Matrix Games Forums

Just getting into Starshatter, it's great to see there's still room for indie game developers catering for a niche market like tactical space combat sims. Keep it up!

I'm currently going through the tutorials and I've noticed a few things with the controls that I think could be improved upon, not sure if this is the right forum but it seems to be closest to the mark.

Nav point cycle controls: currently the only way to cycle nav points seems to be alt-N but it only cycles forward and if you accidentally skip a nav point this way you cannot go back. Furthermore cycling all the way through to the last waypoint takes you out of the nav mode for good. Would be nice to be able to loop through the nav points to avoid this all together.

View direction: Hat 1 is not used for viewing around, it would be nice to have the hat intergrated into the default joystick controls so people with a joystick with coolie hat do not have to use the keyboard or mouse for this.
Also even while using my saitek config software I cannot seem to map the view directions to Hat1 (all the others controls apart from zoom in and out remap without any problem). This might be a fault on my end but regardless of that the coolie hat should be part of the standard control set.

HUD colors: some more colors (more saturated) would be helpfull as the default colors blend in quite a lot with the planetary surface of the tutorial mission.

Bitching Betty: A soft female voice warning you of low speed, radar warning, missile lock, telling you to pull up etc. etc.

"Bitching Betty: A soft female voice warning you of low speed, radar warning, missile lock, telling you to pull up etc. etc."
 
all I need in a video game is to get nagged by a female.. lol

I agree with you. It's very nice to see space combat sims [:)]
 
I also totally agree with the Nav point cycling. You should be able to cycle backwards. You can ofcourse create a new route by clicking your ship and then right clicking on the navmap, but that requires you to remember where the route was.
 
With regards to view direction: Are you completely unable to pan the view in virtual cockpit? Do you have TrackIR installed on your computer (that doesn't work because it's ver. 4.0 or something like that)?. If that is the case, quit the TrackIR program on the task bar before running the game. I think the game is fooled to think you have trackIr and expects signals from it, but when there are no signals, the game assumes the camera should be pointing forwards. I did this, and it worked [:)]
 
I also agree that we need more HUD colors. Maybe you should be able to mix and match your own from the menus or something. You could create your own day, night and space huds with the colors you wanted from a palette.
 
Bitching betty would be nice too... Although it's not on the top of my list of changes I would like to see [:)]

I just downloaded the demo last night, so I'm not sure if the full version has the same issue that I have but...
Starshatter doesn't seem to want to recognize both my HOTAS AND my rudder pedals. Only one or the other. This is very annoying since Cougars don't have a yaw axis, I usually use my pedals for that. So I use a button on the HOTAS to switch between the two modes... It'd be nice if that was fixed or if it was in the full version already I'll have to buy that somewhere....