Gamepads anybody?

Inspired by a dream of playing this game as God Hand-style beat em up, today I went out and traded some old DS games for a Logitech dual analog gamepad, and I just spent this afternoon creating a MA/Willpower scrapper as a beat em up tribute (his origin shamelessly stolen from Cheetahmen 2).

Anyway, luckily there's a Joystick control scheme option that works fine for gamepads, but I still needed to heavily customise it to create a viable control scheme. I'd like to explain it using the PS2 controller as a reference, since the gamepad is basically a Dual Shock with no rumble.

The two joypads control movement and camera respectively, like a standard third person shooter should do, and clicking down the sticks targets the next enemy, or the next ally for the right one. The front buttons are mapped to the four attack slots, with L1 having the fifth slot (R1 is Jump), and Start being slot 10, which is used for powers I don't wanna use lightly.

Now, where things really get interesting is L2 and R2- I've mapped those to cycle between power trays, giving me different 'modes' of a sort. I have access to six powers in each 'mode', which so far includes Attacks, Travel (travel powers, Sprint, etc), Teleporters (Pocket D, mission porter), Team (Tarot cards) and the last one (Self Destruct mapped to Start). Once I get the toggle powers I'll add a Defense mode. Since he's only level 3 so far I've still got a lot of work to do, but it's a start. I've tested him out fighting stuff and it works well.

Sounds pretty awesome!

This Logitech control pad, how does it stack up against a wired Xbox 360 controller? That's what I've got, and it's pretty tight from what I've found. The only problem is that it treats the analog shoulder triggers as a third axis for the left control stick, which effectively means that if you hold both the controller thinks neither of them are held.

Note that I've not used the 360 controller for CoH.

I toyed with a gamepad for a bit, but didn't like the feel of it. Probably because I rely on the ingame chat to communicate with most teammates and had to keep putting it down. I may have adjusted to it eventually if my sgmates used ventrilo, teamspeak, etc.

One thing I found working well for me was mapping the shoulder buttons (R1 and L1) and face buttons (d-pad, circle, triangle, x, and sqaure) together for powers. I used R2 and L2 for tabbing, with R2 + L2 to target the furthest enemy.

I've used controllers to play for the last 3 years, actually the two that have been mentioned so far. The logitech dual shock clone until the wires frayed and started crossing buttons and now a 360 controller.

To get around the 360's shoulder button/right analog mix up I used a keymapper called xpadder. The controller sends different signals for the buttons but for some reason the drivers mix it up.

What i've done for both is, the face buttons are 1-4, the shoulders are 5-8, start and select become 9 & 0. That way every power is available, and by placing stuff like self destruct or end crashing nukes into the start and select, I have to reach a little for them. It has cut down on alot of accidental exploding. The right stick becomes forward, back and strafes with pushing it in for jump. Left stick is camera movement and pushed in for 1st inspiration. The D-pad becomes up - target next enemy, down - target nearest enemy, left - previous power tray, right - next power tray. With this set up the keyboard is to chat and the mouse for placement powers like rain of fire/arrow or teleport and to sort inspirations.

It works out well for most powersets and ATs. Makes playing Kheldians a little easier and quick but something like a fire/storm controller is a little clunky having to use the mouse so often.

Anarchy and Backfire, I got a XBox360 wired controller for a few games I own and to make the times I play Champions Online (yes I know, boo hiss, get it out of your system) and am very intrigued by the keymapping you're talking about.

Would you be able to provide a little walkthrough (I have XPadder, btw) of how to set it all up? Very interested in giving it a go.

S.

Interesting, I've always wondered what it would be like. I have a wired Xbox 360 gamepad, I was tempted to use it when playing Fallout 3 until it obviously sucked compared to a keyboard and mouse. When I got RE4 for the PC I used the gamepad, found it a lot easier in the long run.
If you ever get a guide going I'd probably try it out as well.

If button-space is limited, you could also try setting up some bind files to change the attack used each time you press a button. I don't have the exact commands for this (it was on my old PC that had a harddrive crash), but it was something like this:

Lets say we want an attack chain with four attacks that goes Power Bolt -> Power Blast -> Power Bolt -> Power Burst -> repeat. We want this all on button1.

Make four files, named attack1.txt - attack4.txt, in a folder coh_binds. These all have one line in them. (Again, I'm not positive this is the exact syntax since it's been a while since I used it. Hopefully it's good enough to show how it works at least.)

attack1.txt:
button1 "powexec_name Power Bolt$$bind_load_file c:\coh_binds\attack2.txt"

attack2.txt:
button1 "powexec_name Power Blast$$bind_load_file c:\coh_binds\attack3.txt"

attack3.txt:
button1 "powexec_name Power Bolt$$bind_load_file c:\coh_binds\attack4.txt"

attack4.txt:
button1 "powexec_name Power Burst$$bind_load_file c:\coh_binds\attack1.txt"

Finally, manually bind button1 to load one of these files to get the combo going.

Each time you press the button it loads the next file and rebinds the button to the next attack. However, be aware that if you button mash faster than the attacks can activate, you can skip over attacks.

For a gamepad with four face buttons, you could setup a blaster this way with one "melee" button with blaps, one "ranged" button, one "AoE" button, and one "powerup" button with Buildup and aim.