do not have access to keyboard/mouse controls, such as the Switch.
 
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Similarly, I have absolutely no idea how any of the new controls are actually beneficial in any way. They feel explicitly and exclusively like features that are maintained by people who are more comfortable playing SRB2 like a shooter in multiplayer and they do not factor in any way shape or form in to the single player campaign, outside of a few very annoying sections in EggRock Zone (which as I understand are due for a remodel).
I'd like to clear up a very strong misconception: nobody is doing this because of match. I haven't played ringslinger in 4 years. These controls are not new, either. They have been the default controls in the game for the entire time, although they've obviously been refined from the days when the default was literally tank controls with nothing but the arrow keys. We did this because we found, in significant amounts of focus testing, that analog was actively harming people's fun when they found it. The new players that actually stuck with the weird hybrid control scheme performed better and had a better experience. What we apparently missed is that a lot of experienced players have been using analog for long enough that they actually got good at such a badly made scheme, and therefore the pushback is stronger than we expected.

Never once did I ever feel like I needed to strafe. Never once did I think to myself, "I wish I could move and look at objects in different directions." Occasionally I wished the bosses had a standard 3D platformer "boss camera" where the view tracks the enemy, but never anything more complex than that. Seeing Mystic in this very thread try to claim that strafing "was not optional" is absurd to me on a lot of different levels because clearly he's viewing the game from a very different perspective than I am and as far as I can tell there is absolutely nothing wrong with mine.
You are misunderstanding that. What's necessary are three axes: move forward/backward, move left/right, and camera left/right. These are all necessary controls to play the game effectively, both in the default control scheme and in analog mode. Analog would be similarly unplayable if you bound the stick's left and right to control the camera instead of movement and didn't have a way to move left/right bound.

Hearing that people found the old analog controls confusing and yet seeing the tutorial open by explaining at length how SRB2 breaks 3D platformer standards feels incredibly contradictory to me and makes me question who exactly found the old analog controls to be confusing and in what context.
It's not that people found the old analog controls confusing. The problem is that they are imprecise. When you posted about finding the analog function again and were extolling its virtues, you posted a video of you going through GFZ and you were crashing into walls left and right and barely miss getting hit to crawlas due to pure luck. You also demonstrated quite an impressive mastery of the thok in that control scheme, nailing enemies at angles and doing other things that clearly demonstrate your high skill level at the scheme. It's obvious you've played this way for a long time, but you still didn't have the camera under control. This is because that the analog camera sucks. Hard.

We discovered that new players who were introduced to the weird shooter scheme early, through any control method (KB+M, keyboard alone, or gamepad), performed better through objective metrics, like how much they get hit and how long it took them to beat bosses, compared to analog mode. This is exactly why we open with a tutorial explaining non-standard controls; we know they're not industry standard and weird, but we also know through research that players who stick with it through the half an hour of clumsiness have more fun! Thus, we made the decision to create an explicit tutorial to teach new players how to use the controls that we know aren't initially intuitive but also create the best possible new player experience. Again, this has nothing to do with ringslinger or any other multiplayer silliness. This has everything to do with the experience of new players to our single player game.

In particular, I find the new controls hard to work with because I am now expected to hyper-micromanage camera position in order to constantly maintain an invisible crosshair because somebody tied special ability angles to the camera direction instead of the player direction. No longer is it as simple as "hold left, thok left" -- now I'm expected to aim Sonic like a bullet in a game that's often even faster than Doom itself. That's possible, sort of, when using a mouse, but when using a controller, it feels ugly, clumsy, and frustrating, because it's going against standard action game control practices. It just does not make sense to me.

And you control Sonic with a controller. Period. It's not as though KBAM platformers took off as a popular genre on the PC in the last 20 years, you know? They were always console games, using analog sticks attached to controllers. That's the Sonic franchise's bread and butter, good or bad. Otherwise it's like, yeah, you could play Forza Horizon on a fight stick, and eventually you'd even get good at using it, but would there be a tangible benefit? It's a tough sell.
I stated this earlier in the thread, but in testing I played through 2.2 entirely on a SNES controller, including the super hard extra content. I bound movement to the D-pad, the camera to the L/R buttons, and jump/spin to A/B. I found it shockingly effective, even with no analog sticks. It's not that the game does not perform well on a controller with the default camera settings.

