OT - Game Commander first impressions
I got my Game Commander Saturday, and it seemed to work pretty well. One Mexican-American (more Mex than Tex-Mex) was using it, and with no training the program recognized about 75% of his commands without a problem, despite his extremely heavy accent. We did train a couple of commands in Spanish, which worked well. (Normally you shouldn't need to train.)
I have 2 problems with it - one which was resolved through a very quick email support response:
1) Multi-key commands have too long of a delay between keystrokes. Turns out this is a setting you can change. I'll test that out tonight. This will be very cool if it works! I've already hot-keyed stuff like "/pet follow me" but it would be nice to do things like "/tell Beezlebub" and allow me to type in my message (or even macro those). This is good since Hot-keys within EQ always complete the command (ie, presses Enter), so you can't hot-key part of a command normally. Also it will be good to enter stuff like "/Group I'm running low on mana!" or "/shout I am the very model of a modern major-gerneral!"
2) There's no way to turn off the mike when in-game. So if you get into a conversation or the phone rings, you'll have to make sure to take the mike off of move it to the side. Turning down the microphone input levels helps somewhat. I might pick up a 3rd party rocker switch.
I didn't get a chance to play it with those games you guys recommended, but I might pick up Tribes this weekend and give it a shot. I did try StarCraft. The default template it ships with isn't good. I modified it and made a better one in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, this was before I applied the multi-key patch, so it wasn't as good. But with the multi-key patch, I could say "Supply Depot" which would map to "{b}{s}". StarCraft is not the best game for this product though, since too many of it's actions require some mouse input. (There are many template downloadable from their website, including a new one for StarCraft.)
I did try it with Explorer, and mapped "Shutdown" to F4. ;) Also mapped some other ALT commands and printing. Worked with it in Notepad to test the EverQuest commands. The company that makes it will make a non-game version soon, and I bet that would be pretty neat too!
Summary so far:
Usability: 8/10 - would have been a 9 but for the mute factor.
Use for non-games - 5/10
Stability: 10/10 - no crashes with it.
Compatibiliy: 8/10 - can't use while using another voice recog program like Dragon or Via Voice.
Cool/Nerd factor: 9/10 - if you own 3D glasses you should get this too.
Price: 8/10 - comes with a very good noise-reduction microphone.
Tim |
