Descent: The Game That Ruined Me

By Shamus Posted Thursday Nov 12, 2009

Filed under: Game Design 114 comments

Shamus, why do you use the numpad for movement in videogames? Why do you use inverted mouse controls? Why are you always banging on about bad ports all the time?

When will you people learn to stop asking questions? Now I will punish you for your earnest curiosity by answering you. In excruciating detail. Like most long boring stories concerning people of a certain age, this one begins a long time ago…

My first mouselook FPS wasn’t really Quake, it was Descent. Descent was a strange game. This was the early-ish days of gaming before the genres had been fixed in stone and developers were still running around doing crazy stuff with every new title. Like making an action 3D first-person flight simulator set indoors.

This is the game in its 320×200 glory. The other screenshots here were made using an <a href="http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/">updated open-source fan version</a> that drags the thing into this century.
This is the game in its 320×200 glory. The other screenshots here were made using an updated open-source fan version that drags the thing into this century.

You flew your ship through weightless 3D environments. This means you needed to be able to navigate and rotate in all directions. For sheer complexity of movement keys, it was surpassed only by real flight simulators and the like. At the time, this many inputs was unheard of in an action game. (Although System Shock came close.)

By default, Descent used the numpad. Like this:

This is just the basic movement, and leaves out cruise control, weapon-switching, etc. EDIT: After making the above image, I went back and fired up the game to find I’d gotten several details slightly wrong.  Still, you get the basic idea.
This is just the basic movement, and leaves out cruise control, weapon-switching, etc. EDIT: After making the above image, I went back and fired up the game to find I’d gotten several details slightly wrong. Still, you get the basic idea.

This was the first time I’d ever really used “mouselook”. I’d dabbled with it in Doom and Wolfenstein, but that was only horizontal. Since you were flying, looking down = moving mouse forward. Descent, being a “flight” game, had mouse inverted by default.

Thus began my habit of using:

  1. “Inverted” mouse controls.
  2. Numpad for movement.

When Quake came out, it felt natural to retain this keyboard layout, since it was now second nature to me. Up / Down translated seamlessly into Jump / Crouch. Roll left / right keys became lean left / right when stealth games came along. There were plenty of extra keys around the edges of the numpad for whatever special actions were required by the game.

The opening cutscene, which is a static picture of a corporate suit explaining the mission while your character inner-monologues about what he thinks is going on.  Man, sometimes it was impressive what games were able to do with storytelling when all they had to work with was text.
The opening cutscene, which is a static picture of a corporate suit explaining the mission while your character inner-monologues about what he thinks is going on. Man, sometimes it was impressive what games were able to do with storytelling when all they had to work with was text.

When Windows 95 rolled in, I was so grateful for my Numpad style. The WASD folks were suddenly getting blasted out of the game by that blasted key, which ended up tucked between Ctrl and Alt. (Run and crouch? Something like that.) It was bad news, and I was doing just fine on the other side of the keyboard. (Ergonomics: I slide the keyboard WAY over to the left so my hand is still in a natural position. Yes, I have a big keyboard drawer.)

The tables began to turn as we entered this decade. Games began accumulating additional inputs. WASD people had lots of keys under their hand to accommodate the new complexity, while I was forced to offload things to the inverted T arrow keys and the six-key group just under ScrLk. And I was still running out of keys.

At this point I tried migrating back over to WASD, only to find it was murderously hard to do so. Partly this is because of how much skill I’d built up. Back in 1995 I’d begun at zero: Inept. Then I learned to kick ass with the numpad. Moving over to the WASD was going to make me worse off than I was at the start. I’d be worse than inept. I’d have no skill with WASD, plus I had years of muscle memory working against me. I found myself fighting to keep my hand lined up right because the keys are staggered on the main part of the keyboard. WASD is also a different shape than Num 1, 2, 3, 8, so even when my hand was lined up I ended up over-reaching for “move forward”. It didn’t help that I was ten years older, which always slows learning down a bit.

In the end, the frustration of not having enough buttons was less than the frustration of trying to re-learn everything according to the traditions of WASD. This is about having fun, after all, not being the most elite.

But then game developers tightened the screws: Having drunk the console kool-aid, they came back to the PC with a head full of stupid and lazy:

1) Suddenly they forgot about the numpad 5. Like, you couldn’t bind that key anymore, and I was down one precious input.
2) They began treating numpad enter as identical to the main enter key. And lots of games hard-coded that one to “chat” and the like. Another key gone.
3) Suddenly the six key collection of Insert, Home, Page Up / Dn, Del, and End were all merged with numpad. You couldn’t bind numpad 9 to one thing and Page Up to another. Six keys gone!
4) The arrow keys were merged with numpad 8, 4, 6, 2. Four more keys, gone.
5) Invert mouse? Wuzat? They either omitted the feature, or implemented it in some useless, bone-headed way. (Beyond Good & Evil inverted BOTH axis, so moving mouse left would turn right. Murder.)
6) Games for Windows Live recently decided to take the Home key (both of them) for itself, forever and ever, in all cases. You can’t re-map that one. (Hey idiots: Why didn’t you take the WINDOWS KEY, since that thing is a manifest pain in the ass when running a game anyway?) One more key gone, which pushed me beneath a crucial threshold where there just weren’t enough buttons to get the job done.

Now I’m stuck here at 38 years old. I’ve been numpad-ing my way through games since 1995. Numpad gaming is obviously unsustainable. I can rant all I want against the cross-eyed dunces responsible for the above list, but the best I could possibly hope for in my wildest dreams is that things would stop getting worse.

The cockpit-style view. More immersive, but the window frames blocked too much of the view and I always ended up switching back to normal view.
The cockpit-style view. More immersive, but the window frames blocked too much of the view and I always ended up switching back to normal view.

That one game all those years ago presented me with a perfectly reasonable setup: Use the numpad! It had enough keys, all lined up, no with Windows Key landmine, and a nice easy-to-feel edge so my hand never got lost. At the time, there was no reason not to use it. I went along for years before any problem showed up. But as a result of that one coin-toss decision, I’ve had nothing but headaches for the last five or six years. People who used WASD and the non-inverted mouse have been able to jump right into games without having to rebind everything first.

I tried again a couple of months ago to get used to WASD. It’s still so frustrating that it sucks the fun out of the game. What I think I need to do is retrace my steps. I need to go back to 1996 and work my way forward. Trying to play something complicated like an MMO or a stealth game is just too dang hard. There are too many inputs to re-learn all at once. (This drives home an important lesson about why the Wii is doing so well. Modern games have a MASSIVE learning curve, which is more or less a wall to the uninitiated. There are precious few adults with the patience and time to jump into a modern FPS and scale that sucker.) I should go back to Quake or other simplistic old-school game and re-master basic movement. I’ve got Serious Sam 2 here, which seems like a good tool for that particular job.

Once I get my skills back into the “competent” area of the spectrum, then I can give Deus Ex or Thief a try. Complex FPS games are my drug of choice, so I’ll have a nice reward waiting for me at the end of that road.

There, more than you ever wanted to know about why I take this stuff so seriously.

(Descent and Descent 2 can be procured from Good Old Games for six bucks. For both of them. There’s no school like old school. Just make sure to re-bind everything to WASD before you start.)

 


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114 thoughts on “Descent: The Game That Ruined Me

  1. Aergoth says:

    Shamus, as a Nethack player I can see whre you’re going with the numpad useability. In the case of Nethack, you mapped every direction of movement except up and down (I think you might still be able to do that) to a numpad key. It’s much easier than arrows because the game (*GASP*) requires you to move diagonally quite often.

    I’ve more often used the arrow keys than the WASD configuration simply because it removes part of the chance of having to deal with wrong button presses and awkward keyings. Usually it’s something like Arrow Keys = Movement
    Switch Weapon or some similar toggle on the CTRL key, Reload/Repetitive/needed action on the shift key and something else on Delete and Insert. It worked out pretty well until I got into flash games that didn’t like the idea of bindable keys. WASD, I don’t like you.

  2. karln says:

    Yikes, I can see Thief being horribly punishing if you’re still going for the wrong keys at that point…

  3. bickerdyke says:

    Descent was my reason to buy a real Badass PC-Joystick. Complete with thrust control and lots of buttons.

    1. Alexander The 1st says:

      Responding to an old post, but same here – although I think my dad was on board with it for flight simulators too.