However, there appear to be two complaints here that analog mode pretends to solve:
1. People want their character ability to aim in the direction that their character is facing instead of the camera, even if that means that they can thok in a direction that they can't see in.
2. People want the camera to automatically face in the right direction instead of requiring it to be managed.

I think it's very important to distinguish these complaints from the KB+M/controller complaints, because these are tangible, real issues that we can try to address. The first one is relatively simple to make as an option (although getting the glide to work properly that way will be some work). The second one is an absolute nightmare, though. Having an automatic camera that doesn't require micromanagement is the holy grail of the 3D platformer, and is something that SEGA never got even close to right with official Sonic, either. This is the core reason why we call analog mode "bad", because its implementation of this absolutely sucks and requires almost as much micromanagement as the completely manual default camera does. Because of the outcry there are currently several people on and off the team experimenting with this to try to create an automatic camera that isn't utter rubbish, but that'll almost certainly take a bit to experiment with and find out what works best.
 
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I have toyed around with the analog mode a bit in past versions of the game, usually I would just play through an act or two before getting frustrated with the camera and turning analog mode off.

For years, using the default movement type, my single player setup was the following (keep in mind I am right handed):
w and up arrow key - move forward
s and down arrow key - move backward
left and right arrow keys - turn camera/character
a and d - strafe left and right
z - spin
space - jump
shift - ring toss

This was how I played until about a year or two ago when a friend pointed out that it's way easier if you take your right hand off the arrow keys, use strafe to move left and right exclusively, and use the mouse to control the camera. Initially, I felt like a complete idiot for not thinking of doing this for all these years, despite getting fairly skilled at the game without using the mouse at all.

Now my control scheme is mostly the same, but I changed ring toss to left mouse button for convenience. Playing like this feels incredibly natural, and because I never got super used to analog mode it also just naturally clicks in my brain that thok is in the direction of the camera and I never have any problems controlling it the way I want to.

For gamepad, I only have a Dualshock 4. I have found the following setup to work perfectly fine without me suffering too much of a loss in skill:
D-pad and left analog stick - Movement
X - Jump
O - Spin
Square - Ring toss
L1 - Turn camera left
R1 - Turn camera right

By using these two setups, I have absolutely zero issues playing through the entire single player campaign regardless of if I feel like using gamepad or keyboard + mouse at the moment. The only thing I can think of that might be throwing fans of analog mode off is their brain is telling them to aim with their character instead of their camera, and since they haven't fully adapted to the shift in playstyle they are suffering a temporary drop in skill. A toggle option as some have suggested would be fine, but I wouldn't ever need to use such a thing myself.

What I do absolutely love in terms of ideas though, is having it so the camera automatically locks on to the boss in act 3 of each zone, or setting a lock on button to use instead. Having the camera locked on to the boss would not only help players keep their attention focused on the boss without losing track of it, but it would also give the boss acts a really cool, special feeling.
 
I feel like most people already hit the nail on the head, and it's already becoming known that there are people that prefer analog despite it's flaws, so I'll just parrot a few ideas I believe would help, even if temporary.

First off is the auto camera, when people are referring to that, I don't necessarily believe people want the camera to auto turn better, but rather they want the game to have a relatively scripted camera experience when analog is selected. What this means is, for example, when running down the first turn of GFZ, the camera pans out a bit here and auto turns in a position where it gives the player visibility of whats after the turn, the camera is more so directed by the position within the stage, rather than just auto turning with the player. This also includes bosses, where it will follow the boss in relation to the characters position. However, I do not know how plausible it is to even do something like this in SRB2, which ultimately leads to my other ideas, which aren't as effective but ought to get the job done until an actual solution comes by.

