Wait, I'm confused. I played mw4 but not mwo. After reading the article it seems to me there is that cool shot item ( how long to grind that out?) that makes alpha striking better than ever. 3rd person jump sniping further supports that. I stopped playing mw4 due to disliking the hill humpping and jump sniping alpha strike gameplay. I see that as a bad thing IMHO, but others might enjoy it I guess...but why was mw4 jump sniping bad vs mwo jump sniping being good?
In my ideal world cars can talk to streets and other cars for congestion reports, routing, and local avoidance. Having a manual driver in that process would fuck everything up since there is one X factor in the swarm that isn't responding.
Still that is a long way off, I imagine self drive will begin like ski lifts, drive into a zone, control is taken, moved along a highway, then as you exit a slow ramp with some warning bells as you resume control of the car.
Either way seems to be an infrastructure nightmare but damn would be nice when it is in place. Hopefully i can see something like this when I'm just getting old enough to not drive myself.
The tech has to be there of coarse...but machines can do things much faster and more constantly than the human machine, and they don't have moods to deal with. You are distracted, pissed off, bored, lethargic, whatever, all of those will impact your ability to do anything in life, good machines dont have it.
In an ideal condition you say turn left, or tap the roadway on a map to tell the car you want to travel down it, vehicles around you respond in milliseconds to your change in direction and route around you or apply brakes behind you, and even the oncoming traffic will react to your move, no matter how abrupt.
But yeah, this dream is a long ways off, but I have no doubt the human race would be better for it if it took us out of the drivers seat and put us in command of vehicles instead.
If people want to drive for fun race tracks and 'specialized manual race cars' are where it should go down.
I agree with what you are saying, and there is a large degree of talent in finding appropriate application of technology, but sometimes those first strides to create the tech is often where the true genius lies, and often those people are under appreciated and/or compensated for it.
I don't think people praise notch for being a great game designer, do they? He kinda just kept doing stuff and hit it at the right time with the right game. We hadn't been subjected to the alpha funding model before, and that sale of 'promise' was still new and squeaky, and indie games hadn't quite exploded yet, right time, right place.
All games are copies and iterations on existing ones, EQ -> DAOC -> WOW for example, each added their own twist to the previous and improved upon it. I played infiniminer before getting minecraft and it just lacked something that minecraft has, that flavor and personality of the world.
Anyway I agree strongly with your sentiment but the fact is that the world doesn't reward hard work and knowledge and creativity. I have a friend working on a game with this pretty bad ass hand built 2d engine, he made it back before Unity/UDK existed and all that in c++ / dirextx. It is really kickass honestly, and the game play of several of his games is pretty damn good, a one man creation of a functioning RTS.
Though the art was off, he lost money/time to add the polish layer once the engine and gameplay was good, and the game sold basically nothing. That polish push is where the $'s are at, and always has been. The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.
You are basically talking out of my mouth about gmail... I wonder if this is something that is making me 'old' because the tiny ass compose window and bullshit down the left side doesn't concern me.
As for the icons I think it is a stupid ass UI design fad that I hope passes soon. As a designer though I can see how I can think my icon is super obvious as to what it does, and I don't have to translate it and worry that the "Fwd" takes up more or less space in another language.
Still, I always have to hover for tooltips now a days, I just can't remember which stupid button means what. But yeah google is taking a falling dive for a while now, they sold the gold company for riches and more generalization as they opened up the door. I probably would have done the same thing honestly.
Thought I read a random thing somewhere that said people generally stop finding new music into their 30's... we just listen to what we grew up...most anyway, I still get new stuff occasionally, but it never does have a place in my collection like what you grew up with.
I have heard also that younger people today also tend to listen to music that is all over the place in terms of the time it was released, but that is probably a trend of mp3's and digital music, a good song is a good song no matter when it was written, and it is easier than ever to just have good songs now a days.
I really hate them. It is some modern UI koolaid everyone has been drinking apparently. The multsized grids are really hard for me to locate information. The only thing they seem to be good at is forcing me to scan over advertisements before I find what I want to get to, which might be the point, and the reason I hate them.
Agree here. I have noticed a bigger trend with how-to's and the like being screencasts on youtube taking 10 minutes when it should be a 30 second read. Highly frustrating.
Isn't the problem with the rift right now that it has no positional tracking yet? From what I've read the thing most inducing the motion sickness is not keeping track of your head moving around in space, basically the rift can only act as though you are swiveling the camera around, not panning it. Since our heads move around so much normally, that not being represented in the rift is what is causing the puke factor.