      But the main reason I bring this up – just recently had a conversation with someone else on Twitter that played Descent without a joystick…and they ran into the same problem Shamus did here.

      It’s starting to feel like if you didn’t get a joystick for Descent, you were pretty much guaranteed to run across an issue with controls at some point on PC.

  4. …and Nethack and other roguelikes are hardly playable on most notebooks without numpads.

  5. Glazius says:

    Huh. Guess it’s a coding thing. I just checked the keybinding options in City of Heroes and the entire numpad and pretty much everything that’s not on the keyboard are all available for use as controls.

    Myself, I use WASD for movement and the numpad to activate my character’s many powers. I don’t think I could get by with just a “power selector” and a single fire button, Descent-style.

  6. Zapata says:

    That’s the same game I got started on, and I’m a lefty, so the NumPad was perfect for me. A few years later UT came out and I never looked back.

  7. Ranneko says:

    I feel your pain in part.

    I started using a mouse with Quake 1, I did use WASD, but I also used as jump. It has with later games become the default key for alternate fire, melee, etc. So every damn time I start a new FPS I have to rebind right click to jump. (Mouse 3 was my alt-fire key with Unreal, these days tis Mouse 4, which is conveniently next to my thumb, leaving mouse 5 and my pinky to push to talk on vent).

  8. Conlaen says:

    When I first moved from the arrow keys I initially went to ESDF in stead of WASD. I was a little peeved when games started to set WASD as standard, but I learned to live with it, because with many games it was quickly obvious that it was a lot easier to adjust your muscle memory then to adjust the keys to fit your old habits.

  9. Hirvox says:

    I’ve gone through several exotic keyboard combinations. Back in the Duke 3D and Quake days, I used full-keyboard with arrow keys for moving and a/z for jumping/ducking. Then I moved to using comma and full stop for strafing and jump/duck in mouse buttons. I did try the numpad, but I ran out of buttons (especially in QWTF, where macros and team comms started to emerge) and moving the keyboard left wasn’t always an option. I eventually settled down to almost-standard wasd, with c being jump, x being crouch and q/e being lean left/right. Naturally, that’s quite bad for games that demand duckjumping.

  10. fuzzyillogic says:

    Have you considered investing some bucks on a programmable keypad? On one of those, you could map all the desired keys in the position you want without caring about wich key is on the stadard keyboard… something like the logitech g-13, the belkin n52te, or the saytek “cyborg command unit”.

  11. Joshua says:

    Hmmm, I used the NumPad for Descent, Doom and others. I think with the first Half-Life I switched over to using the arrow keys plus the right shift/control/”/” keys. After hearing people rave about using WASD for those types of games(easier access to the 1-5, which change weapons), I switched about five years ago.

  12. Ell Jay says:

    I’m in the very small minority that moves with the arrow keys, so everything I need has to be reachable from there (Ctrl = jump, / = zoom, ‘ = crouch, Delete = Gravity Gun). I may have been shaped by the actual flight sim Tie Fighter, in which all the important throttle/power controls were clustered around that Enter key.

  13. SolkaTruesilver says:

    @Fuzzyillogic:

    That would be like giving low-alcohol drinks to somebody who tries to get on the wagon (on or off the wagon? damn Seinfeld). Shamus wants to reprogram his brain to WASD setup, as there is little choice left for gamers now.

    On a Ad-hoc basis, I have to remember fondly the joystick my father bought me when I was young (but it was later than my Descent years, which I played at 4 yr old).

    The joystick was sensitive to how I positionned it, so I really had to lift my control to make my X-Wing go up. It was a joy of sensibility…

    ….

    I hope I will ever find it back… :(

  14. Klay F. says:

    I (sort of) feel your pain. My first FPS was the early versions of America’s Army. The game used WASD controls so I got used to that pretty quickly. However, the difficulty arose when the newer versions started coming out. With each new version, they would change the keybinds of some very important actions. Switching between 3-round bust and semi-auto fire went from Mouse key 2 to some far fetched key on the other side of the keyboard. I would actually have to take my hand off the mouse to switch fire modes. The crouch and prone keys were combined into one. The drop weapon command went from the CapsLock key to the RIGHT CTRL key. How does that make any sense? The problem was that the controls changed like this with every new version of the game. You had to go into the keybindings and study the thing like you were cramming for a test so you could change the controls into something that made a little sense.

  15. Amarsir says:

    Keybinding options are nearly perfect in City of Heroes. But I wonder how you made it work. I need WASD to move, a couple nearby keys for other features, tab and tilde for targeting, and then all the numbers (often combined with ctrl and alt) for actual powers. If I was numpad-centered I can’t imagine how I’d activate the 3 trays of 10 powers each. Unless I [shudder] clicked them, and you as a mouselook person probably wouldn’t do that.

    And I remember Descent. I picked it up shortly after Doom and Rise of the Triad, and the gameplay wasn’t as great but the idea of 3d combat was pretty darn cool.

  16. Matt K says:

    Ah, Doom and Decent my first forays into FPS. For Doom I pretty much just used the arrow keys with little problem. I have no clue what used for decent but I sucked so hard at that game that it probably never became an issue. That said, After getting Decent (also my first foray into rebates or more accurately never reciving my $10) I stuck mostly to RPGs and so I had no issue switching my setup when I finally got back into FPS with Deus Ex (god has it been that long?).

    EDIT: Oh, how can I forget Hexen. I have no clue where I got it or if it was a demo but I played the hell out of that game.

  17. nilus says:

    I played a little decent but at the time I was big into Wing Commander. I much rather have 3-d dog fights out in space then in little tiny rooms. But all those space Flight sims is why I always go with an inverted control scheme.

  18. bbot says:

    My first FPS was, of course, Doom; it of the arrow keys for movement and ctrl for fire. But for some goddamn reason, I found it easier to cross my arms, ending up with my right hand on ctrl, and my left on the arrow key cluster.

    What finally broke me of that habit was gaming at a net cafe. When you pay for time in half hour blocks, and you have to spend five minutes remapping the keys at every computer, you drop your own custom keybinds pretty quick.

    1. Zagzag says:

      I did something similar. I played one of the really old Tony Hawks games many years ago, which were designed with console controllers in mind. Movement was with the arrow keys and everything else was controlled with just about every button of the numpad, set out with 8, 4, 6 and 2 acting like the four right hand buttons of a playstation controller. Other buttons were covered by other parts of the numpad. As I found it impossible to move with my left hand, and the game stubbornly resisted my eforts to change the controls, I started moving with my right hand, and crossing my left over it onto the numpad. This led a very strange muscle memory when playing other games.

  19. MadTinkerer says:

    I’m in a rather different position: from 198X-1999 I played on semi-recent-gen desktops with a full keyboard. I never got used to mouselook when it was first introduced, and played Half Life with classic-Doom-ish controls(arrow keys + ctrl = shoot, alt = strafe, shift = run, space = jump). I did use the numpad for Descent, but I think that was the last game I played with the numpad.

    From 2000-2007, I basically didn’t upgrade my computer due to cashflow issues and ended up missing out on a lot of the “Golden Age” as well as pretty much every post-Golden-Age PC game prior to the Orange Box. In 2007 I got a shiny new laptop and decided the OB was the very first thing I wanted to try out. My muscle memory from the 1990s was pretty much gone at that point so it was easy to use the default WASD + mouselook controls when I started playing Half Life 2.

    I tried playing Halo on the Xbox and found it impossible to look at the sky/ground when I didn’t want to, because my two-analog-joystick muscle memory wanted to use the Square Enix style third-person camera control. There is no Halo control setting that I’m comfortable with: I’ve tried them all, and there’s no way to invert just the right joystick Y-axis. GRRRRR.

    1. aldowyn says:

      wait, what? There totally is, at least on PC :/ It tells you to ‘look up’ at a sensor, and you just move the right joystick either up or down and it does it automatically, IIRC. And it’s SEPARATE from x-axis inversion. Actually there might have been a button to switch it or some more explicit choice, but I’m pretty sure you could change it.

  20. fuzzyillogic says:

    @SolkaTruesilver:
    Well, as then he would have that keypad, he would not need to re-train on wasd, he would simply use his old scheme on any game without caring about wich kind of scheme-du-jour they’re implementing. It would mean using the hardware to bypass the lazyness of the programmers that didn’t care about giving their game adequate remapping options. By the way, I’ve not done any research about this, but I think I remember reading about some gaming mouse that did support inverting axis natively.
    Personally, I never found FPS of any kind very entertaining, so I mostly ignored this kind of interfaces, but for a dedicated player it could be worth the expense.