Firstly, a button to reset the camera behind the player, similar to how Z targetting with center the camera behind Link in Zelda, or how 06 in general had a button dedicated to this. This does not really all of the issues with analog and it's camera control, but it does give the player more control over their direction and visibility on the fly, which at the very least is useful on a few bosses that might move around the screen.
Secondly, just better camera options in general when in analog mode, and even outside of it. For whatever reason, you just lose your full camera control, sort of, when in analog mode. Horizontal movement on an axis just no longer works, despite the buttons to turn camera still functioning. That needs to really be fixed, with the addition of camera speed options for BOTH directions, rather than it being tied to just one general camera speed. I actually been running analog recently because my controller is now experiencing drift in the right stick, until I can get a replacement (it's custom colored so its going to take awhile), I don't really have much of a choice because excessive keyboard or mouse usage puts my hands to sleep. Turning the camera speed up and putting them on L and R helps incredibly, theres hardly ever a time where I'm taking leaps of faith, thought that camera reset I suggested earlier would be nice to have too.

tldr: analogs ok and can mostly work when tinkered with and given a few more options, even if its objectively worse for playing the game, the option really shouldn't be removed until a solution is found, and even then I'd argue it shouldn't be removed juuust in case.

That being said, the real kicker with analog mode as a whole is....it really doesn't have to exist. Instead, every feature that this mode offers SHOULD be offered as multiple options to give the player FAR more customization, like someone else essentially said already. The auto camera, facing in directions, using abilities in character direction, etc, should all just be options rather than just bundled into one analog mode, along with those other options and changes I mentions before. To top all of this off, while it might sound extreme, we could still use more general control options. The ability to set, for each character ability separately, how they function. For example, Thok could be toggable if it does camera or character direction, while Knuckles gliding can ALSO be toggable in the same manner, so people can mix and match these control schemes to how they see fit.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that no matter what, there needs to be times where the control is taken away from the player. For example, it's odd how springs naturally point you in the right direction in standard mode, yet analog, a mode that really needs that camera adjustment, does not do this.
 
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I've been playing more SRB2 (with Xbox One controller, the new-to-me three-axis 'control the camera, thok in camera direction' controls, and Spin mapped to LT and Jump mapped to RT). My comments here are intended to provide the developers with further feedback on 2.2's controls.

Today, among many things, I got the Time Attack emblems for GFZ1 and 2, I got an A-rank on Floral Field and a B-rank on Egg Sattelite (SECOND TRY, I was shocked, I've had to work really hard for all the other Nights stuff), and I beat Egg Rock Act 1 without taking a hit. I could not have done any of these things if I did not trust the controls 100%.

Every now and then the camera will jitter, but then I simply rotate it so it's no longer hitting whatever wall or object it ran into. I also played as Knuckles and, to my surprise, did not once cling onto any walls I did not want to, nor did I ever not cling to a wall I was supposed to cling onto. I thought I had experienced the latter when I first tried 2.2 Knuckles, but I'm suspecting now that I might have misunderstood.

For further reference, even when I played 2.1 and swore by analog mode, even then I recognized the need to control the camera, and thus mapped it left/right to L and R. This may be a factor behind my not taking that long to get used to the "new" control scheme? I was already expecting to have to move the camera. I think most of my time learning things has been getting used to jumping and spinning with buttons I would normally expect to rotate the camera. I did also make absolutely sure to un-map my face buttons altogether (except for menu functions); this has prevented a lot of unknown incidents from occurring the many many times I instinctively hit them in gameplay.

So, speaking as someone who was so comfortable with controller analog mode that I could beat Mystic Realm as Sonic and then speed through Egg Rock 2 without losing a life, someone who had not touched SRB2 for several months before 2.2's release, it's taken me like three days to get used enough to this non-analog control scheme that I could do some fairly high-level stuff again.

I will probably stop posting in this thread now that I've got the hang on things. I just want to keep playing. I freaking love this game.
 
