Thoughts on the controls

Thursday, 22 August 2013 at 13:42

I have started implementing the basic controls for both the keyboard and joysticks and to test everything out I added basic thrust and torque controls, and while this is really hard to control as each torque requires a counter torque from stopping to spinning I started thinking. The WebGL version of lander and I recall the original (I still can’t get it to play on my win7 system) let’s you enter the desired orientation and let a AI controls the torque thrusts. This is a much easier control scheme as you don’t have to compensate for the rotational adjustments.

Going a step further one could add another AI layer to control the main thruster and let the player use a fps-like control to control the lander. With this control system a couple of issues arise on how the camera, the input display and, most important, the aiming should work, and I’m thinking time and testing will only tell if this is a feasible input system, I believe it’s a good way to testing the AI that will be controlling the enemy landers.