  21. Galenor says:

    “(Descent and Descent 2 can be procured from Good Old Games for six bucks. For both of them. There's no school like old school. Just make sure to re-bind everything to WASD before you start.)”

    Hah! I did this when I downloaded D1+2 from GOG a few months ago. “What’s with these odd Numpad controls? Time for a modernization!”

    With all those problems cropping up with the numpad becoming less and less versatile, I doubt it beats the problem I have, where my laptop doesn’t have a numpad at all</I. I guess they're just not trendy, or something.

  22. Ritch says:

    I LOVED Descent and its sequel. After Wolfenstein, I was exposed to both Doom and Descent simultaneously. I managed to learn both well enough, but I found Descent to be more enjoyable. There’s just something special about being able to move in any direction.

    Thanks so much for that link. I know what I’ll be doing for the next few days. ^_^

  23. Eric Meyer says:

    Descent.

    Oh HELL yes.

    I think Descent was my first multiplayer experience””it was either that or Marathon. And the keypad still makes total sense to me as a controller.

    Still, Shamus, you’re one of those super-àÂĽber-geek types, right? You should just build your own programmable keyboard! Keypad in the center, keys ringed around that, and all of it assignable at the keypad to whatever lame-ass WASD scheme the game du jour demands. With that and mouselook, you can school the newbs from here to Charon and back again.

  24. Falke says:

    I’m not sure if anyone suggested this yet but how about using a gamepad? I’ve got a G13 two month ago and it pretty much solved every problem I’ve ever had. SInce you can adjust the setup completly you could get it to work almsot exaxly like the keybpad your familiar with.

    Edit: Also I rember that the Decents graphics blew me away. I feel old now :(

  25. Nathon says:

    I was an arrow keys T guy for a long time. Eventually, the number of keys available just couldn’t cut it and I switched to esdf (actually .oeu because it’s dvorak) which has all the advantages of wasd’s many reachable keys in addition to letting me take advantage of the fact that I’ve been touch typing since I was 12. The kinesis keyboard adds a lot to that too, since its keys are arranged in actual columns and they’re hardware remappable. A game doesn’t let me bind backspace to jump? I’ll just move the space bar over there while I’m playing. Anyway, if you’re seriously considering trying to learn wasd, and you know how to type, I recommend you try esdf instead.

  26. David V.S. says:

    My story is almost exactly the same.

    Being left handed, the number pad worked perfectly for my right hand (more keys in easy reach when all were bind-able) since I use a trackball with my left hand.

    One reason I enjoyed WoW so much as my only character was a rogue. I deliberately picked a class that veteran players said used few inputs. Sure enough, with the right macros I could do everything I needed with only the track ball and number pad.

  27. “Man, sometimes it was impressive what games were able to do with storytelling when all they had to work with was text.”

    They still do. It’s called interactive fiction.

    Also, +1 for Serious Sam. Pure, mindless, shoot-everything fun.

  28. Vladius says:

    Oh, man, I LOVED DESCENT!

    I used to play that all the time.

    Thanks for triggering a wave of nostalgia.

  29. Craig says:

    I once got descent for free with one of my previous macs. I loved that game, the whole 0 gravity flying indoors was really disorienting, but very cool.

  30. GoodApprentice says:

    If there was ever a game that would rewire your hand-eye coordination, it was Descent. The part of my brain that handles the third dimension blew a fuse while navigating those spaces.

  31. Graham says:

    I played Descent, but I played it with a joystick. (I was also never very good at it, as I got disoriented too easily in the 100% 3D movement.) The inverted mouselook never felt right to me, even in a flight sim. I can only do inverted axis with a joystick (including console joysticks, where I can also do inverted left/right if need be, but don’t prefer it).

    But man, 1, 2, 3, 8? Holy crap, my hand would cramp up so badly from that stretch. I can’t imagine using that for the years you did.

    Oh well. To each their own. Either good luck on your retraining, or on obtaining a programmable usb keypad, as mentioned above.

  32. David_DHX says:

    I also want to give a hearty shout-out to my Descent-loving colleagues. Not only did one’s spatial memory get a real work-out while navigating to the escape hatch after blowing up the reactor, the AI on those robots was amazing for the time. They ganged up on you, went around corners to come at you from behind, readied weapons and hid when they heard you — I seem to remember a recent rant on this topic, Shamus ;-)

    I dreamed about flying through those corridors for months after.

  33. Drew says:

    I’m just going to agree with something hinted at above. If you’re going to learn WASD, you might find ESDF easier. It puts you a little more central in the keyboard, offering more surrounding keys, and it also (on most keyboards) puts one of those little home-key nubs under your index finger, so you always know you’re in the right place.

    But either way, you’re in for a learning curve. I was a num pad guy for a while, then moved to the arrow keys when the num pad started to lose support. WoW was the game I taught myself ESDF on, and after only what…a billion hours of that, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

  34. Factoid says:

    You’ve got the right idea. I never made as drastic a switch as you…but I have managed to retrain my brain to be able to switch competently between several different key configurations.

    I did pretty much what you are doing…find some less complicated games and emulate my progression through the years. I don’t think it takes as many steps as you fear, though….nor do you really need to replay the same old games. There are plenty of new games that would be terrific for retraining yourself.

    Give MAW a try. It’s a 3d platformer, and it’s a terrific indy game. It requires some rudimentary jumping puzzles, but doesn’t require a ton of overall dexterity.

    Then I’d maybe try going through the Quake 3 single player tournament. It provides a nice progression of decreasingly hapless AI opponents and you really only need the movement keys, the mouse, reload, jump, crouch and the number keys or mousewheel for switching weapons.

    Then try a game with a hojillion buttons to manage. It’ll be rough, but I think this can be accomplished in as few as three games, a few hours into each.

    You’ll hit the steep part of the learning curve eventually, but I don’t think it will be as steep as it was the first time around.

  35. Stranger says:

    The answer, or solution, if you will, is quite simple. Get yourself a sidewinder keyboard (Or similar), flip the keypad over on the left side (for better ergonomics) and map the WASD keys to the keypad, independent on whatever the game allows.

    And you’ll never need to adapt, ever.

  36. Jonathan says:

    Yay, one of my favorite games. We tried some Descent 2 at the last LAN party I was at, but too many people had trouble making it run.

    Descent 1 was actually the first or second game demo that I tried back when we got our brand-new P133 (replacing a 286). Sat through the briefing and then got lost in level 1.

    I played with arrow keys, slides on the Insert-Page down 6pad, and ctrl/alt/shift/enter for shooting and going forward/backwards. It worked pretty well, although I had to switch to mouse useage sometime in the past decade because windows got too sensitive to the ctrl-alt-del combo.

    I have the Descent 1 soundtrack on my Winamp playlist.

    1. Shamus says:

      Jonathan: I also listen to the D1 misic. That was some amazing stuff.

  37. Louis says:

    If I were in your shoes I’d refuse to give in to relearning everything again, that just seems stupid and unnecessarily frustrating.

    You could manually write an entirely new windows keyboard layout moving letter keys over to the numpad, inverted T and 6 button island above it, I imagine it would be irritating to need to change the system keyboard layout every time you wanted to play a game but I guess you could script that changeover to make it reasonably painless, if still a reminder of the inanity of most game input layouts.

    I would buy a special keyboard for gaming, as fuzzyillogic suggested, my logic being that the 100-200$ a good customizable keyboard would cost is cheaper than the amount of my time I would otherwise being ruining through frustration. My suggestion for a keyboard would be the Ergodex DX1, ergodex.com, I’ve never actually used one myself but I’ve known people who said they were pretty awesome, the only complaint I’ve ever heard from someone that used one was that it isn’t cheap (~150$). You could reconstruct a numpad shape out of them with whatever keys your current game-of-choice wanted.

  38. Girl Gamer says:

    It’s interesting to hear everyone’s preference and how they learned it. I haven’t done nearly as much computer gaming as most people here, but I always liked the arrow keys for movement. Of course that’s less than ideal for current games. Now I find that I pretty much have to relearn the coordination of wasd movement with every game and the first couple of hours can be quite annoying.