I wasn't going to post in this thread, because I've gone on and on and on about it on my blog, either to positive or negative effect to how my opinion is viewed around these parts.
I don't have a blog, and I've kept myself off twitter and facebook and such; frankly, most of us stay away from that. So, I appreciate you at least dropping in here to talk about it a bit.

What I don't appreciate is having to correct misinformation about our game being broadcast at large. A few quick bits before I go into what I really want to talk about here:

* Character abilities have never worked in the direction of the controller input by default. Ever. It was always something specific to analog mode. This is not something we changed.
* Most of our NiGHTs stages are easy because they are a minigame you only get limited tries at during normal play, not because of the controls. We do not presume prior familiarity, and we do not assume people are interrupting their playthrough to go into NiGHTs attack until they git gud, we made an effort so that it would be reasonable to get all emeralds in a single playthrough. Try black hole zone if you want to see what we think players can do with the controls SRB2 has.
* Our personal opinions about control schemes were not the driving force behind our choices in what to champion and what to hide.

The first is something there's really no excuse for you not to have known, the second is common sense, and the third... well, I wouldn't have put it on the list, except that you basically spent the entire time writing about it just casually repeating that the opposite must be the truth to the point of randomly inserting insults about it, saying we consider controller players second class citizens, and for some insane reason implying there's some logical inconsistency between hiding analog mode and having concern for disability accessibility options.

Like, that last bit just gets to me. I'd rather not dominate the whole post talking about how absurd it is to conflate support for your favorite control scheme with features to allow deaf and colorblind people to play the game, but I can't exactly let that go without mention, either. That's seriously bad form, dude.


But, onto the main thing I want to talk about.

One of the project founders, SSNTails, was a keyboard-only player.

Our current project head, Rob, is a keyboard-only player.

The level designer for frozen hillside and spriter of metal sonic, Blade, is not only a keyboard-only player but uses it to notable success in deathmatch mode.

I myself a keyboard-only player. I use the arrow keys to turn, and that was good enough for me to record this video almost 10 years ago, amusingly as a way of proving that the controls weren't slippery if you braked on your own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZqVgy3RVI8

Former developer Torgo, who made the now defunct SRB1 remake, was an analog player outright and recorded this as a rebuttal to people who said analog in specific was unusable. (mind the bad camera in the replay)
https://imgur.com/svC7Qxy

One of our musicians, Shane Strife, occasionally plays on gamepad, and Mystic played through Arial Garden Zone using a SNES pad.

Former developer Inuyasha, who coded most of the upgrades to NiGHTs mode in 2.1, swore by keyboard and track pad.

And after seeing non-developer CheatFreak show off what his new steam gamepad could do with only a few days' practice, I immediately put in an order for one despite having missed the liquidation sale where he had gotten his. College has kept me from participating in beta tests during the run-up to 2.2's release, so it's very likely my first time playing the finished product will be using a controller. (spoiler warning: video is from the endgame)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2QVRTaZnF8


That's certainly not a complete list of developers who use other schemes - not even a complete list of who I could name off hand. But instead of asking any of your former colleagues what they were thinking, you decided to speculate about us and tsk tsk about your guesses into a bullhorn. That a tutorial existed at all should have been enough to tell you that we weren't making our decisions based on gut feeling and personal preference here, but you went full speed ahead with easily preventable lies of ignorance instead.

So you know, I'd really appreciate it if you could stop talking shit every other tweet about how we're circle-jerking to The One True Control Scheme and gave the middle finger to everything else because we only care about what we know. A retraction of some or any of it would be nice, but I'd mostly just like for you to stop introducing the many people who trust and respect you to our game with unwarranted contempt for the people making it.

Mystic has already mentioned the actual process we used to decide how our control schemes were presented, and with more polished prose than I came up with. I already wrote a bunch by the time I saw his though and it goes into more detail on different things, so click through if you wanna see the same topic from a slightly different perspective, I guess.

So if it wasn't personal preference, why did we champion mouse and keyboard, and hide analog? It's not because of their skill ceilings, I've just demonstrated that you can go far enough to style on the game with any of them. It's not even because of an abstract notion of one being better than the others.

