Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Customizing your Physical Interface: the Church of ESDF

I'm an interface geek, I'll admit it. One of the things I think about a LOT is the manner in which I interact with all sorts of things. Today's post is about the basic physical interface for the game. This has something to do with the virtual interface, via keybindings, but for now let's focus on how you actually press the buttons.

Most people play with a keyboard and either a mouse (like me) or a trackpad (like phil and any other laptop users). Take a moment and look at your keyboard. Where do you put your hands when you play? Do you put your hands on movement buttons? On the mouse?

Most people play by using their left hand to move their character and their right hand to activate the mouse or another set of buttons for action bindings. Historically, this interface grew out of the Quake Years. When PC gaming was young (say, Doom as one of the early FPSers which needed this kind of interactivity), people used the arrow buttons to move and used the left hand to use control clusters (guns, grenades, chainsaws, etc). Eventually, all the best players realized that you were better off putting all the important controls on your left hand, including movement, with the WASD keys. You could use QE to strafe (or when I played Quake seriously, circle-strafe), and keep your right hand on the mouse. Generally speaking turning by using the mouse is faster than turning by using the keyboard, and in games that need precise aiming like a FPS, having your hand on the mouse all the time is really important.

History lesson aside, most people use WASD to move nowadays.

You should use ESDF instead.

Put your hand on WASD and look at it. What can you reach in terms of controls? How often are you going to need that capslock key? The tilde? Now put it on ESDF. Hey presto, you can still reach the tab (for targeting, although I rebound the space bar to target and tab to jump), but now you have QA for more action buttons. Plus you can reach 1-6 pretty easily without moving your hand too far. You've just added about four action buttons to your interface without having to buy a custom device. Whee!

For the record, I still keyboard turn a lot, using SF for turning and WR for strafing. More on why I do that tomorrow (and a preview of how I've tried to fix that).
Posted by at 10:50 AM
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2 comments:

  1. I honestly tried to switch to left-hand drive, but I just couldn't pull it off. I recognize the benefits that it would provide in any situation where you are moving and still require some trackpad activity, but for me, that both feels awkward and would wreck the heart of my keybinds.

    I never played fps games much, so I never got used to their controls. In fact, what little fps I have played, with the need to have your movement and camera view on seperate channels of thought and action have utterly boggled me. I'm terribad at fps games.

    Instead, I have adapted to a playstyle which requires almost no mouse use at all. I have something like 56 action bar keybinds - everything I ever do in a fight, and a heck of a lot of the stuff I do out of a fight (mounts, mote extraction, even vanity pet summoning) is keybound. The only action bar clicks I need to do with the trackpad are things I would never do in a hurry - tradeskills and hearthstone and the like.

    I'm not recommending this approach, certainly. Doing it right makes you better at a lot of things - pvp and AoE targetting especially (AoE targeting is a real hassle for me), but if you, like me, simply can't get used to using your left hand for useful things, or WoW, do yourself a favor and abuse keybindings as much as possible.

    Or learn to play.

    But definitely one of the two.
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  2. That's a lot of bindings. I have quite a few myself - 14 keys on the keypad, QATG, plus shift-buckied versions of those bindings, and about 36 more floating buttons that are bound to out-of-combat stuff like you have (trade skills, etc).

    But that's a post for a different posting.

    I'm going to do a series all week on interface stuff, since I'm supposed to be getting my new Mouse To End All Mice in the mail on thursday or so.
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