    As for the mouselook thing: I game on a laptop and quite like it when a game lets me use the arrows to look. It works nicely for me and it’s easier on my hand/arm than holding a mouse for hours (and I can game from the couch or bed without worrying about a flat surface for a mouse, yay laziness). I also hate inverted axis looking; I always look the wrong way!

  39. Rayen says:

    My dad was one studyibng to be a pilot when descent came out. my learning curve was from joystik to keyboard/mouse controls PERIOD. Thats why i’ve played consoles until recently.

  40. LintMan says:

    My initial Wolfenstein 3D/Doom/Quake playing all used a flightstick-type joystick, so I was stuck on the inverted Y axis also. (For some reason, I remember playing Descent with keyboard, though. But my keyboard mapping used the WASD area and not the numpad).

    Anyway, a few years back (just before HL2 Episode 1 came out) I decided to bite the bullet and break the inverted mouse axis habit. (Sorry if I mentioned this before in a previous post). During a period when there weren’t many new games out, I picked a short-ish game I had already played through a few times (HL2: Lost Coast) and played through it again with the non-inverted axis.

    It was a tough at first, and I took my time, just manuevering round the environment for a while to get a bit more used to the controls. Soon enough, though I was able to get by mostly OK, with occasional screw-ups. By the end of the game, it still wasn’t quite “natural” but the frustration was mostly gone. And by the second or third game I played, it was natural and I don’t feel I had lost anything over my previous skill level. (Not that I am or was a super-skilled player or anything).

    If I can do it, you can too, Shamus. Remember that while you might be trained in-game to use inverted-y, outside of the game, all your mouse work is non-inverted, so you’re already at least partly trained in using the mouse that way.
    I don’t think you need to go back to the beginning. Just pick a not too complex game you’re already familiar with, and maybe play it on easy.

  41. Lalufu says:

    I’m probably the only person on the planet using UYHJ (mapping to movement as WASD). Started using that with Quake2, where I discovered that there was something called mouse look and that I needed my right hand for the mouse. It’s way more comfortable for my wrist than WASD. The Wolfensteins, Dooms and Q1 were played with the keyboard only, Descent with Joystick (1st generation MS Sidewinder).

    Oh, and inverted mouse, of course.

  42. Kennet says:

    You might want to take a look at autohotkey, if you haven’t already. I switched to at mac a while back so my memory might be a little off, but I believe it will allow you to map all the numpad keys to regular keys and then use them in a game (or wherever else you might want to use them). You can also use it for a lot of other things, like (again, as far as I remember) turn your right mouse button into a toggle for that mouselook thing you talked about in a previous post.

  43. Groboclown says:

    I loved Descent, too. However, even then, I settled on mapping the keys close to the WASD side. I seem to recall using ASDF + QWER + ZXC for all the different pitch / yaw / roll / slide / thrust / slowdown commands; no mouselook.

    The one thing that peeved me about that game was that even though you could slide easily, any time you tried to turn left or right, the nose on your ship would dip, which would throw off any place where you needed accurate aim.

  44. Scott says:

    I started with Descent as well, but moved to Dark Forces 2 (Jedi Knight) to play with my friends online, so I learned to play with WASD movement, inverted mouse and right click to jump. The right click to jump has stayed (I ALWAYS use it; if I can’t, I use programs to re-map), but the inverted mouse changed fairly recently to accomodate newer games.

  45. krellen says:

    Descent was the big game on my college campus in early 1995, and I spent a lot of time playing it (we had a campus-wide network even then). Our top player used numpad and mouse like Shamus; most of the rest of the top ten used joysticks. Except me: I was keyboard only, and was around the #10 player on campus. I was kind of proud of that (I was the only keyboard player even in competition).

    Nowadays, I’ve learned the WASD setup, but I still like my Y-axis inverted.

  46. CaptainFrance says:

    Curse you all! I’ve always used WASD, although ALWAYS mapping anything on Crtl or Alt to somewhere else to avoid the windows key landmine, aside from simple games where I could map the whole thing to the numpad, but since switching to a laptop, losing my numpad, and getting used to a touchpad (with my left hand, since there was no way I was going to get used to that with my off hand,) hooking up a mouse has gotten annoying, not to mention some of the horrible hand gymnastics needed to avoid Ctrl and Alt on a more cramped keyboard and finding a place for the mouse now that my tiny little optical mouse doesn’t work in the bottom right corner of my new laptop, and using the wrong hand for gaming and nothing else . . .

    You guys have me considering falling into the arrow keys trap to use the touchpad with games, just because it seems like it would be so effective with the cramped little laptop keyboard. D:

  47. Nick says:

    Has nobody mentioned Duke Nukem 3D? I think that was the first actual game to have mouselook (to be fair, it hardly rotated 40 degrees up or down, skewed the view, could only get it by console magic, and still didn’t make the gun fire where you looked, more of the Doom method where it shoots where it thinks it needs to or else on the horizontal otherwise).

    I’m not sure why, but my older brother at the time showed me how to enable mouselook AND invert aim for that game. Since it was the first mouselook game, I am not sure why I enjoyed invert more than normal. But, from then on, I have had to use invert for EVERYTHING else. Any time my non-invert friend comes over and changes it, I always get disoriented when I forget to re-invert it.

    As for my control scheme, I use the “inverted-T” control scheme. Not sure where that came from, but at least I got my friend addicted to that. Only problem are some dumb-*** games that decide the CTRL key cannot be used (usually on complex games that allow mixes of ctrl and alt on the inputs), or that the arrow keys can ONLY be used for sliding the map around.

    Even some normal, modern games are not innocent of re-map hell. Battlefield 2, I remember, had some addiction to certain keys. Enter, for me, was the all around use/enter-vehicle key for me. But, when chatting, it also finishes and sends the text you just typed. How annoying is it when you type something like “Roger” and the game decided “Oh, you hit Enter, time to eject you out of that jet!” I had to spend some days perfecting my ini file for that game to get it to my liking.

    Fallout 3, recently, had a problem. Remapping the “Open pip-boy” key, did NOT remap the “close pip-boy” key, and there was no way (maybe aside from ini hunting) to change that.

    Some games, like MMO’s, that required handy access to obvious button keys like 1-6 near the movement keys, I have given up and moved to WASD. It’s not too bad, and I could probably adapt my other games over to it one day, but I just don’t WANT to.

  48. Rudegato says:

    I recommend picking up an mmo with “click to move” I believe WoW, Lotro, and Guild Wars all have this. then take your hand off the movement keys entirely, relying on an auto run button and mouselook for navigation.

    Then move your hand over to the dreaded “wsad” and just get used to controlling your hotbar powers with the 1-6. Eventually you can work non essential turning or strafing into the wsad keys as you’re comfortable with it.

    I recently helped a friend adjust to shooters from only consoles in this same way, his problem was a lack of finger dexterity and wanting to do everything with his thumbs. Give it a try, and stop if it gets too frustration :D

    Cheerio

  49. Tesh says:

    Descent is still high on my favorites list. I can’t recommend it via GOG.com enough. It wasn’t my first, though. That was Wolfenstein. I used the arrow keys to move, so when Descent came around, it was easy enough to switch to the numpad. Inverted mouselook was also reinforced by my Privateer days, so these modern games that are all backwards with no way to remap it are just… not worth the time.

    Bad UI design like that is a Twinkie Denial Condition. Where are the Twinkie police?

  50. MadTinkerer says:

    “In 2007 I got a shiny new laptop and decided the OB was the very first thing I wanted to try out. My muscle memory from the 1990s was pretty much gone at that point so it was easy to use the default WASD + mouselook controls when I started playing Half Life 2.”

    D’oh! I forgot to mention an important point: neither my old laptop or my current one have keypads. The old laptop had an option to override the right part of the letters (789UIOJKLM = 7894561230), but I don’t think my new laptop even has that. The arrow keys are arranged next to the Enter, Right Shift, Menu (same as right-clicking), Page Down and End buttons. Needless to say, the default controls Valve uses are better for my current keyboards than trying the not-numpad or the arrow keys. Though I’ve been considering switching to ESDF for the games with a lot of different possible action types (for example: Saint’s Row 2).