Some solutions mentioned were basically trackIR like tech and its equivalents. I recall carmack talking about it saying trackIR was really good but you sort of fall off a cliff as you turn too far, but that eventually they would figure something out that would degrade more gracefully.
Well no real thought on the most efficient method, but thinking that a rail or some other mechanism gives you more control over positioning and would seem less of a difficult problem to make sure everybody is in their lane or can transfer around and less opportunities for 'rogue' vehicles to get onto the system, in addition to just taking up less space on rural branches.
Really just seems routing a bunch of cars on fixed rails is easier when you don't have to worry about steering and keeping them there with any sensors or electronics, probably some bumpers around it in case one fails and could possibly get dragged/pushed by another vehicle to avoid any blockage. I would think that keeping a car on a road automatically would take a lot more tech and specialized sensors and more points of failure then rails.
Though no reason the rails couldn't be some other material. Either way pipe dream, but the thought of being able to get around from point to point where I could be doing something else with that time is awesome, sort of like a cruise, you wake up and suddenly you are in a new place.
Rip all our roads up and have a rail system, instead of cars we own our own rail car that sits in a garage that his hooked up to the main system. If I don't own a rail car or need a bigger one if I'm moving or have guests over or want a party bus style move, I can just rent one via the control panel and take all the risks of a dirty car, or I could rent one from a private company that charges a bit more.
The car would be routed out to my house as soon as I place the order, or I might have scheduled it ahead of time. When I travel with it I can pick my own route or let the computer auto route me based on congestion/traffic. If I change my mind mid travel I can update the route, hit a button for 'bathroom stop! (if the car doesn't have one) Food! Scenic Detour!' and the car will respond appropriately.
Local streets and rails are all elevated so the streets become bike paths, walkways and grass. You take them out of local rail system and get routed into rail highways that handle high speed merging and maintaining distance etc.
That is my dream transportation system. Maybe in another 300 years.
I wish I would be alive long enough that our cars just drive for us, pathing algorithms will do a much better job and get us there faster and cheaper, no worry of speeding tickets, the cars can merge us faster and safer and more efficiently than we ever could anyway.
Hell, remove roads, how about a series of routed rail cars, if I didn't want to own one, I could just rent one, punch in the number of passengers and how much transport room I need for it, railcar shows up front in the house, load up, punch in the destination, go to sleep/do whatever.
I thought of the parrallel processing for parsing large data file at work, but doing a bit of glancing round the web it appeared to not really be worth it since the file is typically on the same hard drive and having multiple threads accessing the same drive might actually be slower than just reading it sequentially.
I guess if you want to go parrallel with big data its worth looking into Hadoop and all that since the file is split out over multiple drives and CPUs and can be accessed in parrallel without bottlnecking as easily. For me the tradeoff of setting all that up and learning it didn't justify saying, hey this script takes 10 min to run, especially if it's not run too often.
Not to mention star wars was the star destroyers, storm troopers, xwings, tie fighters, and generally a junked up craft design, instead we get like 1980's portrayal of 'future tech' sleek and glossy crap designs, and not a single thing of the star wars set / ship design that made star wars, star wars.
Aren't they moving into the next generation of characters? It is pretty easy for them to play their characters aged the same as the actors are, han grows up in the star wars world the same way harrison ford does.
You might be psyching yourself out. I mostly have the same sort of fears about getting online, but you can overcome a lot of those things or choose to do something that doesn't involve heavy requirements.
Coordinated events are usually the most fun, but I haven't participated in one in years for the reason you mentioned, but you have to not think of them as appointments, but something fun for yourself. At one point in time I likened MMO raiding to participating in an intramural sport. I had played volleyball in a YMCA league, and I signed up for a night a week, and it was pretty easy to know that when Thursday came around from 6 to 1030 I was playing volleyball, I was on the court or reffing, pretty obvious times for people to know that I won't be fielding phone calls or responding immediately to texts. People can understand that about sports, but have trouble when you explain that you are going on a raid, joining up with your wing to drop bombs, or practicing with your clan. Still, its blocking time aside for yourself to participate in a hobby you enjoy.
2. Hurry up and wait. I abolish those games/modes immediately, I have no time to wait, there are many that you dont have to wait out, especially if you and a bunch of other people have blocked the time out, its actually pretty fast to meet up and get going right away.
