nucas: thanks to ravenger, the dev who posted that mouse .ini. i've had this game's disk sitting around for probably over 7 years now and been unable to play it. i'd always found things like PPJoy grossly inelegant and unsatisfactory. i can't express how excited i am to
finally be able to play it!
why did i never buy a joystick? i saw no need to spend extra money on a peripheral i would use for only four games.
the other three? the reasons i assumed independence war 2, a much newer game, would support mouse and keyboard play.
tachyon and the freespace series. perhaps you've heard of them? those saying freelancer was the first proper mouse supporting space sim are mistaken, freespace's mouse support was flawless (you could bind any control in the game to any button on any input device, something games 12 years later still havn't quite learned). it's a series i've played through countless times. i also used to be quite active in it's mod community.
so to those parroting this, please drop the purist nonsense expecting people to spend additional money on a peripheral that is completely unnecessary for modern gaming. i do not care for (what you tout as) "realism" or "having the right tool", i care about playing good games. it's unfortunate independence war 2 didn't support it this, it would have opened it to a wider market. if more developers in the early double oughts had adopted this attitude space sims might not be a dead genre (though like everything else i'm sure they'd be more arcadey currently for widespread appeal and profitability)
While I agree that games should support as best as possible all types of input devices, certain genres do lend themselves to certain input devices being the optimum input. Further you can get reasonable joysticks for cheap - at least in comparison to gaming mice/console controllers, you can get a lot of bang for your buck. While IW and other space sims (much more so than flight sims) are probably very playable with a mouse and keyboard, I would still say a joystick is the optimal input - in fact part of me wishes I had two joysticks to make full use of the game! - kidding, although ... :)
I can certainly understand not wanting to invest in something you don't use for very many games. I'm not going to get a high-tech gaming mouse or console controller for the rare game I play that is best suited for those controllers. That said, a regular mouse is to a "gaming mouse" as a cheap joystick is to an expensive setup with track-ir, rudder paddles, and an expensive joystick - one may provide a better experience, but they are the same basic interface. For me, I have a cheap mouse and a cheap joystick since a joystick provides a very different interface than a mouse and for some games that distinction can be important - especially for games like Red Baron 3D or IL-2 where the flight models on hard are difficult enough with joysticks (I have heard tell of keyboard + mice players in Red Baron 3D, but few and very far between). You are after all attempting to simulate on a mouse what a joystick does naturally. Though we have a program on the OS X called ControllerMate which is the best way to turn one controller into another that I have ever seen (as well as for general programming of keyboards/joysticks/mice), it's still not the same.
I argue that the joystick is "unnecessary" because space sims went out of vogue, not due to the controller - Freespace 2 great game that it was sold very, very badly and supported mice well as you pointed out - but mostly because the gaming environment changed as other genres matured (and some boneheaded publisher decisions, but that's a small slice). This has happened to other genres: point and click adventures didn't go out of style because mice were no longer valued. People simply stopped being interested in them as a gaming genre. When flight sims and space sims were at their peak, joysticks were quite common and not seen as unnecessary extra peripherals by gamers. So I think you've reversed the chicken and the egg there. After all console games require buying an entire dedicated system and those don't seem to lack popularity. Certain games even ship with specialized controllers for them with those consoles. Some of those are the most popular games there. Although to be fair I'm slightly hypocritical here since I don't own a console for pretty much precisely those reasons. :)
You briefly decry the "arcade"-like quality of recent games, but I argue that the arcade quality comes in part from people not wanting to use the tools best suited for a job. Getting the "good enough" experience and dumbing down the game so people with a variety of input devices are made equal is partly what leads to games becoming more arcade-like - even ones that are not intrinsically made for the "causual-gamer" like Wii or Kinect (side note: I have nothing against casual gaming per se - I quite like it myself, but I also don't want all games to be casual). I'm thinking of course of some of the modern shooters where the PC version is less than it could be because the game was designed for consoles controllers and not mouse+keyboard (I don't actually play that genre much myself, but there were people pissed off about it). From this standpoint, it is a little odd to decry the arcade-ization of games to appeal to wider audiences and also decry space sims for not appealing to a wider audience in the same breath.
So I suppose it depends on what you mean by support. Yes a game should support the widest possible (within reason) input devices because you shouldn't be exclusionary (and these days with the "fall" of space sims, you cannot rely on someone having a joystick). But that said, all genres do lend themselves to a certain UI being the optimal one. The effort to make the game accessible to all controller types shouldn't gut the heart out of what a game is to make all controllers equally good. Then you get an arcade simulator.
when i perfect a real life space fighter prototype, it will feature a mouse and keyboard flight interface.
Were I a pilot for your prototype, you'd have to design one heck of a mouse/keyboard/touch interface to even convince me to get into the cockpit of your space fighter - never mind fight with it! :) With my life actually on the line, I'm really, really, really going to want the control of a joystick-like interface in that space fighter prototype of yours. Now a corvette sized craft like in IW1? well that's debatable. But a fighter-sized craft? Joystick for sure.
