Flying with a mouse, the War Thunder way
The feedback was blunt: flying with a mouse is too hard. It was right, and the fix isn’t a new flight model — it’s the one habit War Thunder’s mouse aim has that ours didn’t. Let go, and the plane comes home to level. That, plus two smaller mercies: a quieter phone and a door back out of flight school.
The mouse never had a center
We already fly the mouse the way War Thunder does — you don’t push elevator and aileron, you point a reticle where you want the nose to go and an instructor works the controls to get there, softening the pull as the wing nears a stall so a panic-yank doesn’t spin you in. All good. But there was a hole in it.
In flight the mouse is captured, and the reticle moves by relative motion — every flick nudges it and it stays nudged. There is no physical “straight ahead” to fall back to. So the plane kept flying whatever your last twitch asked for, and the only way to level out was to hunt the reticle back to a center you couldn’t see. New pilots never found it. They wandered the sky in a slow, permanent turn.
War Thunder’s trick is quiet and it’s the whole thing: stop moving the mouse, and the reticle eases back to the nose. Hands settle, wings level.
Give the reticle a home
So we did the same. While you’re flying, the aim reticle bleeds gently back toward straight-ahead — a soft spring with about a one-second pull. Working the mouse outruns it easily, so a held turn is still a held turn: keep sliding the mouse into the corner and you keep cranking. But the moment your hand goes quiet, the reticle drifts home and the plane rolls its wings level on its own.
We measured it. Drop a hard climbing-right flick on the reticle, then let the mouse go still, and its distance from center walks steadily home — 0.61 at the instant you release, 0.51 a third of a second later, 0.43 by three-quarters of a second, and still falling — instead of hanging pinned in the turn. Keep the mouse moving, though, and it doesn’t decay at all: it sat pinned at the edge (0.62) the whole time a hand kept feeding it. That was the line we cared about: help the lost, never fight the fighter. It rides entirely in the mouse layer, so the six-degree-of-freedom model and the server/browser parity check never moved. Prefer the old sticky feel? Mouse aim is still V, and the keyboard still commands every degree of stick.
A quieter phone
The scrolling text feed is a desktop luxury. On a phone that top-right column — kills, spotting, capture calls, chatter — ate a slice of a screen already carrying a stick, a throttle, a minimap and a fight, readable real estate a dogfight can’t spare. So on anything smaller than a desktop window the whole feed steps aside, chat composer and all. The beats that matter still land where you’re already looking — centered banners and audio — instead of a wall of text off in the corner. On the small screen, fly.
A door out of flight school
Flight School runs as its own little world — a private server with no clock and no crowd, so you can practice one skill at a time. The main game already links into it. It just never linked back out. Exit a drill and you landed on the scenario picker; the picker was the whole app, with no way home but editing the address bar. Players walked in and felt the door lock behind them.
Now there’s a ← BACK TO MAIN GAME button pinned to the
corner of the flight-school screen, always in view, never a scroll away.
When you arrive from the game it already knows where home is (the game
hands the school its address on the way in), so the door works with no
setup; self-hosters can also point a GAME_URL at it for
players who wander in by a direct link. Practice as long as you like
— the way back is one tap.
Same honest airplane. It just stopped hiding the center of the stick, the edge of the phone, and the exit.