3 + 3. I agree with this for some games. I have enjoyed RTS games but I find the hyper focus for a long duration they require just won't work for my life at this point, so I avoid those. Basically if you find a game where you walking out immediately will ruin no ones experience but your own, you can just spec immediately, alt f4 out, or just stand up and leave your guy AFK.
Anyway no need to fear the online with limited time, it can be done!
Nah, have had to use a powermac at work, I tried to go all trackpad but need a mouse. I did figure out drag and drop is a hold one point drag with a spare finger, but honestly my hands just hurt too much for all that. I can't for the life of me do the 'explode' gesture, it still takes me 3 tries. When I need to get the cursor in between letters to highlight or drag and drop files around I settle on the mouse, its just much faster and precise. For right click I still prefer a mouse as well.
I have adopted it for scrolling instead of the wheel on occasion as repeated scrolling hurts my wrists. On the other hand they also hurt if I use the trackpad for long as I have to curl my wrists at a weird angle to use it, where as with the mouse I can keep my wrists straight.
All in all it is a a very nice trackpad as far as trackpads go, but by far it doesn't have the versatility to surpass a mouse.
Also, delete, home and end keys please? I know you can cmd left/right and I have sort of gotten used to it, its just not as fast. Delete you can fn + delete key but a backspace centric approach to text editing is slower, Usually the cursor is already on the left of a word, so its faster to get to your delete point to remove character than it is to get to a backspace point.
Been a windows user forever, but i have no qualms about hating the mac, but it does have its share of problems. It doesn't know how many bytes are in a meg, it leaves ds_store files all over the place, and I've never seen explorer crash anywhere near as much as Finder does for the apparent crime of trying to open it up and look at the filesystem.
I've been having to use a power Mac at work and while it is a nice laptop, Mac in my personal life seems like a pretty shitty idea, not only do you get the lack of gaming support of Linux, you also buy in to a gimme gimme gimme culture where even the most basic apps cost 20 dollars. Whereas windows and Linux have a plethora of open source / free software to choose from.
I almost was going to find the Mac as something great to develop in as it is a nice marriage of GUI and command shell, but strangely all the tools and software I would want to use for productivity costs and costs, pretty much wrecking any gains you would get from Darwin.
Also, how about a fucking delete key, just saying...
Look into what a 'hitbox' is. There is some debate about them being fair or not. Essentially its a standard tourny joystick (so granted not keyboard buttons) with the 4 way directions mapped to buttons rather than a stick. The old street fighter style things are usually 4 button clickers so it translates to buttons easily.
The plus is that there is no throw time that a joystick has, plus 100 guaranteed input for complex movements.
Following this precedent of a hitbox, I would say a keyboard user could very easily take down person using a tournament stick.
Though I agree with some points here, kb mouse is not the holy grail of all game styles, each one has its own. Though I will say in fast games you are generally wanting to move full tilt in any direction so the key is actually better as there is no throw time.
For games that need it like flight sims and racing games, there are specialty controllers for that While in general the controller analog stick works better than the binary keyboard, the throws are often too small and tight to easily find all the areas in the middle you need to say hold a turn in a race game.
Oh that is a neat one. I grabbed the razer one with 12 on the side, I end up basically using about 3/4 of the 12 buttons on it because the rest are just too hard to comfortably reach. Moreover, if you stretch weird I have a nasty habit of shifting the mouse around and upsetting my aim/view which is a bit frustrating. For a bunch of them I have to sort of counter balance the mouse so the thumb press doesnt send it off into oblivion, all in all I'd just say it isn't that comfortable.
This one looks like an improvement somewhat with a way to feel where the buttons are and maybe they don't have as much throw for pressing.
I used to think I wanted a ton of buttons on the mouse for gaming, but at the end of the day I think just 5 or 6 work pretty well, a "rocker" 2 buttons on the thumb, or maybe even a 4 way there, and a few scattered around like on the 'RATT' or whatever it is now is probably optimum.
Actually I finally got a HOTAS controller a while ago, and there are a lot of really neat button types on it, some of them could probably get interesting on the mouse, like the little nipple mouse mover, a mouse on a mouse maybe... could see it. Hell, has anyone done a trackball + mouse?
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Googled Xtend for more info... what an unfortunate name they have for the language.