  51. FTR says:

    I remember getting a Spaceorb just to play Descent, the controls were mental

  52. Cat Skyfire says:

    I wish more games gave more options as to how to set things up. I’m a left handed mouser, and it drives me nuts when games want to make me use the WASD section, because, well…that hand is on the mouse, not the keyboard…

  53. David says:

    Your rant about WASD’s proximity to the Windows key landmine reminds me that I just posted about how that key has been interrupting my normal workday. Windows,e maps (hardcoded) to undock on my laptop. Undock, Shamus. Undock. With the keyboard wired to the docking station, no more computer access without a serious interruption. Story here: http://dblume.livejournal.com/131070.html

  54. Carra says:

    I just wrote a blog post about it this afternoon. I bought Dead Space two weeks ago and can not get it to work as I can not rebind my keys to the numpad. Playing with WASD is a nightmare! It’s made even worse by having an AZERTY keyboard. I’m not gonna do it! I’d rather get a tool that sends W to the keyboard if I press numpad 8. But is that really worth the trouble for a game I’m gonna play for a few hours?

    Some games offer great keybinding features. I can bind 36 actions to numpad in WoW. I just rebind two of my mouse buttons to ctrl & alt. Then I can use all the numpad keys & mousebutton + numpad. It’s great.

    And of course you learnt the inverse y-axis from descent. Probably everyone who still uses that learnt it from descent or flight simulators. Newer games only put in the option to make those players happy.

  55. Sheer_FALACY says:

    Descent was definitely a cool game. For everyone mentioning 1 and 2, you realize there was also a Descent 3? With outdoors, even. And indoor to outdoor movement allowed, which was apparently a big deal at the time.

  56. Descent…. Indeed one of my favorites back then (and still hold fond memories.)

    I agree completely, nowadays they seem to be more interested in making it ever less customizable – and the worst part: claiming it is to provide us with a simpler/better/whatever experience.

    What will this lead to? An auto-playing game where you simply stare at the screen and don’t even have to press a key?…
    I though those were called movies! In games we want to be able to set it up as *we* feel confortable.
    I get really mad whenever they remove any kind of option that, even if it will be unused by 90% of their customers, it will still fulfill the remaining 10% of the people that have paid for their product.

    … and don’t even get me started on the new Modern Warfare 2 having removed the lean option… What next, removing strafe because it also “complicates” user experience?

  57. Matthew Clarke says:

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately due to my recent conversion to MacOS from PC (CTRL vs Command, Home/End keys now useless for coding) and from PC games to XBOX360 controller (circle strafe w/ analog sticks!!!).

    Muscle memory is a bitch to retrain, but if you stick it out, really only takes about 2 weeks max to do. With minor relapses for another month or so.

    I’ve generally found it worthwhile to rewire to a new system, rather than doing custom bindings. My theory goes: you develop an aptitude to rewire, making new control schemes easier to adapt to, without getting stuck in muscle memory rut.

    I started doing this because I hated having to always invert the axis on all the FPS’s I played… And then having to flip it back when another player came on. Laziness is the mother of invention.

    That all said, the inverted axis for FPS’s thing was the hardest to deprogram.

  58. Atarlost says:

    I’m normally a numpad user too and you’ve just reinforced my intention to never buy another FPS ever again. (MMOs I won’t even play if they’re free) If I need a mindless killing fix I can allways play Sauerbraten, which has no keymaping in the version I’ve got, but controls so simple the inverted T and a 3 button wheel mouse are all you need.

  59. Rutskarn says:

    I started playing FPSes in the Quake/Outlaws/Schrack days, where it seemed like every game just made up its own control scheme. As such, I never really got used to one set of controls until (I think) Aliens vs. Predator, where I switched to the ASDF keys. I don’t remember if those were the presets or what, but that’s what I used. I stuck with that until (again, I think) the Aliens vs. Predator 2 demo, which used WASD. It was tricky to get used to it, and it seems odd in retrospect that I’d change my entire control scheme for a demo of a game I’d never play, but that’s what I remember as the turning point.

    I can’t even imagine learning a new control scheme at this point. It’d be like if all of the sudden, the brake pedal was turn left and the gas was turn right, and you accelerate by turning the wheel to the right. Inside of ten minutes, I’d have destroyed more mailboxes than technically exist.

  60. Maleldil says:

    The game that ruined me (at least with regards to inverted mouse) was Top Gun for the NES. As an NES game you couldn’t remap any buttons, and since it was a jet fighter game the Y-axis was inverted. I played the crap out of this game years before playing any FPSes with mouse-look, but by the time I did it as already ingrained in me. At least on the Xbox 360 you can set invert mouse as the default for your account so you don’t have to remap it in every game before you play.

  61. Cuthalion says:

    I love Descent. So much.

    I usually play with numpad 4/6/8/5 for left/right/up/down “strafing” and wasd for accel/decel and turning, q/e for rolling. Can’t remember which keys I usually use for shooting. Probably spacebar and lctrl.

  62. Galenloke says:

    Oh wow, descent, that brings back memories. That was probably my first true game and I still love it. Only problem was that when computers got faster the game became nothing short of ridiculous(ly crazy). Thanks to your little link I just realized they have it set up for xp so I think I’ll be getting it again.

    The multiplayer on that thing was one of the best I’ve ever seen, co-op did exactly what you wanted it to and the versus mode was excellent.

  63. AlfieUK says:

    I’m a year older than Shamus, and have always used the numpad as well, although my reason is that I’m a left hand mouse user so it felt more comfortable to leave my right hand over the numpad and the keyboard in front of me in it’s normal position in case I needed to access more keys.

    I was also a big flight sim player where the numpad was usually bound to camera controls for non-hat switch joysticks (like my cheapy back then) so joystick in left, right for camera and other keys.

    I can usually ignore lack of ‘invert mouse’ after the first ten minutes, but there is absolutely no way I can use WASD.

  64. Falling says:

    Well I am a WASD player, well maybe a combination of that and regular arrow keys. But I really dislike it if there’s no option to rebind keys.

    With old school games like Comet Buster we’d rebind keys all the time- WASD, regular arrow keys, Num keys and IJKL or something like that. Ah yes, back when they made games that four people could play squished around the same keyboard. But sometimes the computer couldn’t keep up with the amount of input from four users, then someone would hit the stupid Windows key. Great times.

  65. Heron says:

    @David (53): How is Win+E hardcoded to undock? Windows itself hardcodes Win+E to open an explorer window. What manufacturer made your laptop? (And yes, I use Win+E all the time, and yes, I run a docked Dell laptop.)

  66. vede says:

    *comments without reading any previous comments*

    In order to work up your skills in the WASD department, you might try playing a deathmatch-type game in super-slow-motion. It’ll be slow, sure, but if you misreact, you have time to correct your mistake instead of just being blown away.

  67. BikeHelmet says:

    Re: Windows Key Landmine

    I’ve never had a problem with it. However, the Windows key has saved me hundreds of times when games lock up, and alt+tab and ctrl+alt+delete just get eaten as input.

    @Shamus: Don’t take offense, but I think you learned the wrong key layout. :P It’s no sweat though – I did too.

    I used to play a lot of 2D platformers. When I started on 3D platformers, I naturally wanted to use the four arrow keys for movement, Shift for jump, Ctrl for Attack, and Alt for Block.

    This layout didn’t work so well for me. For one thing, camera control is a bitch. I had to migrate to WASD too – but after approximately nine months of playing L4D almost every night, I’m now extremely proficient with it, and my mouse coordination has gone up as well.

    You’ll get there eventually! Keep at it!

    Oh – and I spend time reading the controls for every game, before playing. I hate not knowing what the chat key is(There’s no standard!) or not knowing how to activate buttons or other in-game objects. (OMG – why not E!?!)

    1. WJS says:

      Wait, is it even possible for ctrl-alt-del to get intercepted? I thought that was reserved at the highest level? If it isn’t working, I wouldn’t even think about alt-tab or win-key.

  68. echelon says:

    In my competitive Q2 days, my classic configuration was actually based around UHJK.
    Having that many bindable buttons nearby seemed like a logical way to do things.

