Darkroland wrote:
Caleria wrote:
I was one of the few people I knew that used mouse + Keyboard for Quake. Everyone else used the keyboard only. I tried to convince them otherwise, but I was unsuccessful, until we had a Quake tournament at our local mall. One of my friends, who was favored to win kept telling me, "You can't dance with the mouse, man." When I won the tournament by beating him 3 games in a row, he changed his tune. And suddenly, everyone was trying to learn how to use the mouse, heh. Good times.
Yup, that's the same thing that converted me. I was the "Number one" in our gaming group, we were all keyboard players of Quake 1. Then I went over to another group's house, I got absolutely obliterated, they were all mouselook users. Was time to step up my game!
I was in the same boat. Played Doom as a keyboarder and would obliterate my friends (who also used the keyboard). Beat Quake in single-player mode as a keyboarder.
I played multiplayer CTF online shortly after and there was a map where I was chasing a player up a steep ramp. He was easily pointing down and nailing me, but my look-spring made it impossible for me to hit him. I decided I needed to completely change my setup.
I didn't know how most mousers have their keyboard set up. I didn't do any Altavista-ing (Googling didn't exist). So I just made up what seemed logical. A key to move forward, a key to move backward, and two keys that strafed left and right, and use the mouse for steering. They keys I chose for this setup was E,S,D,and F.
It made logical sense to me: It kept my arms at comfortable distances from each other. The F key was a homerow key so it always had an indent for me to quickly find in the heat of battle. And it gave me keys on both sides for binding weapons to and using quickly. Little did I know that the standard was WASD, exactly how I had planned mine out. Except without the added benefit of having more bindable keys around it and no homerow key (thus, I've always viewed it as inferior).
Changing to that new setup from a setup where I used arrow keys for movement took a while to get used to. I tried it a little bit in single player, but I found myself thinking too much. I resolved myself that the only way to learn is to remove thinking from the equation to build the instincts and muscle memory faster. I decided to play online against other players with this setup, no matter how painful it would be.
For the first week, it was pretty bad. I got owned more than I ever care to admit to. But it did have the intended effect I was hoping for. I got up to speed very fast after that first week and I haven't looked back since.
And my friends followed suit too once they saw how big of a difference it makes. I still smile when I see those core friends of mine place their index fingers on the F key instead of the D.