Would a mechanical keyboard help in this situation?

[invictius]

I'm always over or undershooting jumps in wads, not sure if using one of these mechanical keyboards with linear switches would help. I'm guessing no, since a key is either on or off, wouldn't affect my run speed or how quickly I can let go, unless I'm mistaken?

[Edward850]

Yes, that is indeed correct. Including the fact that the jump action itself is also binary. I'm confused as to how this question even manifested.

[roadworx]

yes, get a mechanical keyboard. all other keyboards suck.

[invictius]

Edward850 said:

Yes, that is indeed correct. Including the fact that the jump action itself is also binary. I'm confused as to how this question even manifested.

I seem to be able to more accurately control what distance I run/walk for though. Might be handy in new-fangled FPS's where you come in and out of cover and such.

[fraggle]

I'm a mechanical keyboard user and the main advantage for me is for typing rather than playing games (I want the tactile feedback). Maybe it could help you though - it doesn't hurt to try. Keyboards with MX Black or Red switches aren't too expensive.

But, Edward850 is right though - the jump action is still binary. The "linear" description of the keyswitches just means that they move straight up and down without any tactile "bump" along the way. It doesn't mean that they give you any kind of analog action (pushing down a little bit won't move you forward only a little bit).

[Arctangent]

If there were analog keyboards, however, you would gain fine motion control with them - provided you managed to let you source port know to look at their analog input, as opposed to their digital input, anyway. Pretty much everything based on idtech 1 actually only truly has analog input for movement and turning and such, with digital input being converted based on whether or not the player is running.

That all said, though, all that would do would help with the horizontal part of a jump. I don't think there's a single Doom source port that adds jumping in such a way to allow analog input, so as both Ed and fraggle have said, it wouldn't help control your height in the slightest.

To be honest, I can't really even think of any game that has analog jump control. Typically you either just get lowered gravity while holding the button, the upward momentum from the jump is canceled when you release the button, you enter a jumpsquat state upon first pressing the button and your jump height depends on whether or not you're holding the button when the state ends, or various other ways to make it less reliant on hitting the jump button with different strengths to control your height and more about keeping the button pressed for different lengths of time.

[Linguica]

People actually are starting to make analog keyboards:

http://aimpad.com/
https://wooting.nl/