Wait, I'm confused. I played mw4 but not mwo. After reading the article it seems to me there is that cool shot item ( how long to grind that out?) that makes alpha striking better than ever. 3rd person jump sniping further supports that. I stopped playing mw4 due to disliking the hill humpping and jump sniping alpha strike gameplay. I see that as a bad thing IMHO, but others might enjoy it I guess...but why was mw4 jump sniping bad vs mwo jump sniping being good?
In my ideal world cars can talk to streets and other cars for congestion reports, routing, and local avoidance. Having a manual driver in that process would fuck everything up since there is one X factor in the swarm that isn't responding.
Still that is a long way off, I imagine self drive will begin like ski lifts, drive into a zone, control is taken, moved along a highway, then as you exit a slow ramp with some warning bells as you resume control of the car.
Either way seems to be an infrastructure nightmare but damn would be nice when it is in place. Hopefully i can see something like this when I'm just getting old enough to not drive myself.
The tech has to be there of coarse...but machines can do things much faster and more constantly than the human machine, and they don't have moods to deal with. You are distracted, pissed off, bored, lethargic, whatever, all of those will impact your ability to do anything in life, good machines dont have it.
In an ideal condition you say turn left, or tap the roadway on a map to tell the car you want to travel down it, vehicles around you respond in milliseconds to your change in direction and route around you or apply brakes behind you, and even the oncoming traffic will react to your move, no matter how abrupt.
But yeah, this dream is a long ways off, but I have no doubt the human race would be better for it if it took us out of the drivers seat and put us in command of vehicles instead.
If people want to drive for fun race tracks and 'specialized manual race cars' are where it should go down.
I agree with what you are saying, and there is a large degree of talent in finding appropriate application of technology, but sometimes those first strides to create the tech is often where the true genius lies, and often those people are under appreciated and/or compensated for it.
I don't think people praise notch for being a great game designer, do they? He kinda just kept doing stuff and hit it at the right time with the right game. We hadn't been subjected to the alpha funding model before, and that sale of 'promise' was still new and squeaky, and indie games hadn't quite exploded yet, right time, right place.
All games are copies and iterations on existing ones, EQ -> DAOC -> WOW for example, each added their own twist to the previous and improved upon it. I played infiniminer before getting minecraft and it just lacked something that minecraft has, that flavor and personality of the world.
Anyway I agree strongly with your sentiment but the fact is that the world doesn't reward hard work and knowledge and creativity. I have a friend working on a game with this pretty bad ass hand built 2d engine, he made it back before Unity/UDK existed and all that in c++ / dirextx. It is really kickass honestly, and the game play of several of his games is pretty damn good, a one man creation of a functioning RTS.
Though the art was off, he lost money/time to add the polish layer once the engine and gameplay was good, and the game sold basically nothing. That polish push is where the $'s are at, and always has been. The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.
I knew I was fucked when I started bobbing my head in time to shit playing in the grocery store.
You are basically talking out of my mouth about gmail... I wonder if this is something that is making me 'old' because the tiny ass compose window and bullshit down the left side doesn't concern me.
As for the icons I think it is a stupid ass UI design fad that I hope passes soon. As a designer though I can see how I can think my icon is super obvious as to what it does, and I don't have to translate it and worry that the "Fwd" takes up more or less space in another language.
Still, I always have to hover for tooltips now a days, I just can't remember which stupid button means what. But yeah google is taking a falling dive for a while now, they sold the gold company for riches and more generalization as they opened up the door. I probably would have done the same thing honestly.
Thought I read a random thing somewhere that said people generally stop finding new music into their 30's... we just listen to what we grew up...most anyway, I still get new stuff occasionally, but it never does have a place in my collection like what you grew up with.
I have heard also that younger people today also tend to listen to music that is all over the place in terms of the time it was released, but that is probably a trend of mp3's and digital music, a good song is a good song no matter when it was written, and it is easier than ever to just have good songs now a days.
Gah towerfall looks cool, but 15 dollars for that? Gah. I'd snag that on pc for 5 in a heartbeat though.
I really hate them. It is some modern UI koolaid everyone has been drinking apparently. The multsized grids are really hard for me to locate information. The only thing they seem to be good at is forcing me to scan over advertisements before I find what I want to get to, which might be the point, and the reason I hate them.
Agree here. I have noticed a bigger trend with how-to's and the like being screencasts on youtube taking 10 minutes when it should be a 30 second read. Highly frustrating.
Isn't the problem with the rift right now that it has no positional tracking yet? From what I've read the thing most inducing the motion sickness is not keeping track of your head moving around in space, basically the rift can only act as though you are swiveling the camera around, not panning it. Since our heads move around so much normally, that not being represented in the rift is what is causing the puke factor.