  69. Blake says:

    Shamus, I don’t know how much the game’s hijack the input but have you tried writing an AutoHotkey script to rebind the numpad keys to wasd etc. So that the game only recieves input it allows?
    Probably less effort than retraining your keyboard hand.
    As for invert Y axis, I used to always use it but somewhere along the way changed to “standard”.
    Developers that don’t put it in though are just being stupid. You know as well as anyone all they need is something like
    float yInput = g_invertYAxis ? -Input::GetMouseY() : Input::GetMouseY();

    I always hate when a game doesn’t have the option just on principle now :P

  70. Miral says:

    I think I originally learned with the arrow pad (Wolf3D, Doom, etc), and then migrated to WASD fairly early on (Quake etc). I tend to avoid the numpad, partly because of inconsistent binding and partly because the shape doesn’t match what I’m used to — in fact I had to remap the right-hand controls in Fahrenheit to the arrows before I could get anywhere in that game.

    But FYI: the reason behind all of those remapping nightmares (numpad 5 going missing, numpad 9 being treated identically to PgUp, etc) all comes down to whether the game is mapping input by character or by scancode. Everything should be using scancode, since that allows every button to be treated individually; but sometimes devs are lazy and map by character instead (whether because they’re easier to express, or because they’re more consistent [eg. backslash has several possible scancodes, depending on keyboard layout], or just because they don’t know any better). (Things are a bit simpler under Windows, since Windows provides a single unified scancode [the virtual keycode] that hides keyboard layout differences, removing that as an excuse.)

  71. Bailey says:

    You can do it, Shamus!

  72. Tomas.se says:

    It’s wonderful to hear that I’m not the only numpad/inverted-y-axis player. I might have used the arrow keys back in the early Quake days, but never the WASD-keys. I feel that the separated placement of the numpad gives much better points of reference for the hand. With the WASD-setup I often found myself unintentionally shifting to “ESDF” or “SZXC”.

    Shamus – if I might make a suggestion – consider trying a separate game controller. I have a Nostromo n52, which works pretty much like the numpad, except that it has more buttons and it can be programmed; so poor numpad-support in games is not an issue.

  73. Justin says:

    Shamus, if you’re going to go back to the beginning, I’d recommend grabbing Doom Legacy — it has a Quake-like interface, lets you remap keys arbitrarily, and keeps its gameplay true to the original.

  74. simmuskhan says:

    Descent!
    My favorite all time game.

    Especially the first one, you know when you blew up the generator then had to afterburn your way as quickly as possible to the exit!

    I used to LOVE the little cutscene of flying through the exit tunnel with all the explosions happening.

    The 3-D blew my mind, I remember having “endless” fun getting the keymapping *just* right.

    I used numpad also back then. Eventually I got a joystick, and with some tweaking, still use the joystick for FPS games today. I’ve even tried a combo joystick/mouse.

    I’m right handed, but I used to use my mouse in my left hand so that my right hand could do joystick or keyboard depending on the game.

    Because of the lack of ability to change keybinds in lots of games I’m now a right hand mouse, left hand keyboard player. It took me a surprisingly long time to adapt, I’d find myself clicking the LMB and RMB at the wrong times.

    Anyway, I’m really glad I’m not the only person who has difficulties with controls AND loved Descent!

  75. Nihil says:

    Before you go on masochistic 12-step WASD programs or spend unnecessary money on l33t shiny glorified numpads, do a Google search for “remap keyboard windows”.

    Hell, do an I’m Feeling Lucky. One click away is a workaround that will take you far, far less time to set up than it took you to write this rant.

  76. Ator says:

    What if, instead of having to relearn keybindings for your left hand, you instead had a mouse with a few more buttons… http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/18-button-open-office-mouse-makes-a-keyboard-look-minimal/

  77. Dix says:

    “…and Nethack and other roguelikes are hardly playable on most notebooks without numpads.”

    Brbrbr. I’ve played Nethack on a laptop for like, ever. These here arrow keys work wonders, and if you mash down two at once you move diagonally. Maybe that’s how Macs work?

  78. Jonathan says:

    Descent 3 just wasn’t as much fun. The gameplay changed too much.

  79. wererogue says:

    Disclaimer: I didn’t read the comments.

    Is AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) any use to you? It’s free, and lets you rebind keys to actions, other keys, whatever. You could probably knock up a script that rebinds Num8 to W, and home to P or whatever pretty quickly.

    It won’t solve your mouse Y problem, though. I just learned to play both ways when I was a kid – inverted for flight sims, and regular for FPSs.

  80. MadCow says:

    I don’t get how WASD or inverted-T evolved until its state now.

    I gamed since the 8088 times and at that time, not many keyboards had inverted-T cursor keys. So gaming was usually numpad 2468 (with 5 being the fire key) or some strange beast like QAOP.

    When Wolfenstein 3d and Doom came out, I played with numpad (2468) + Ctrl-Alt-Space-Shift for a very long time, even learning to circle-strafe with the keyboard until I saw a person using the mouse and showing me how quick and efficient it was in FPS games.

    It was then that I tried to learn and shift to mouse+keyboard — but WAXD, not WASD. There was a short period of time when I used the right mouse button to move forward, and hold down W to run… but when games with secondary fire started becoming common (I think it was Half-Life that made me do the switch), I began to switch to always-run, W moves forward, RMB for secondary fire.

    When true 3D fps games came out I naturally used inverted mouse, from familiarity of flight sim games.

    However, it’s probably somewhere during 2003-2004 that I got sick of remapping the keyboard all the time, especially when having LAN parties and I wasn’t always on the same machine consistently and just forced myself to stick with whatever “default” keymapping the game offered.

    That was probably a positive experience for me, since now I can easily adapt to either WASD or WAXD, inverted or regular mouselook.

  81. Bryan says:

    I never got to be any good with Descent, but I don’t remember what input scheme I was using. Never played a lot of Descent 2. I did play a lot of Wolfenstein, but with the arrow keys looking left-to-right and moving forward and backward (totally different from everything after it :-) ). Never played a whole lot of Doom, and never used mouselook at all. (Mostly because it didn’t exist in Doom 1 that I remember, and I never played Doom 2.)

    Fast forward about five years, to when I found Half-Life (the first one), and WASD + mouselook; that worked really, really well. I found Unreal and UT around the same time, and used the same setup.

    Then I got an old copy of Descent 3, and managed to bind WASD to sliding, Q/Z to slide up/down, E/R to tilt left and right (roll, basically), and mouselook for the other two axes (pitch and yaw). This worked really really well, and I’ve since gone back to Descent 1 and 2 (an updated, GL-capable version of the engines, with the original data) with this scheme; it seems to work even there.

  82. tussock says:

    Of course, ergonomically, asdf, with a-back (rare) and f-foward (most used), is a little more how your keyboard was designed to hold your hand, and gives the naturally dominant finger the most use. If you’re going to bother with relearning your muscle memory and all.

    I’ve still got the two-hands on keyboard layout from descent in my head for 3D sims, which I can’t fly with a mouse at all, slide about with the left and pitch/bank/roll on the keypad.

  83. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Why so much negativity for windows key?Ive never ever pressed it by accident.Probably because Ive never used alt in a game(too hard to reach when using wasd).But I did use it quite often in some games that(stupidly)dont support alt+tab.cAPS LOCK,ON THE OTHER HAND,IS SUCH A BIG PAIN.aND SO IS NUM LOCK IN SOME GAMES WHERE i USE JUST THE KEYBOARD(GTA WHEN YOU GET INTO A PLANE?HELI IS MUCH EASIER WITHOUT YOUR MOUSE).

  84. SHODAN says:

    I started out with FPS’s like Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke and Descent. Back then I used the arrow keys and mostly the row “qwerty” on the keyboard. I then changed from arrow keys to the numpad for movement and some extra buttons to play with. Of course I did not use a mouse back then, so I would mostly rotate and walk forward and backward using the arrow/numpad keys and strafe using the other hand on “q” and “w”, open doors with “e” and run with “r” (or slow down, since auto-run is such a great feature I found after some time of keeping “r” constantly pressed while playing ;) ).

    Then I started playing Quake, and after about a year, I began considering using the mouse for playing since the competition of multiplayer required me to do so. I simply did the normal “wasd” for movement and mouse for jumping and looking around (not inverted). After some playing using “wasd” I realized that the amount of buttons available to me were getting too low, so I simply moved the layout to an “esdf” setup, which I’m still using.

    Now however, I begin to question the “esdf” layout as well, since it would be much better to actually have the hand in the middle of the keyboard and have stupid amounts of extra buttons available on each side of the hand.

