What are your wackiest ideas for a “universal” controller layout that would appeal to the fans of the Xbox, Nintendo, and PS layouts? You certainly can’t pick one of the three, that would be lazy and frankly unfair for the other two layouts. It’s got to be something that everyone agrees on, something different!
I’ve got a few ideas: NSEW (the cardinal directions), RGBA (colours, also transparent button could be cool…), or maybe CMYK (printer ink colours for ease of printing)
What are your ideas for the universal controller layout?
I personally prefer the asymmetric joysticks over the playstation symmetrical ones. RB, RT is descriptive of the button itself. B being Bumper and T being trigger.
I do agree with you in the shapes being more memorable though.
But how do you remember whether it’s the bumper or the trigger? Counting downwards 1 and 2 is easy. Knowing the one they’ve named “bumper” and the one they’ve named “trigger” is…less so.
I remember it because one is a bumper and the other is a trigger. Bumper like the front of a car, and a trigger like…a trigger.
I have no idea what makes one a “bumper” and one a “trigger”. The only meaningful difference is one is on top of the other.
the trigger is like the trigger of a gun. the bumper is a bump/bigger button
In what way are any of the buttons like the trigger of a gun? Plus, unless I’m mistaken, isn’t the bigger button the one you’d call a “trigger”? Just picking up the USB PS2-shaped controller I bought off Ebay, R2 is definitely the bigger button by a large amount, and I thought R2 is the one you’d call the “right trigger”. Am I misunderstanding something?
Bigger button as in, compared to the XYAB/Symbols buttons. The bumper just feels like a big button you press down. And the trigger does look like a gun trigger, due to the shape. Well, at least on an Xbox controller
One is a trigger lol
and the other one is a bumper
Someone else pointed out that when you say “trigger”, you mean like the trigger of a gun, as opposed to in the sense I was thinking, which is in terms of event scripting, where a “trigger” is the event that causes another event to begin. I was thinking of it like that because, well…none of the buttons look even remotely like a gun trigger to me.
It was clearer in the 360 days when the trigger was narrow. Now that it’s as wide as a bumper the distinction feels a bit dated. I still prefer the 360 triggers, they felt great for fine control.
Oh yeah that definitely looks more trigger-y.
The form is similar and in fps games the use is the same
Ok that bottom image is interesting. It certainly looks a little more trigger-like. I dunno what console that is, but I think it’s noteworthy that the PS2 controller has convex buttons for both R1 and R2. And even the PS5 seems to have only gone so far as making the button relatively flat:
With a steep convex bump out at the top, and a very gentle concave curve (much too gentle IMO to still be described as “similar to a gun trigger”) across the rest. Personally, I don’t particularly like the idea of naming the buttons in a way that is dependent on minute details of design like whether it is convex or concave. It’s unintuitive and particularly if you throw third-party controllers into the mix, could lead to the names being even more misleading and unintuitive.
It’s Xbox Elite controller. The trigger makes sense because out of the two “buttons”, it’s the one that’s more like a trigger. Not sure why giving it a number would make things clearer, you’d still have to guess which one of the buttons is #1 and which one was #2. Intuitively you’d probably able to guess which is which on both systems.