Some solutions mentioned were basically trackIR like tech and its equivalents. I recall carmack talking about it saying trackIR was really good but you sort of fall off a cliff as you turn too far, but that eventually they would figure something out that would degrade more gracefully.
Well no real thought on the most efficient method, but thinking that a rail or some other mechanism gives you more control over positioning and would seem less of a difficult problem to make sure everybody is in their lane or can transfer around and less opportunities for 'rogue' vehicles to get onto the system, in addition to just taking up less space on rural branches.
Really just seems routing a bunch of cars on fixed rails is easier when you don't have to worry about steering and keeping them there with any sensors or electronics, probably some bumpers around it in case one fails and could possibly get dragged/pushed by another vehicle to avoid any blockage. I would think that keeping a car on a road automatically would take a lot more tech and specialized sensors and more points of failure then rails.
Though no reason the rails couldn't be some other material. Either way pipe dream, but the thought of being able to get around from point to point where I could be doing something else with that time is awesome, sort of like a cruise, you wake up and suddenly you are in a new place.
Rip all our roads up and have a rail system, instead of cars we own our own rail car that sits in a garage that his hooked up to the main system. If I don't own a rail car or need a bigger one if I'm moving or have guests over or want a party bus style move, I can just rent one via the control panel and take all the risks of a dirty car, or I could rent one from a private company that charges a bit more.
The car would be routed out to my house as soon as I place the order, or I might have scheduled it ahead of time. When I travel with it I can pick my own route or let the computer auto route me based on congestion/traffic. If I change my mind mid travel I can update the route, hit a button for 'bathroom stop! (if the car doesn't have one) Food! Scenic Detour!' and the car will respond appropriately.
Local streets and rails are all elevated so the streets become bike paths, walkways and grass. You take them out of local rail system and get routed into rail highways that handle high speed merging and maintaining distance etc.
That is my dream transportation system. Maybe in another 300 years.
I wish I would be alive long enough that our cars just drive for us, pathing algorithms will do a much better job and get us there faster and cheaper, no worry of speeding tickets, the cars can merge us faster and safer and more efficiently than we ever could anyway.
Hell, remove roads, how about a series of routed rail cars, if I didn't want to own one, I could just rent one, punch in the number of passengers and how much transport room I need for it, railcar shows up front in the house, load up, punch in the destination, go to sleep/do whatever.
Ahh future dreams, maybe for our kids/kids.
April Fools, we drove away half of our readers! HA HA HA :(
I thought of the parrallel processing for parsing large data file at work, but doing a bit of glancing round the web it appeared to not really be worth it since the file is typically on the same hard drive and having multiple threads accessing the same drive might actually be slower than just reading it sequentially.
I guess if you want to go parrallel with big data its worth looking into Hadoop and all that since the file is split out over multiple drives and CPUs and can be accessed in parrallel without bottlnecking as easily. For me the tradeoff of setting all that up and learning it didn't justify saying, hey this script takes 10 min to run, especially if it's not run too often.
Not to mention star wars was the star destroyers, storm troopers, xwings, tie fighters, and generally a junked up craft design, instead we get like 1980's portrayal of 'future tech' sleek and glossy crap designs, and not a single thing of the star wars set / ship design that made star wars, star wars.
Aren't they moving into the next generation of characters? It is pretty easy for them to play their characters aged the same as the actors are, han grows up in the star wars world the same way harrison ford does.
You might be psyching yourself out. I mostly have the same sort of fears about getting online, but you can overcome a lot of those things or choose to do something that doesn't involve heavy requirements.
Coordinated events are usually the most fun, but I haven't participated in one in years for the reason you mentioned, but you have to not think of them as appointments, but something fun for yourself. At one point in time I likened MMO raiding to participating in an intramural sport. I had played volleyball in a YMCA league, and I signed up for a night a week, and it was pretty easy to know that when Thursday came around from 6 to 1030 I was playing volleyball, I was on the court or reffing, pretty obvious times for people to know that I won't be fielding phone calls or responding immediately to texts. People can understand that about sports, but have trouble when you explain that you are going on a raid, joining up with your wing to drop bombs, or practicing with your clan. Still, its blocking time aside for yourself to participate in a hobby you enjoy.
