movement documentation and discussion

movement documentation and discussion

Postby gruntunbur » 30 Aug 2012, 14:10

I think a movement documentation could help implement, discuss and improve the current player controls.
this is my humble beginning with fairly random notes, and does not cover everything by a long shot
my language skills are pretty crap so "patches" are welcome.
its text with drawings
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lipsofsuna-doc-images-2.jpg
lipsofsuna-doc-images.jpg
Last edited by gruntunbur on 12 Sep 2012, 13:59, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby amuzen » 30 Aug 2012, 22:40

As mentioned in IRC, this looks quite good to me overall. The things that need some more thought are the sidestepping behavior and camera locking.

Unless I am missing something, running circles around the camera does not sound particularly useful. When exploring caves or other irregularly shaped areas, being able to avoid obstacles without changing your facing direction is quite useful. I would expect that most people are also used to traditional sidestepping and expect it from a game of this kind. Because of that, there would have to be solid rationale on why this scheme would be better than the normal approach.

Being able to lock the camera on an enemy sounds like a useful feature, but a few additional points need to be considered. It would be necessary to decide, how would the player enable camera locking, and how would the target be selected if there are multiple enemies around. Furthermore, it would be nice if this could be made work reasonably well in smaller spaces. I was mainly hoping that locking would help with ranged combat and spells, but I am not sure how you would be able to hit a moving enemy with slower projectile types if your facing direction is locked to its current position. Resolving that would be very helpful as well.

Regardless, everything else looks good to me, so well done. I hope you will keep working on this, and the design of combat controls in particular. We badly need those improved.
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby DrAltaica » 06 Sep 2012, 02:46

amuzen {l Wrote}:As mentioned in IRC, this looks quite good to me overall. The things that need some more thought are the sidestepping behavior and camera locking.

Unless I am missing something, running circles around the camera does not sound particularly useful.

Becouse gruntunbur just did a quick summery of Classic Super Mario 64 Third-Person Control and Animation by Steve Rabin :p

That's what Mario does is Super Mario 64 when you press the stick sideways.

If you going for Keyboard(/mouse) controls I think character-centric would be better.
press [W] to walk forward
Tap then press and hold [W] to run
press [W]+[D] to turn right.
press [D] to sidestep right.
press [S] to back up.
double tap [S] to do a quick 180
double tap [S] then press and hold [W] to do a quick 180 then start traveling the new forward direction(was backwards before double taping [S]).




amuzen {l Wrote}: When exploring caves or other irregularly shaped areas, being able to avoid obstacles without changing your facing direction is quite useful. I would expect that most people are also used to traditional sidestepping and expect it from a game of this kind. Because of that, there would have to be solid rationale on why this scheme would be better than the normal approach.

amuzen {l Wrote}:Being able to lock the camera on an enemy sounds like a useful feature, but a few additional points need to be considered. It would be necessary to decide, how would the player enable camera locking,
Use the Z trigger :p That's a Zelda:OoT reference.

amuzen {l Wrote}:and how would the target be selected if there are multiple enemies around.
Left and right shoulder buttons. I guess you would use the camera controls that are now being overridden by the lock.

amuzen {l Wrote}:Furthermore, it would be nice if this could be made work reasonably well in smaller spaces. I was mainly hoping that locking would help with ranged combat and spells, but I am not sure how you would be able to hit a moving enemy with slower projectile types if your facing direction is locked to its current position. Resolving that would be very helpful as well.
If the camera's looking direction is locked to the character's aiming direction you have a FPS, use the standard FPS controls FPS style like in the 3D Zelda games or autoMagicaly like Diablo1/2

Action RPG's usually have the camera's pan fixed to the world axis, if the play uses the camera control to look south the camera stays looking south as it moves to follow the character.

Like was said over Here with a chase cam you new to decouple the movement controls from the camera's chasing motions
The analog stick is a relative control device. Depending on the game state or how the character is oriented, pressing up on the stick may result in proceeding in any one of 360 directions. Designing good relativistic controls requires understanding how quality, feedback design and the other facets of mechanics design come together. Take the Mario Galaxy series. ... Running down the side of a planetoid is the same as running up it depending on how you look at it. A key point I must make here is "how you look at it" is largely the result of how the camera is designed. Galaxy's movement controls are built in with a wider turn radius than in Super Mario 64 and with a bit of smart-aim-assist like functionality. As long as you don't let go of the stick and let it recenter, you can push the system far enough that holding down makes Mario move up. As backward as it sounds, it feels completely natural.
Personally think trying to create a view dependent controls for character movement for a game with freely modifiable levels is a masochistic task.
But Gamasutra has an http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2 ... amera_.php[url]article of the Camera System from Full Spectrum Warrior[/url]
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby gruntunbur » 12 Sep 2012, 09:36

I have a hard time defending the "run around in circles" thing. ( btw DrAltaica, thats what you mean by "view dependent" right? )
the only thing i can say is that it felt right when playing tombraider-anniversary with mouse and keyboard
that of course is not a very good argument. more specific because LOS is not tombraider, and others might disagree about that "feeling"

added another batch of text and drawings. potential horrible typo's etc. please let me know
rereading it made me realize there might be a slightly better and more easy to explain way of doing the targeting
I'll work that one out when i get to it
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby amuzen » 16 Sep 2012, 15:40

Sorry for the delay in my reply, I had somehow missed your update. Anyway, I really like your auto-aim idea. When the button needs to be held down for auto-aim to be active, it can be easily used to get the enemy under the crosshair, but it does not get on the way if you do not need it. It could also help with ranged attacks since you would get the rough aiming direction by pressing the button and then manually fine-tune after releasing it. The target selection scheme looks like something that would also work well in-game. Excellent!

Your combo moves and power attacks also make sense to me. The only thing I am not sure about is the part about automatically facing the enemy when attacking. I think that this could potentially cause confusion in some cases, such as when mining and some NPC is walking close to you. I think that the game should rather uses broader, physics based attack sweeps so the attack will succeed if the model of the weapon goes through the enemy. This should be quite forgiving about the aim while remaining intuitive about when you will or miss. Furthermore, this sounds like something that would already be covered by holding the auto-aim button.

By the way, I did some background research on camera modes that might be of interest when thinking about the camera controls. I will also add your auto-aim design and perhaps some of the other things to the article since they already look solid to me.
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby gruntunbur » 25 Sep 2012, 21:01

and here am I replying pretty late :)
haven't done any drawing yet for the "simpler" version of the targeting
besides that, I don't have any solid thoughts left to share on the movement controls at the moment

good to know you find the targeting thoughts useful.
and agree. the auto-turn was already covered trough the targeting for example. didn't realized that.
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Re: movement documentation and discussion

Postby amuzen » 06 Oct 2012, 20:50

I incorporated many of your ideas to a newly created wiki page. I also added there some of the existing mechanics we had, as well as a few thoughts about balancing ranged combat.

Keep the ideas coming. This will likely become one of the top priorities for the next release cycle, whenever it starts, so all the help will be greatly appreciated.
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