[xeno]Julios wrote:Some excellent advice in this thread - I should check this forum more, since it seems to have taken over from the old Competitor's Edge forum.
Krazy_k, perhaps treating quake as a martial art will help - I know it certainly has helped me.
Your motor visual system is absolutely fundamental in becoming a good player. Higher level skills such as movement, weapon, combat, and strategy will progressively develop, but it is key to optimize the machine that is your body, if it is to successfully interface with the game.
First, you might want to treat the game with the respect that a martial art, or competitive sport requires. This means preparing your mind and body for intensive learning sessions. It means devoting sustained bouts of attention, which requires patience, among other things.
If you cannot do this, then you need to address the problem on this level.
The most direct interfaces between your body and the game are the eyes and the upper body motor system. You thus want to ensure high quality visual information (visual config, monitor settings, etc), and high quality motor functioning (seating position, mouse dynamics, keyboard config).
Think of the mouse as your sword. You want to develop a confident and useful grip and a way of handling the mouse. As has been alluded to in this thread, there are many different sets of muscular groups that can interact to control the mouse. Some players use the muscles in the upper arm as a primary controller (pivoting at the elbow), while others use the forearm muscles (pivoting at the wrist). At either extreme are the chest and back muscles (pivoting at the shoulder), and the metacarpal muscles (flexing and extending your fingers).
Some players use many or all of these muscle groups in an integrative fashion - that is, they use multiple groups at once, like a set of gears, while others specialize in single groups.
Think of conducting an orchestra with a baton - for wide sweeping movements the entire arm moves as a whole (chest and back muscles), while for tinier movements, the conductor's fingers may barely twitch.
The positioning of your body with respect to the desk and mousepad, and the positioning of the mousepad, with respect to your desk, will need to be adjusted to accomodate your own unique style. Work with your body type, just like learning complex movements in the gym requires you to work with your own particular body structure.
In general, I find that the further in your mousepad is (how deep into your desk), the more you are favouring the broader strokes (chest&back), while keeping the mousepad closer to the edge of the desk favours wrist movements.
Grip is also crucial. I only have extensive experience with the wingman gaming mouse, so take that into consideration. Depending on the style of the mouse, and your own preference, you may choose to use either a two finger (2f), or a three finger (3f) grip. A three finger grip allows for more control, since you involve an extra group of muscles (fiver fingers instead of four) to modulate the control of the mouse. However, a 2f grip allows for a tighter control unit. To understand this, consider that with a 2f grip, you can grip the side edges of the mouse with your thumb on the left side, and the ring finger on the right side. With a 3f grip, it's the thumb on the left side, and the pinky on the right. From my own experience, it seems that the ring finger is stronger and better coordinated than the pinky, and being able to control the sides of the mouse with strength and coordination is an advantage when trying to modulate the lateral velocity of the mouse. For instance, if you're flicking to the right, you can use the muscles that are acting upon the right side of the mouse to act as a braking force which can control the movement and duration of the flick.
However, this advantage may be not as significant as it seems, and the advantages of a 3f grip may outweigh this relative insignificance.
Unfortunately, many three button mice have the three buttons quite close together, which cramps and restricts the fingers. The wingman (which is essentially dead) allows for a 3f grip where all three fingers are in relaxed position - with the same amount of spread as there'd be if you were sleeping. Take this factor into consideration when choosing the grip.
Another important aspect of grip is the parts of your hand which are in contact with the mouse. This is a function of the shape of the mouse (flatter mice = less surface area in contact with palm, humped mice = more), and the arch of your hand. You can increase the arch of your hand by pivoting your hand upwards, around the wrist, and by flexing your fingers (so that fingertips rotate toward palm).
Notice that if your entire hand is in contact with the mouse, it is virtually impossible to use the metacarpal muscles to control the mouse. A quick experiment will demonstrate this clearly:
Grasp your mouse so that your entire palm and all the length of the fingers are in contact with the mouse. Now draw a circle on the screen with your cursor (or a figure eight or whatever).
