Gamepad shooting, part 1

Added this to the game today, and it works fine, although it feels weird, especially since I spent the last one year playing the game with keyboard and mouse…

Most of the work today was more game design related than tech, fine tuning parameters so that shooting feels fine/cool…

For the normal weapons, I feel I got it… Basically I check the line of sight in the direction the player is facing, see if there’s any enemy there and if he’s in a small cone in front of the player, shoot directly at it, instead of the actual direction… There’s about 5 degrees tolerance (maybe this must be distance dependent, instead of just angle based), since the gamepad isn’t as precise as the mouse in this regard… This also accounts for differences in height between the enemy and the player…

Now I have another problem: positional weapons… For example, the teleporter jumps into the cursor position when fired, but now I don’t have a cursor anymore, so I have to figure out another way to do this, like the grenades… Unfortunately, what was one of the most powerful weapons in the game will become just a nifty thing instead, I think…

I considered in adding a pause mode so that the player can leisurely select the teleport destination, but I think that runs a bit against what I’m trying to build with the game, so I’m running an experiment on “length the secondary fire is pressed” to define where the target will be… Maybe that works!

Now listening to “Coal” by “Leprous”