I’m about to produce and start selling a grommet based range of joysticks. There will be two flavours: American will look and feel like a wico (but the look and feel are highly customisable), and Japanese will be smaller, lighter shaft, 35mm ball.
I don’t play fighting games, and I’ve not felt a korean grommet stick.
So tell me if if you think a grommet might work for fighting games.
The obvious difference in characteristic to a sprung pivot, is the force/displacement curve near centre. On my stick, which is a precision fit between shaft and grommet, there is no noticeble free play region but the initial centering force is zero in the limit and then climbs approx linearly.
Korean sticks are better for 3D fighters like Tekken and Soul Calibur games, and a lot of gamers will tell you there’s no point in do something similar (Myoungushin Fanta is the best of the Korean sticks period) but but if you can achieve just the grommets with different tension levels like the ones from ASI and manage to sell them in a reasonable price, then you can get the attention from all those who like to play with k-sticks, including myself.
I don’t mean to troll or anything, so I’m asking this out of pure curiosity as to the direction you and your product are going: if you haven’t used/felt a Korean stick (standard-issue retail grommet-based stick) and don’t play fighting games, why would you be trying to develop and market a grommet-based stick to fighting game players?
I almost feels like saying “I don’t have a driver’s license and I’ve never owned a sports car, but I wanna make the next Ferrari.” In this niche-market of a niche-market of the gaming fandom, I would normally presume that most products are developed not only by having a first-hand need for said product, but also having tried and experimented with the currently available competition to determine what exactly needs to be improved on…
Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m jabbing at you, I’m just genuinely interested in hearing your perspective.
FreedomGundam hit the nail on the head for me. I am curious about the stick but I am also curious as to your reasoning for bringing it to the market given your current experience with those particular types of sticks.
The direction I came from is classic arcade games, which used grommet sticks, and they are no longer available, so people will want them.
Also, at a fundamental engineering level, I don’t like the sliding/lifting pivot concept. It can be done well, and feel OK, as long as you don’t mind the notchy feel.
So that’s why I started designing grommet sticks.
This was before I knew anything about the fighting scene (I still don’t) or about Korean sticks using grommets.
It turns out my first designs are small, about JLF size. So I might as well try to tailor them to the fighter market.
How can you design something better if you haven’t used the existing is an interesting question. I’d answer that if you know the result you want you don’t need to know how close the existing solutions are. The hard part is knowing what is wanted.
Admitting to the purists on a tech forum that you have no knowledge of existing products is admirable from an honesty perspective, but not so bright from a marketing perspective. Your best bet first step would be to purchase everything available on the current market and test them all out and see why people prefer product X over Y.
Most people who are capable of making (say) levers for arcade sticks have little or nothing to do with them (and likely never will). This shouldn’t be so shocking as some are making it out to be, and there is no reason to be dismissive.
Rather than trying to improve an existing design, I believe it would be more interesting to see an original perspective from outside the community. So long as jimmer isn’t influenced by those existing designs, I believe he can make something beyond our expectations. If he is truly understanding of the principles necessary to make a lever and willing to go through several working prototypes to get there, then we should be excited. (We might witness a lever constructed from scratch!)
If a wandering artisan (just imagine da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ben Krasnow, or insert engineer/artist) walked in, heard of arcade sticks for the first time, and passionately made his own working interpretation without you offering any explanation, wouldn’t you want to at least try it out? Even if the result does not suit your taste, this artisan has asked nothing of you and has done his best to make a product which if nothing else serves to diversify the range of available products (a development always welcome). The last thing I would do is shove schematics in their face and say “this is how it is done”.
I will purchase some more sticks, partly to evaluate them and partly so I can understand what users are saying about them.
It will also let me offer say a ‘korean feel’ version or a JLF feel version, if that means anything.
It will also allow me to say mine are better at marketing time
I do have another concept that hasn’t been seen in production to my knowledge, but it would probably be a harder sell, not least because it’ll cost more. At least grommets are an established technology with some (a lot?) of fans. So I’ll do that product first.
The classic crowd are very into leaf switches on their buttons and joysticks. And so am I. I don’t like what the hysteresis zone on a snap-microswitch does to the actuation pattern (it puts fuzzy zones on all the borders), so maybe I’ll be the one to introduce leaf switches to modern fightsticks.
