Ideas for modern PSOBB controls

[KainOblivion]

Ello, all Welcome to the thread. This topic came to me while I was playing with a friend today, and thought I'd share it.

    While playing some PSOBB with an Xbox One controller (which felt pretty good, btw), it got me thinking about how old this game really is. I've been playing PSO for a pretty long time, and as much as I love it, I do think the controls haven't aged very well. To sum it up, it feels like it really hasn't left the Dreamcast era of controllers.

    I do think that this older control scheme still works today, as we all still use in on keyboard, or controller, but if we got a new updated port of PSOBB, perhaps some updates could be considered. That's when I really started looking at the controller designs of old and new, and came up with my own idea for some hypothetical modern controller PSOBB controls.

   I don't consider this a suggestion thread, as I'm not a programmer, and am pretty sure some of these would be a bit difficult to program, or maybe not the most useful things to program, but I thought it would make for an interesting, and fun discussion.

-----My ideas for a more modern control scheme for PSOBB-----

    To begin, most of the controls can stay how they are. Left analog stick, D-pad, start, the bottom 3 face buttons, and R1 can all pretty much stay how they've been. They all work pretty well, except for the interact button being the same as the attack button. I do think it's pretty annoying trying to fight, and you accidentally pick something up, especially on a modern controller XD Really, though, In the long run of things, that could be considered a nitpick.

    The first thing I thought about trying to fix was camera control. Right now, the biggest way to control the camera is to use the L1 button to center the camera wherever your character is facing. It works, but I do think it feels a bit clunky. I think we could free up that button, and instead put camera control on the right stick for a much smoother 3D experience. We could even use R3 for centering the camera, too. That way, both options are available. Although, I am also aware of how the current camera, and aiming works in the game, and this might require more work than I know about. Tis just a thought, though XD If that wouldn't work out, then maybe you could keep camera on L1, and slightly adjust one of my later ideas.

    Secondly, the Y button doesn't need to be a chat shortcut anymore. It could be moved over to the select button. In fact, to fix the complaint from before, how about making Y the new dedicated interact button? That could work out pretty well.

    Thirdly, with these changes, we could enable more shortcuts for modern controller users. The other three trigger buttons (Or two, if camera doesn't work out) wouldn't have functions, so we could assign those to the same type of shortcut menu R1 provides to access the 10 key hotbar. It wouldn't be the exact number of shortcuts that keyboard users have, but from my rough math, you'd only lose one to four shortcut keys in this process. That would be an additional six to nine shortcuts. That's pretty dang good I'd say. Also, since I know that's a lot of shortcuts to remember, we could even utilize the same hotbar. All we'd have to add is some indication that a specific group of shortcuts is being selected. You could separate the groups of shortcuts into three to four boxes that light up when the button is pressed.

-----Thus concludes my ideas-----

    And there you have it I wouldn't call it a perfect system, but I do think it sounds like a pretty usable hypothetical control scheme. Feel free to throw around your own ideas, too.

[Fyrewolf5]

A lot of stuff might sound nice, but it's probably not easy to do. Like having full camera control, that might take a lot of work to do, if it's even possible at all. Chat shortcut button is used for more than just chat also, change action palette + word select/symbol chat button is the combination to open up the quick select menu, which is essential for many different things, so if select were used for symbol chat/word select, then quick menu would need to have its own dedicated button as R+Select is much more clunky than R+Y. A lot of these kinds of things are hardcoded into the game and not easily changed.

As for the 0-9 shortcuts, what a lot of players do is use an external program such as xpadder or joytokey to supplement or replace their controls entirely, allowing them to do things like use the dpad and right stick directions for those shortcuts, or have the unused triggers + face buttons do those, or whatever other setups.

[KainOblivion]

For sure. I did mention that a lot of this being hardwired into the original version of the game would make it a lot harder to pull off, and not very worthwhile in the original form. It's why I included an alternative setup where the right stick wouldn't work out.

As for your second point, I completely forget about the shortcut menu XD Totally my bad on that one. That can stay on the Y button for sure, but instead of Y bringing up chat, it would be the interact button when nothing else is being pressed. That way, the quick menu would still be quick. The idea I meant to express, and didn't clarify very well is that I don't think the chat button is all that needed nowadays in the world of audio chatting, and keyboard usage, at least on PC versions of the game. I also don't think we should get rid of it, as I know people still use it, so I think the select button would be a pretty decent place to put the feature, since it's still pretty quick to get to. I might even edit my original post to include that info. Thanks for bringing it up  

I have used programs like that before, but I don't think it's as efficient as the solution I've proposed. It sounds like there is a way to set up a similar thing to what I've mentioned, and that's pretty awesome, but I am primarily talking about a hypothetical updated port to keep new controllers in mind without the need for an external program running in the background.

With that said, I will totally have to give this a shot. I've been wanting to setup a program like that for more shortcuts, and I didn't know the best one to go with.

[Terrybriggs711]

15 hours ago, KainOblivion said:

 

    Secondly, the Y button doesn't need to be a chat shortcut anymore. It could be moved over to the select button. In fact, to fix the complaint from before, how about making Y the new dedicated interact button? That could work out pretty well.

   

That would be epic