2. Hurry up and wait. I abolish those games/modes immediately, I have no time to wait, there are many that you dont have to wait out, especially if you and a bunch of other people have blocked the time out, its actually pretty fast to meet up and get going right away.
3 + 3. I agree with this for some games. I have enjoyed RTS games but I find the hyper focus for a long duration they require just won't work for my life at this point, so I avoid those. Basically if you find a game where you walking out immediately will ruin no ones experience but your own, you can just spec immediately, alt f4 out, or just stand up and leave your guy AFK.
Anyway no need to fear the online with limited time, it can be done!
Nah, have had to use a powermac at work, I tried to go all trackpad but need a mouse. I did figure out drag and drop is a hold one point drag with a spare finger, but honestly my hands just hurt too much for all that. I can't for the life of me do the 'explode' gesture, it still takes me 3 tries. When I need to get the cursor in between letters to highlight or drag and drop files around I settle on the mouse, its just much faster and precise. For right click I still prefer a mouse as well.
I have adopted it for scrolling instead of the wheel on occasion as repeated scrolling hurts my wrists. On the other hand they also hurt if I use the trackpad for long as I have to curl my wrists at a weird angle to use it, where as with the mouse I can keep my wrists straight.
All in all it is a a very nice trackpad as far as trackpads go, but by far it doesn't have the versatility to surpass a mouse.
Also, delete, home and end keys please? I know you can cmd left/right and I have sort of gotten used to it, its just not as fast. Delete you can fn + delete key but a backspace centric approach to text editing is slower, Usually the cursor is already on the left of a word, so its faster to get to your delete point to remove character than it is to get to a backspace point.
Been a windows user forever, but i have no qualms about hating the mac, but it does have its share of problems. It doesn't know how many bytes are in a meg, it leaves ds_store files all over the place, and I've never seen explorer crash anywhere near as much as Finder does for the apparent crime of trying to open it up and look at the filesystem.
But yes, the unix shell does win a lot of points.
I've been having to use a power Mac at work and while it is a nice laptop, Mac in my personal life seems like a pretty shitty idea, not only do you get the lack of gaming support of Linux, you also buy in to a gimme gimme gimme culture where even the most basic apps cost 20 dollars. Whereas windows and Linux have a plethora of open source / free software to choose from.
I almost was going to find the Mac as something great to develop in as it is a nice marriage of GUI and command shell, but strangely all the tools and software I would want to use for productivity costs and costs, pretty much wrecking any gains you would get from Darwin.
Also, how about a fucking delete key, just saying...
Look into what a 'hitbox' is. There is some debate about them being fair or not. Essentially its a standard tourny joystick (so granted not keyboard buttons) with the 4 way directions mapped to buttons rather than a stick. The old street fighter style things are usually 4 button clickers so it translates to buttons easily.
The plus is that there is no throw time that a joystick has, plus 100 guaranteed input for complex movements.
Following this precedent of a hitbox, I would say a keyboard user could very easily take down person using a tournament stick.
Though I agree with some points here, kb mouse is not the holy grail of all game styles, each one has its own. Though I will say in fast games you are generally wanting to move full tilt in any direction so the key is actually better as there is no throw time.
For games that need it like flight sims and racing games, there are specialty controllers for that While in general the controller analog stick works better than the binary keyboard, the throws are often too small and tight to easily find all the areas in the middle you need to say hold a turn in a race game.
Oh that is a neat one. I grabbed the razer one with 12 on the side, I end up basically using about 3/4 of the 12 buttons on it because the rest are just too hard to comfortably reach. Moreover, if you stretch weird I have a nasty habit of shifting the mouse around and upsetting my aim/view which is a bit frustrating. For a bunch of them I have to sort of counter balance the mouse so the thumb press doesnt send it off into oblivion, all in all I'd just say it isn't that comfortable.
This one looks like an improvement somewhat with a way to feel where the buttons are and maybe they don't have as much throw for pressing.
I used to think I wanted a ton of buttons on the mouse for gaming, but at the end of the day I think just 5 or 6 work pretty well, a "rocker" 2 buttons on the thumb, or maybe even a 4 way there, and a few scattered around like on the 'RATT' or whatever it is now is probably optimum.
Actually I finally got a HOTAS controller a while ago, and there are a lot of really neat button types on it, some of them could probably get interesting on the mouse, like the little nipple mouse mover, a mouse on a mouse maybe... could see it. Hell, has anyone done a trackball + mouse?
I bet you could do some wild stuff with that.