At the moment I’m planning on leaf switches. Optical switches (the Flash1). And I’m experimenting with a non-snap microswitch (you could call it keyboard style). I’ll do snap-micros as well.
Note that my comments are all theoretical. When I say fuzzy borders that’s not necessarily something that anyone can feel or even detracts from the performance.
Is there a grommet stick currently that you can buy, or even retrofit, with optical switches?
@deserada
I’m totally in agreement with what you mentioned, and I don’t think anyone had the intention of being dismissive about @jimmer’s ideas and project. We, as Tech Talk, obviously welcome fine-tuned equipment and diversifying the available options to all of us.
I personally was just concerned more from a marketing point a view, like @FrankCastleAZ had said. It’s one thing to create a component from scratch for your own needs (since you’d obviously know what you want and need), but it’s a separate thing to want to make it available to the public for purchasing without doing the appropriate market research.
I don’t doubt that @jimmer most probably has the technical knowledge to determine how to make a kick-ass grommet-based lever; I’m more concerned about how he’s going convince the majority of potential buyers to pick his lever over one already available (Crowns or Fantas). As a personal example, I’ve tried using both a Crown and Fanta before, and I didn’t like them much. I’d very much like to hear @jimmer tell me that his new lever is better than the Crown/Fanta because of reasons ABC and XYZ. Kind of like we can objectively compare the feel during operation of a JLF and an LS-32, no matter how similar or different the interior functionality is.
Again, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see this product come to fruition and then we’d all have additional options for our arcade sticks.
@jimmer
Don’t let any of this discourage you or anything. We just all want to hear more details about your ideas and goals with your product.
Even if you can create the best grommet based stick in the world with the most ingenious design, the bottom line is you’re going to attempt to make it available for the public for purchase. As much as I hate to state it, the likelyhood that people will purchase from an independent creator instead of the major manufacturers is slim. There’s plenty of independent creators in the community, from PCB makers like Toodles and Phreakazoid, and other parts manufacturers like stuff from Paradise Arcade Shop, Buttero (sic) etc, but these guys do it for the love and don’t make tremendous amounts of money. They primarily only sell to the extreme niche market and modders. If you’re doing it expecting any heavy profit, I just don’t see it happening. Nonetheless, good luck. You’ll need it.
On the profit side. I didn’t design this to make money. My main plan is to make cabinets with authentic controls. But there were no new controls available that matched what I wanted. Especially for my first 2 games of interest: Defender and Robotron. That’s why I’ve ended up designing a new 2way stick, and an 8way grommet leaf stick.
Now it’s done, I’m obviously interested to see if I can make any money from selling the sticks.
I don’t know how to go about it, I’m here looking for ideas. Maybe I want a good player, and one with influence , and probably a korean stick user, to try out a prototype and feed back his findings to me and this community.
note: The best Defender player is using prototype01 of my 2way design, and has said very good things about it (eg it immediately improved his play, no familiarisation period). That hasn’t quite made the world gaming news though But it’s not available for sale yet either, so…we’ll see.
Before that though I need to work out how to tune the prototype. And for that we are back to me needing examples of the favourtie sticks. …
OK Myoungushin Fanta is ordered. Can the top be changed to ball top? I’ve got a couple of friends who are OK at SF2, and they use balltops. And it’s one less variable to confuse things when I’m comparing to a JLF.
I’ll order a JLF and all the mod parts from Paradise, and maybe a Crown too ?? Which one? (or two)
I would recommend contacting both Focus Attack and Paradise Arcade about replacement shafts. They both sell replacements shafts but I am not sure, from the product descriptions, if any of what’s available would be a drop in replacement for a Myoungshin Fanta.
Nice video from Markman’s channel showing Crown stick dexterity, back when they were pushing the KE sticks (VS S.H. stick in the vid, but was used to promote the KE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w3ldd5n1Sk
I will offer a wide range of restrictor gate shapes and throws. I’m talking new hybrid shapes, and also 0.10mm increments on throw (at the gate) if wanted.
But how do you like screw adjustment for tweaking engage distance ?
Or different shaped actuation maps that bring the diagonals in closer?
Here’s an actuation pattern I’ve been thinking about. It brings the diagonal in closer. I can’t avoid the flare of the diagonal zone because this is a mechanical design (not electronic mapping).
But it’s not available for sale yet either, so…we’ll see.