Monday, March 25, 2013

Working with touch screen FPS controls

Hopefully this'll be a very short post since this is just an update on the Kuba engine. I have recieved some very helpful feedback about the controls so I have been trying to rewrite them.

I found the problem came from the "turn and look" controls on the right side of the screen. Originally I was using the same sort of control settings as I did for the left "move and strafe" invisable virtual joystick, but it really just made moving around very confusing...

In short I ended up going with the swipe based control that a lot of other android FPS games use, but before that I was trying a weird mix between swipe controls and a virtual joystick... sort of a dynamically located joystick the sets its new location when you change directions... (eg: if you start turning left by dragging your thumb left, when the thumb first touches it grabs the X location and measures the distance from that point to figure out how fast you will turn, but if you swivel right, it sets the new X location to measure from at the point where you switched directions on screen)... It was better then the original code... but felt very weird.

Well, I'll be posting a new update later on today with the controls I've just written.

Thanks to everyone that tested it for me so far, and thanks to anyone who tests it in the future.