It's because we got dozens of people in person who never played the game before to try it using a choice of them, and watched what happened.

Our game's core premise flies in the face of industry standard simply for not abstracting acceleration away in favor of the analog stick directly dictating speed, and industry standard for 3D platformers means absolutely nothing next to what works, or does not work for the game that we have. And beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt, we found that for all that players would gravitate towards analog when they knew it existed, and felt the most comfortable picking it up right away...

They were also the ones who learned the game the slowest, the ones who got the most frustrated, and the ones who played of their own volition for the shortest amount of time.

Flat-out, we learned not only did we need an explicit tutorial, not only did we find out that mouse+keyboard users learned the fastest and usually got comfortable with the scheme by techno-hill zone, not only did we find out that even keyboard-only was better than analog, we learned that analog mode actively ruined new players' experience with the game and made them want to quit.


Take your experience in eggrock zone, and transplant it into GFZ3, and techno hill, and deep sea zone. That is what we saw. Like the people I listed above, you are an experienced player who already understands their control scheme on a fairly deep level; some who watched your demonstration in GFZ commented on how you bumped into walls and overshot turns on open ground, how you didn't check the position of the last SDURF in GFZ2 before taking the spring into its path and missed it by pure chance. What caught my attention more though was how you almost never broke stride, how you could opportunistically snap out a thok to the side to hit a crawla on the way to your destination, and were evidently building rapid mental maps of the area around you as the camera swept over it so you could safely maneuver into it without looking back.

Indeed, you are certainly good enough to beat the game, and you have a playstyle and certain fundamental skills built around the controls you use.

But it's not about what experienced players can do with it. It never was.

We chose to explain the control scheme we already had which proved the quickest to learn, and we hid the one that proved to be actively toxic to new adopters. No more, no less.


As for controls we may have or make in the future? As this topic should certainly indicate, that's a matter we're actively looking into. When we have something worth putting in the options menu itself, it'll go in. Some are of the opinion that having full control of the camera so that it never screws you over is one of the most unique and appealing parts of the game, and I can certainly relate to that perspective; there is an appeal to the thok for me that only works when I have that invisible crosshair you talk about to work with. But what works, works, and that's our bottom line.

So with all due respect, again I ask: please make a greater effort to separate your speculation about who we are and why we made the decisions we did from your criticism and personal experience with the game.
 
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It seems to me that the game's analog support is flawed to a lot of people, and more importantly that neither the game's mechanics nor it's levels are built around it. So I feel like the best solution is to rework the way that say, the thok works (or just straight-up make it a homing attack since the entire point of that is to be able to hit enemies easier with analog control) so that you can use it in multiple directions without launching yourself in a direction you can't see (and possibly danger) and keep the regular controls as the default. There are issues doing things with analog control that regular can do just fine, but nothing that is seemingly easier with analog. Build the game around the less-accurate control scheme, and well, you've got an easier game, but then you can focus on making alternate or optional stuff more suited to different control styles. Like, obviously it wouldn't make sense to use analog control for match.

Thing is, that'd take a lot of work, and a lot of manual camera positioning, I think. The main issue with the camera in analog mode is that it's totally manual. There's no environmental or scripted camera points like there is in the Sonic Adventure games, for example. It would pay off to make some of those, and to simply build levels around more flow and drift than precision. I mean, I kind of already fucking hate Eggrock for basically being a straight line of overly-precise obstacle courses.

For whatever it's worth though, the way it is right now is actually also fine with regards to people's interaction with it. A console command is obscure enough that newbies won't find it on accident and have more trouble with it, but not so difficult that a veteran won't be able to activate it easily. Whatever the decisions made, "remove it entirely" is obviously the wrong answer.
 
It's not that people found the old analog controls confusing. The problem is that they are imprecise. When you posted about finding the analog function again and were extolling its virtues, you posted a video of you going through GFZ and you were crashing into walls left and right and barely miss getting hit to crawlas due to pure luck. You also demonstrated quite an impressive mastery of the thok in that control scheme, nailing enemies at angles and doing other things that clearly demonstrate your high skill level at the scheme. It's obvious you've played this way for a long time, but you still didn't have the camera under control. This is because that the analog camera sucks. Hard.