    I will go home and try a “tfgh” or “yghj” layout now. Oh the horror of setting that up and deciding what all the surrounding buttons will do :)

  85. Matt P says:

    I never played Descent (always wanted to) but Freespace was my second big jump into the pool of PC complexity*. Luckily, after feeling the love of the numpad I transitioned over to WASD sooner and at a more tender age. I still sometimes gaze longingly at the neglected right-hand side of my keyboard, but my hand still feels comfortable over on the left. When I sporadically rediscover the fold-out keyboard layout diagram that came with the game I get the sudden urge to boot it up again.

    *The first was Civ 2, without a manual at the age of 12. It took me five minutes to realise I could control the flashing guy. I thought I was doing well until a catapult unit of mine bumped into an enemy tank.)

  86. ColdFrog says:

    Obligatory Descent Nostalgia: Insert Here.

    I feel your pain. The numpad is so… Designed to be used for directions. I mean, it’s laid out so perfectly square and nice, as if intended to be always recognizably placed in that geometric fashion, and letting those silly letters to flounder about, cockeyed and askew, wondering if the trapezoid was the wrong shape after all.

    On the other hand, I ALSO remember being tormented by people because I used the keyboard to play descent, when a REAL man would play with a joystick with a thousand buttons, a throttle and a cupholder. Being about 13 at the time, being a real man was probably the only thing I cared about, and so I came home with a Microsoft Sidewinder, and a complete lack of ability to use it. Even with the hat stick.

  87. toasty says:

    Wow… I feel sorry for you. I’ve used the numpad for some games, but mostly, ya, it was WASD, I guess this is the advantage of being young. :p

  88. KarmaDoor says:

    My foray through input layouts:
    Started with Atari 800 and 2600, so it was mostly stick and button for a while.

    Eventually I was migrated over to a spiffy 8088 and thus MS-DOS based games. Many were side view platformers so…
    QWE for Jump, Activate, and Fire, or whatever, plus the Numeric Pad for moving about.

    First person shooters came along and I’d try them simply because they were 3-D. 8-) Nothing stuck, so I moved back to other games, mostly puzzles.

    1998 came and I ended up trying the demo for Unreal Tournament since it happened to be on a Mac I was using. (Not mine.) I tried WASD but, despite not having to worry about the Command key, I decided I didn’t like the irregular alignment of keys. (I had brought my own mouse to use on the G3; remember those atrocious “pucks?”) Numeric Pad because my fried, as I could slide the keyboard over on the large desk.

    Eventually I got a copy of U.T. for home and started migrating toward WASD. Not having a desk or tray had forced the issue since I balance the keyboard on my knees. Ctrl and Alt were redundant to the mouse buttons, so not much of an issue.

    Pretty much I can go either WASD on Num Pad, these days. Alas, keyboard layouts are getting more convoluted, so it is moving toward the WASD-or-die camp. X-d

    Lastly, UT 2004 was, oddly, the game that got me to actually tri-chord. I haven’t gone back to try it in Descent, though.

  89. Gildan Bladeborn says:

    Descent was the first game I ever purchased (a tale I inflict on all the whippersnappers I interact with whenever I get the chance!), back when I was… 12? Great, now I feel old (I’m only in my mid to late 20s!).

    For some reason (probably all my previous experience with the game Stellar 7) I never got the hang of using the Numpad when playing the Descent series, even though I objectively knew it would have been a better control system than using the arrow keys (no roll or slide controls there), so I always relied on the Alt key to toggle strafing, which meant I couldn’t turn while strafing. But then when I started playing Descent the inability to circle strafe was hardly much of a detriment considering my complete inability to, you know, MOVE through the environment without frequently having to stop and re-orient myself. Thank goodness for cheat codes or I would have given up in frustration long before I got the hang of the whole 360 degrees of freedom angle.

    But learning to fly before you learn to walk has it’s advantages – there is not a game environment in existence that I find disorienting or confusing thanks to those maddening zero-gravity mineshafts and their constantly shifting frame of reference (doors in ceilings!).

    Even though I was using both hands on the keyboard (so using the arrow keys with my right and the thrust/weapons/other controls with my left), my use of the arrow keys still managed to become a bad habit. By the time I started actually utilizing the mouse and playing non-flight sim FPS games, my reliance on the arrow keys was starting to get a bit ludicrous – I think I realized how untenable a control scheme it was back when I was first playing Rune: I would have to take my left hand off of the arrow keys to jump or do anything other than move.

    That still didn’t stop me from beating the entire game using my retarded control setup, but it did make me realize that perhaps I should learn to use the WASD layout instead. I haven’t looked back!

    As for the whole inverted mouselook issue, I’ve realized why I grew up playing the same games that instilled this habit in Shamus and yet still think he’s weird for doing that: I never used the mouse to play any of the Descent games or space sims (yup, I still played Descent 3 using just the keyboard), until Freelancer came out and made using a mouse in a space sim something other than a really bad idea.

    When Descent 3 came out I gave using the mouse a try, decided I’d rather stick with what I knew and promptly went back to ignoring it in favor of my keyboard-only control scheme.

    Apparently I made the right call!

  90. Simon says:

    Have you considered buying a specialist gaming keyboard like the wolfking DK-2388U? It has the WSAD keys and most of the surrounding ones arranged in a more “NumPad” friendly style with no offset between rows.

    It might be just what you need to transition to the more recent key layouts.

  91. Zaghadka says:

    Ah, Robert Frost, the balloon animal most likely to scare pigeons:

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    And be one traveler, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth;
    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And having perhaps the better claim,
    Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
    Though as for that the passing there
    Had worn them really about the same,
    And both that morning equally lay
    In leaves no step had trodden black.
    Oh, I kept the first for another day!
    Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
    I doubted if I should ever come back.
    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

    He never said whether it was a positive difference, however.

  92. Yeargdribble says:

    I tried hard to play Thief with the numpad (which I’d grown accustomed to by years of UT), but Thief was what eventually broke me and forced me to use WASD. I’ve never looked back and am much happier for it.

  93. Blurr says:

    http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/77ba/

    Thinkgeek has the solution to your problem.

  94. guy says:

    I’m an arrow key man myself, but then the games I tend to play are more accurately described as mouse+hotkey games and the way I play them is most accurately described as poorly.

  95. Simply Simon says:

    I have always used the wasd keys for movement as long as I can remember, but recently, for some reason, I went through freespace 1 and 2 while steering only with the keyboard. The largest annoyances I found was that I only could hold down three keys at once and that there is a (for me) too large distance between 8 and 2, which I used for looking/aiming downward and upward. Other than that, it was quite easy to adapt to using it to steer, albeit with the right hand on the numpad rather than the mouse.

  96. Michael B says:

    Hrm, I doubt my comment will be seen now that it is waaaay down here.

    But I, for the most part, am like you. Descent was a game that has left a permanent mark on me. However I didn’t use the number pad for movement. I used the arrow keys, navigation keys above the arrow keys, and the buttons on the eastern shore of the keyboard.

    The WASD players could lick my balls. That’s about it. I curb stomped them in whatever game I played. But like you, I was eventually forced to move to WASD. Not because of the superiority. No, I miss my old set up. I was quite good with it.

    No, this abomination made me switch to WASD:
    http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l275/praecorloth/keyboard-mangled-arrows.jpg

    For the longest time, the only keyboards I could find, ergonomic or not, had the evil cluster-$#@! of arrows, and the horrid layout of the navigation keys. Not only had the layout changed, but the keys themselves were smaller. Trying to use the arrow keys for more than 20-30 minutes of gaming resulted in some hand cramps I haven’t had since my first all day Baywatch marathon.

  97. Peema says:

    Now I’m going to have to dig that up and play it again.

    Being lefthanded, I had my joystick out to the left and rigged for attitude control and remapped the numpad for linear motion with 4 and 6 strafing left and right.

    _Such_ a fun game.

  98. kathleenb says:

    Ah, yes. Descent marks my wonderful discovery the any first person game of any kind makes me sick. Rather limits my gaming options nowadays…

  99. Decius says:

    I started with RH on the inverted T, LH on CTRL/SHIFT/SPACE/ALT (what mouse?). That got me through Wolfenstein 3d and doom. For Descent I moved my right hand to the numpad, left hand stayed on the bottom right.

