We've been doing a pretty thorough overhaul ... targeting and flight controls as they relate to the HUD... makes it much much much more easy to shoot fixed weapons, not because we enabled any sort of auto-aim or anything but actually because - looking at modern fighter jets, we have a lag pip reticle now, cleaning up a lot of the HUD elements so they're a little more minimalist and you can see more of the ship, and you get more of a direct corollary between where you're aiming and where you're hitting. It feels much more satisfying."
"One of the other things we did is, everybody's complaining about "Mouse Commander", where mouse and keyboard are super OP, so, for the joystick, and what it really comes down to is, the problem is when you're flying around, and we got race mode, space combat, and those two kind of have different control - non-linear curves that you'd want - on racing, you don't really care about maintaining a steady bead on anything, so you want it to be super snappy and super responsive, as soon as you start pushing on it you want it to snap to its maximum yaw or maximum pitch, whereas in dogfighting, that SUCKS, because then all of a sudden, especially when you have a stick with a low theta like you do with the gamepad, right, it doesn't have a lot of distance, so you don't get a lot of range physically, that low theta makes it sot hat you need to make it less sensitive, significantly, at the beginning and then exponentially ramp up with a little bit of a plateau in the mid range - basically we've been toying with all these different curves and making them dynamic and that's the cool part - that now the game has more awareness of what you're doing contextually, and that's been a benefit (???) - so for a mouse it's less important, because you're just moving your mouse, but for a joystick or a gamepad it knows if your target that you are currently actively targeting with your computer is in front of you and as it comes within a cone at the front of the ship, t says, hey, you're probably trying to aim at that guy, so what I'm going to do is deaden a little bit your input and slide the linearity curve over, so that you now all of a sudden 1-100 is like the old 1-25 so it prevents you overshooting - i don't know if you play with a mouse or joystick or gamepad but on the gamepad or joystick you significantly overshoot a lot, over correct a lot, that's not a function of anyone being a bad player, it's a function of the fact that linearity curve for those controller setups is not ideal for those. So this will intelligently say, oh he's trying to hit this and it'll deaden the response and sensitivity, and then obviously if you push hard right it'll just go ok **** it he doesn't want to do that anymore.