Shaky Controls in Descent 3
I'm having trouble playing Descent 3 with a mouse and keyboard. My issue is that I cannot seem to move my mouse (flight-sim controls) exactly how I want to. My cursor seems to glide or shake a little bit, causing my normally good FPS skills to degrade to being unable to hit stationary targets much of the time!
Is this an issue with using an optical mouse on an older game, or is it some "feature" of the game itself that you cannot target or move exactly the way you'd like to?
EDIT:
Using USB Optical mouse. Using Windows 7 (haven't tried compatibility mode yet. Perhaps a better word than "shake" would be "drift", as my ship/targeting seems to move past where I want it to.
Best Answer
I cannot speak from personal gaming experience, but from what I've seen with videos and explanations, it seems that the 'floaty' controls are justifiable.
Because Descent 3 - like its prequels - is a six-degrees-of-freedom style game, having 'floaty' controls could come from two different reasons:
Six-Degrees-Of-Freedom is a relatively difficult feature to implement, not only because of the computations, but also trying to find an actual applicable reason to have it. To this end, the developers might've deemed it more acceptable to spend less time making the controls too tight.
Six-Degrees-Of-Freedom is also a fairly unique idea, and certainly was more unique at the time. Not many games at the time had this - other then the old Descent games - and thus they made it slightly 'floaty' to let players learn how to use it easier. Also, moving around quickly and abruptly in Six-Degrees-Of-Freedom can be quite jarring and could also cause motion sickness.
I can't find any information from the developers directly as to why they did this, but these are a few possible reasons. Feel free to not accept this answer because it is all opinion, but this makes the most sense from the facts I know of the series and the history of Six-Degrees-Of-Freedom in video games.
EDIT: To do with the drift thing, a lot of games that are in space use the drift to make it kind of seem as though the ship is 'adjusting itself' in space due to newton's laws. This may not be the case, but that is what it sounds like.
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