Now grasp the mouse with a curved arch so that only your finger tips are in contact with the mouse, and draw the same figure. be sure to use your metacarpal muscles to control the movement.
Notice the surgical precision?
Assuming a 3f grip, when you flex your middle three fingers, the cursor moves down, and when you extend them, the cursor moves up. When you flex your thumb, the mouse moves right (if thumb is positioned on left edge), and when you flex your pinky, the mouse moves left.
Note that you now have five independent modulators which can seamlessly interact with the mouse in order to produce a desired movement.
Some people prefer more surface area in contact with mouse (with much of their palm in contact with mouse), because it provides a more stable and rigid contact with the mouse from which to use the higher level muscle groups, and it is more comfy; This would make sense if you didn't want to use the metacarpal muscles at all, but if you do want to incorporate them, you'll need a grip that compromises palm in favour of fingertips. You must develop your own balance, and experiment.
The way in which you configure your mouse settings should work in concert with your control style. The key thing to consider is that with larger movements of the mouse, you can afford lower sensitivities, and smaller movements require higher sensitivities. For instance, if you use all wrist, your muscles can only move the mouse over a small distance on the mousepad. As such, you'll need to use a higher sensitivity so that you can cover more area with the crosshair with those small movements.
Lower sensitivities have the advantage of increased aiming resolution (which is why sniping requires low sensitivity).
Higher sensitivities have the advantage of being able to cover more crosshair area per unit time.
If you used all wrist, and a low sensitivity, you would need to twist the wrist multiple times to do a 180 degree turn. It wouldn't really be a flick, rather than a series of flicks, each of which is interrupted by picking up the mouse. This is because the wrist only allows the mouse to arc over a few centimetres.
If, however, you used all chest and back, you could move the mouse over a metre long arc, and would thus be able to do a 180 in one flick even with a very low sensitivity (course you'd need a very large mousepad and would need to make room for the arc by moving your keyboard).
Now of course, pivoting your entire shoulder in its full lateral range of motion takes longer than pivoting your wrist in its full lateral range of motion, but the point is, they are both continuous and finely controlled movements, which is important in flicks.
Furthermore, you are not going to use your entire shoulder range to control the mouse (unless you're tom cruise in minority report using the holographic interface). More likely, you'll use a combination of some of the lower groups. Once you have decided upon your mousing style, you can then start tuning your sensitivity so that you can easily flick, with one quick and continuous motion of the involved muscle groups, over a respectable crosshair area.
180 degrees is a good standard for a flick, so tune your sensitivity so that you can flick 180 degrees within the margins of your muscle movements.
Mouse acceleration can be a benefit depending on your preference. If you choose to use it, I would recommend the following tuning method:
Turn off accel. Choose a sens at which you can comfortably and accurately track the "foveal" portion of the screen (that is, the tight centre of your focus over which the xhair tracks).
Next, start increasing accel until you can do a natural and effective 180 flick.
You can fine tune this by adding or decreasing sens, and/or adding or decreasing accel. Using the console is critical here, as you can input the values directly using even decimals.
Find your own balance over time, and don't be afraid to experiment. I radically changed my own paradigm of mouse control years after I had reached a high level of control with one style - in effect I went from one extreme to another. Took me months to get used to the new style, and to start mastering it. Took a lot of open mindedndess to stick with it so I could really assess it properly.
I went from a 2f grip with mouse right at edge of desk, super high sens/no accel, and wrist only (you could have nailed my wrist to the edge of desk and i'd've still been able to play), to a 3f grip with mouse a foot and a half into desk, with super low sens and a decent amount of mouse accel, using all my muscles integratively. Both configurations used the bridged fingertip approach (fingertips also allow for tiny and ultra-fast modulations to aim).
You may also want to devote some energy into learning about the game engine itself. The fact that you don't know what timescale is probably means that you haven't experimented much with the engine (through the console).
You also may want to start training in an rocket arena environment.
This allows for a focus on combat and weapons training.
Whoa!!! Man, I thought I know this game, but I dont't think that's right now.