BF2S Forums Zenmaster's Chopper Joystick Rant

[CANADA]_Zenmaster wrote:

You can aim very well as the pilot with a joystick. You get an inherent feel for your drift, and your overall flight path. With practice, you can hit infantry bodies with rockets from a distance and hit the enemy attack chopper's body from far away while you are dueling it out in the air. Your gunner may be great, but if you are not just a pilot but an attacker too, your team effort is that much greater.

you can do all that with a mouse. the only thing mice can't do as well as joysticks is repeated extreme maneuvers, like you mentioned. however, those have limited application in this game, since you should be spending more of your time attacking ground targets than dogfighting other helos. as for dodging jets, you don't need repeated rolls or flips, just a couple at a time, and mice can do that with no problem.

your own argument of failiarity works the other way around as well. you are probably so familiar with the joystick that you're not realising the full potential of the mouse.

Switch the roll to A/D and the rudder to Mouse X axis and youll notice that the keyboard is vastly superior, capable of maximum turn rate, and superior handling. No calibration crap either. because you switch A and D to roll, Q is now accessible for spotting, and reaching for the X key wont F*** you up. Most people dont know this little gem about control setup because a bug in the game forces you to manually change this in the controls.con file if you want it to work this way, other wise it spazzes "OMG CONFLICT" at you. And dont bitch about my stats either, im a veteran DC player and have practiced this in a  great extent with the DC helicopters and planes. YES I DO HAVE A JOYSTICK, (its a Logitech wingman force 3d) but nothing ive seen is better than that simple control change with mouse and keyboard.

Its not really any harder on the wrist than infantry is either, provided you set the sensitivity right.

TO do this: (sorry i copied it over from another forum i posted it in)

C:\Documents and Settings\ProfileNameHere\My Documents\Battlefield 2\Profiles\0001

That is for the FIRST profile in your list. 0002 is for second etc.

The file is Controls.con. Open with notepad (like you didnt know that already).

Copy and overwrite this text into the appropriate section if you want to try this. (Ive included the header of the sections). Be sure to reset controls to default in game before doing this to avoid conflicts.

ControlMap.create AirPlayerInputControlMap
ControlMap.addAxisToAxisMapping c_PIYaw IDFMouse IDAxis_0 0 0
ControlMap.addKeysToAxisMapping c_PIRoll IDFKeyboard IDKey_D IDKey_A 0

ControlMap.create HelicopterPlayerInputControlMap
ControlMap.addAxisToAxisMapping c_PIYaw IDFMouse IDAxis_0 0 0
ControlMap.addKeysToAxisMapping c_PIRoll IDFKeyboard IDKey_D IDKey_A 0

Last edited by mydarbin (2006-01-30 20:45:30)