I'm sorry, but I am slightly confused, can you please clarify what you mean by "imprecise" here? I tried and failed to find the video you mentioned here, maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I have a couple gifs of my own demonstrating some of what I can do in analog that I'm simply incapable of recreating properly in FPS controls. This isn't to show off or anything (ok maybe a little, but it's intended to be a demonstration of what analog can do) but here are a couple gifs you may find interesting:
o9igDYP.gif


cZciaZL.gif


I'm sure that someone better than me could recreate that second gif perfectly with the FPS controls, but here was my best attempt
an6KsBT.gif
 
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I'm sorry, but I am slightly confused, can you please elaborate on what you mean by "imprecise" here? I tried and failed to find the video you mentioned here, maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I have a couple gifs of my own demonstrating some of what I can do in analog that I'm simply incapable of recreating properly in FPS controls. This isn't to show off or anything (ok maybe a little, but it's intended to be a demonstration of what analog can do) but here are a couple gifs you may find interesting:
The video is here:
https://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/189547895546/open-the-console-with-type-configanalog-on-the
 
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I'm sorry, but I am slightly confused, can you please clarify what you mean by "imprecise" here?
Precision here is in the scientific sense, meaning "refinement in a measurement, calculation, or specification, especially as represented by the number of digits given". Basically it's the difference between someone telling you that pi is 3.14 or 3.1415926535...

As you so clearly demonstrated, it's not that it's impossible to get skilled with the imprecise controls and do incredible things. It's only at world record skill levels that the mouse's advantage in skill ceiling starts to make a difference. It's at the low skill levels where the problem lies.

Let's say I'm a new player, and I press right. What happens? Where do I go? On the base controls, the answer is "exactly 90 degrees to the right of where the camera is facing". The camera does not move unless I tell it to, and therefore if my camera is facing exactly north, I will go exactly east. On analog, that question becomes way muddier. The camera automatically attempts to follow my direction of motion, and therefore I'll actually turn more than 90 degrees, because players don't generally just tap right, they hold it. Once the input is generated the camera turns in that direction and what direction right is changes as it turns. This leads to a common trend of overcompensation in players using analog, where they press a direction and they turn too much, press the opposite direction, turn too much, and end up zigzagging forward instead of going straight. You can even see this in Blaze's video, although not very severely and he eventually straightens out. The problem is that new players who use this scheme tend to very severely struggle with the directional controls. Since they aren't used to the camera yet, they're constantly going in directions they didn't intend because the camera's automatic movement changes the directions they're using as they're using them, and this frustrates them enough to quit playing as they keep crashing into things they didn't want to.

Again, we're not saying that you can't get good enough at this control scheme to do excellently and 100% the game. We're saying that it actively disrupts new player experiences and causes them to quit, because while the base control scheme is less initially intuitive, there's never any question how the controls will react because they're incredibly precise. Pressing right will go exactly 90 degrees to the right, not "between 90 and 135, give or take".
 
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I take issue with the "we chose to explain the control scheme we already had which proved the quickest to learn, and we hid the one that proved to be actively toxic to new adopters. No more, no less" line up above - because you are planning to do more, in that you're planning to outright gut the option. I think there'd be far fewer complaints if that weren't the intent, because as it is it's already out of the way and there's nothing in the game itself to suggest its existence - you get people going in fresh onto the control scheme you love so much, and the people who have gotten good with analog get to keep their favourite option.

You might think "oh, but look at them, they're bad at it!" but... if they're having more fun? Just let them have fun. I suck ass at Alien Soldier but I still love it.

(I hope I don't get another infraction for 'debating' here because I'd find it kind of silly if I couldn't question the logic presented, but the devs could go blasting at Blaze scot-free when ultimately they haven't presented themselves in the most welcoming light to analog fans - Blaze might not have gone about it in the best way, but neither have the devs)
 

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