News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
They probably should have known that when they saw the sub was controlled by a modified game controller.
FWIW, using game controllers is a reasonable thing to do. that game controller? Naw. But a good PS controller? Sure. Xbox? Alright. Nintendo? Only if it’s that weird N64 one.
If you stop and think about it, they’re compact, reliable and comfortable to use. Major consoles invest a relative shit ton of cash into developing it; and there’s plenty of drivers for whatever system you’re using.
There were a lot of straight up stupid design choices, but that wasn’t one of them. (Though their specific choice in controllers… yeah let’s mock that. It’s a terrible controller.)
I'm pretty sure the US military adopted the use of Xbox 360 controllers for a lot of things as well, because of the reasons you mentioned.
Ergonomic, comfortable in the hands, intuitive.
Another one for the military is that the vast majority of their recruits would already be intimately familiar with the interface, and not need to train muscle memory for it.
Is it just me, or does anyone else also do a double-take to this day every time somebody calls an Xbox controller "ergonomic," because they think back to the original? It's especially memorable to me because of how Penny Arcade lampooned it:
I very clearly said "Xbox 360 controller"
Not sure why you brought up the og.
Because it makes me think of it. Is that so wrong?
I was in the minority in that I loved those bigass controllers. GunValkyrie was also amazing once you learned that you're supposed to be playing the game almost entirely in the air.
A wireless controller as well and no backup.
I wonder if they even had spare batteries.
The spare batteries were probably rolling around with the piss pitcher.
Ps5 controller nah, imagine getting stick drift 1 mile below the surface?
I would say exactly the opposite. There's nothing wrong with that game controller as a game controller. Logitech's pads were the gold standard for PC game controllers for years before XInput was released, and the F710 carried that design process forward well into the XInput era. It also has the advantage of having a dedicated wireless channel instead of relying on Bluetooth, which lowers latency and reduces the chance of pairing issues.
But no game controller should have been used to control a submarine at depth with people inside. It is not what they are built for.
Not even the N64 one, the analog stick ground down the surface material underneath the stick, with time leading to stick-drift. One could field-strip the analog stick and remove the ground materials from it, but the lack of material would have diminishing accuracy returns. The sticks wouldn't necessarily drift but they'd be flappy as fuck. Reminds me, I gotta see if this random Internet seller is selling those again to refurb some controllers...
N64 recentered the analog stick on startup. If you were holding the stick in any direction when you started it then that position would be center and allowing the stick to return to physical center would actually be moving in a direction.
I get what you're saying, but I would also suggest that submarines going down to the Titanic should probably not risk being built with off-the-shelf parts.
Custom components are more likely to be poorly tested, and to fail. The drivers are more likely to be unstable.
Off the shelf components are far less likely to have defects in them, far more heavily tested, and to be designed by people who specialize in designing that one thing, with far better documentation available.
Unless of course you’re buying them used off eBay for 10 bucks.
Personally, I would have gone with a Logitech G56 HOTAS set up. You don’t necessarily need all those buttons, but the drivers are designed to allow you to easily customize them (including with custom curves.) and the stick would give you 3 axis control (twist for use,)
There are also well-tested, robust industrial analogue controllers, but they were probably not on the radar of the guy building a submarine with factory-seconds carbon fiber.
I think the whole sub was build in. I trust more a controller made by big company mass production for angry kids that an custon one.
Modified gaming controllers are used for all sorts of things. But generally they pick ones that are good. The Logitech one that was used is known to be a pile of shit.