    For quake and Half-Life, I moved my right hand to the mouse, for looking and shooting, and my left hand to the numpad for movement. I rebound everything, in a similar manner. I think it was 7 and 9 to change weapons, 4 and 6 for turn left and right, and 1 and 3 for move left and right. (At the time, I had a mental line between “turing” and “aiming”.) Plus became jump, enter became duck. I never used mouse for movement.

    It was Aliens vs. Predator that messed me up there. I had more commands than I could shake a stick at, and three sets of them. I think “change vision mode” got moved to numlock, and the other commands got put on their various keys. I never finished AvP because of that.

    When I finally switched to WASD, I first switched to WADZXC, moving my movement mapping directly over. After a few hand cramps from learning to circle-strafe, I retrained myself to WASD and I haven’t looked back -yet-.

  100. Kdansky says:

    Same thing happened to me too, also with Decent. Mouse Inversion plus A = strafe left, S = strafe down (duck), D = strafe right, W = strafe up (jump). Right hand on numpad for all looking, and where do I put forward/back? Oh, I know, space for back (frantically back out of a room = slam the thumb down) works well, and I can use my right pinky on Enter for forward.

    Fast forward to shooters with mouse, I did forward on right mouse click and backwards still on space. It also gives me a fraction of a second in speed advantage, because I can switch quicker from back to forward with two fingers than you guys can with the middle going from W to S. Then WoW came and fixed the right mouse button on mouse look. Weeeellll…. I relearned (mouse inversion was damn hard to relearn), took me quite a while. Nowadays I play on ESDF instead of WASD, because that gives me more reach for hotkeys.

  101. MadForce says:

    MAN, this article. It took me ages to convert to WASD even now I still sometimes make the painstaking effort to map to numpad. Now with the new mice about with 5+ buttons I have finally been able to let go of the numpad. I just map the mouse buttons to abritrary keys around the keyboard and use the mouse buttons for as much as I can and use the keys for as little as possible. The QWERTY’s just do not line up right. I can never hit the right key.

    Now I am trying to becom acustom the the console world TWO THUMBS to move WHAAAAT ! I can’t aim with my thumb and try and mash to trigger buttons at the same time. No wonder all the games have Lock on or auto aim. Dont get me started on that Xbox 360 design my hands convulse when I approach that thing. The PS3 ones are more barable 6 axis is a major fail though. Tried riding a motor bike through the streets of Liberty City with that think on. NOT POSSIBLE 4 second delays and all sorts.

  102. Go1988 says:

    I’m born 1988 but I DO know Decent thanks to my 14 years older brother. But I had the good fortune to play it with a joystick.

    Does anyone know Forsaken for the PS1? That game blew my mind when it came to navigating. The movment is just like in Decent, you are conducting a vessel that is hovering in zero g. So you can and have to move it in all possible directions and axis. I’m used to a lot of games, racing, sport and FPS, but trying to get a hold on that flying thing in Forsaken takes load of time and effort.

  103. Sarah Miller says:

    The pong clone I’m writing uses the numpad for camera movement (it’s in 3D). I’m probably going to leave that in as a ‘secret bonus feature’. Then again, I don’t have any configurable key mapping yet.

    Regarding keyboard layouts, I’m still waiting for a full unicode keyboard…

  104. Dengus says:

    Descent had a similar effect on me. In my case, I wanted the SLIDING key setup to be as intuitive as possible. So I assigned “WASD” to sliding “Up Left Down Right”. (As if your keyboard were glued vertically to your screen, not laying flat.) The reason I did this was — in DESCENT anyway — sliding UP and DOWN was just as important as sliding left and right, or even moving forward & back. I didn’t care so much about forward & back. So I assigned forward & back to my left THUMB. (Which had to move left & right, from Space to Alt, DOH.)

    Which led to my eventual problem – in time, many games did not allow the ALT keys to be bound. Ugh. I could not move forward. Literally.

    Point is, I committed myself to this layout, because of Descent and Descent alone. But no other games I’ve played since utilize sliding up & down in the same way.

    It’s kind of like when your first girlfriend trains you to do something a particular way. Her way. And no lovers after her like it that way. “OMG, who taught you that? Really? She did? Like that? I’m sorry sweetie, I’m trying not to laugh. Honest.” Thanks Descent. (Funny how you say “go down on somebody” rather than “descend”.)

  105. Danielle says:

    Man, I loved DESCENT. Don’t remember what keys I used (we had a joystick, which made playing X-WING a joy. I remember learning how to circle-strafe in DESCENT and it was my first multiplayer game online at like, age 10), but it took a number of years before I adopted WASD–maybe until HL2? For a long time in FPSes, I used keys to look around, spurning mouselook out of pure stubbornness.

    Tendonitis set in in college, so I had to switch to trackballing with my left hand. As a result, I use IJKL almost all the time now. I make it work for most games, but on others I run out of well-positioned buttons–I’ve got some pretty weird keymaps (including the NUM pad) for DARK SOULS.

    I don’t remember the IJKL move being particularly difficult for me, BUT I was also in piano lessons as a kid (let’s say, 8-10 years). So here’s your next thesis study: does being a pianist/keyboard musician make it easier to change over hand habits/positions in gaming?

  106. Bhazi says:

    Yes, a very, very old post to be commenting on. I got lucky in that I was an arrow key user back in the ancient days. WASD is close enough to the arrow key layout that I just had to move my hand over (although the first thing I had to do was stop using my right hand for movement once a mouse became a thing that I had), the only games I used the numpad for movement for was the old Sierra games since that was the only way to get diagonal movement. When I was playing Descent, I used a joystick that my grandpa gave me years earlier for some flight sims.

  107. Erik says:

    Now with extra necropost!

    I saw this on the footer, and re-read by impulse. But I don’t see mentioned in comments the real solution to your problem, which is something my wife uses: a gaming keypad.

    My wife uses a (formerly Belkin, now Razer) Nostromo N52, which gives her left hand 14 keys (with a directional cross in the middle), a 15th “spacebar” button under the thumb for jump/use/whatever the game maps, AND above that a D-pad for the thumb. You can remap the keys on the pad to map to what the game expects. Couple this with a Razer Naga mouse (which I loved playing WoW with) and its 12 keys under your right thumb, and you have tons of keys to map. I have a (formerly SteelSeries, now Razer) keyboard with a built in gaming pad on the left, numpad on the right; it takes a BIG drawer, but it works perfectly.

    Googling around, it looks like the Nostromo has been replaced by the Tartarus v2 (low-end) and Orbweaver (high-end). Both have 20 keys; neither is cheap, but either would effectively give you a dedicated gaming “numpad” device that you can configure just as you like. Other vendors also have keypads (I remember the Logitech G13 being popular once upon a time), but I have no experience with them.

    And *my* muscle memory was first built on the original Doom, then filtered by most of a decade in WoW.

  108. Jeff says:

    Hey Shamus – Wondering if you are going to take a crack at Overload, which by all accounts I’ve seen so far is a successful spiritual successor/inheritor to the Descent series. Might make for a good stream… :)

    https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/31/descents-true-spiritual-successor-overload-is-out-today/

  109. Viqsi says:

    OMG. This is so me. Although I’m kind of a stubborn bitch about this stuff – I’m still steadfastly refusing WSAD (yes, there’s a petulant teenager in me that still automatically deliberately types it that way ;) ).

    It never got to me until I started gaming with my laptop for LAN parties; carrying around a full-size keyboard got really awkward really fast. G-d bless the makers of the Scorpius-32; when I finally found it, that thing was a lifesaver for about a decade. Nowadays I get by with a programmable keypad with some salvaged keycaps (it looks like this) – sure, game programmers may have started to screw with what keys they’ll distinctly recognize and/or give up, but I can just reprogram this thing to get around their boneheadedness and thereby keep my One True Layout.

    Oh, and while I’m ranting about One True Control Systems – no mouse used for gaming should ever have a scrollwheel replacing the middle mouse button. Ever. My mouselook habits got established with the original three-button MouseMan 96 (may its memory be a blessing), and I stubbornly put up with having to keep cleaning mouse balls until I finally found a comparable design with an optical sensor.

    The one thing I can’t dodge? Every damn game out there is now doing run-by-default, hold-key-to-walk instead of the other way around, and a few have taken away the ability to change that. There’s sneaky hacky ways to get around that with Source-based games (`bind -walk +run; bind +walk -run; bind +walk`), but a few others are less forgiving. Ugh!

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