Oolite Bulletins

Rather than configuring yaw vs roll, up vs down, mouse buttons and wheel by way of M and CTRL-M, perhaps this could be put in a configuration file?

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Yeh, well, it's late.

Just amazed somebody would stop playing something as good as Oolite because mouse control didn't include yaw, so I guess my brain just ignored that bit.

Don't worry, I was starting to feel the 'itch' again , I only stopped for a while because I had switched from a trader role to a more combat-oriented role, and since I just couldn't get the hang of roll/pitch, my options were using keyboard only (alright, but not great) or buy a joystick.

I opted to just wait for 1.74 to come out and get right back to hunting those fugitives.

I can understand you waiting to have mouse yaw for combat.

I used to use joystick and mouse for some FPS shooters and I think I used it for Freelancer as well.

In Oolite, I could envisage using the joystick to strafe left/right and accelerate/decelerate and the mouse to aim (ie. point the nose of the ship). Roll might be the twist function that some joysticks have.

It was either for Frontier First Encounters or Freelancer that the joystick did the reverse of what I expected, a bit like the mouse now in Oolite.

In the end I messed around with the joystick driver and got it to invert the controls as I wanted. Anyone know how to do that with the mouse in Linux?

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Just amazed somebody would stop playing something as good as Oolite because mouse control didn't include yaw, so I guess my brain just ignored that bit.

I haven't stopped playing Oolite, and I don't think I will: it's too great

I made this request for a reason only...

I'm not playing Oolite on my main PC since I bought a netbook. The game runs really well on the Samsung N130 (Win 7) and I like to play it in bed .

But imagine... A wooden (little) tablet to put the netbook on it, the mouse and the power cord... Everything put on my legs. Now, put in the scene a wired Xbox360 joypad (the one used to play on the main PC).

Something seems to evoke the Saker cockpit description in Frontier: First Encounters manual to me (plastichrome panel and liqui-coach sit...)

In this situation, using a pad is not that easy. I'd rather play using mouse.

But mouse control is not that comfortable to me as joystick control, expecially in hard combat situations.

I made this control suggestion only to fulfill the gap between the two control modes...

So anyone could play Oolite in bed, on his own netbook, being able to choose the preferred control method (I will be the first )

Mistiff wrote:

MOUSE UP = nose up
MOUSE DOWN = nose down
MOUSE LEFT = strafe left
MOUSE RIGHT = strafe right
RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON + MOUSE LEFT/RIGHT = roll left/right (usefull in manual docking)
CENTER MOUSE BUTTON = center all axis
MOUSE WHEEL = engine speed
LEFT MOUSE BUTTON = fire

I can see how this would be ideal for playing with your bedroom setup. I think what this shows is that the controller setup be that keyboard, joystick or mouse, needs to be entirely user configurable.

mcarans wrote:

Mistiff wrote:

MOUSE UP = nose up
MOUSE DOWN = nose down
MOUSE LEFT = strafe left
MOUSE RIGHT = strafe right
RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON + MOUSE LEFT/RIGHT = roll left/right (usefull in manual docking)
CENTER MOUSE BUTTON = center all axis
MOUSE WHEEL = engine speed
LEFT MOUSE BUTTON = fire

I can see how this would be ideal for playing with your bedroom setup. I think what this shows is that the controller setup be that keyboard, joystick or mouse, needs to be entirely user configurable.

But complete user reconfigurablility for mouse/KB/Joystick across 3 OS platforms using Common Open Source Libraries seems to be much easier said than done.

We need an OpenCL (Open Controller Library)

Doesn't the SDL that Oolite uses abstract from the complexities of supporting controllers on multiple OSs? (It's description says: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer.)

If not, maybe Allegrol (http://alleg.sourceforge.net/) could be used. (Allegro is a game programming library for C/C++ developers distributed freely, supporting the following platforms: Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), Windows, MacOS X and Haiku/BeOS. Older versions also support DOS and QNX. It provides many functions for graphics, sounds, player input (keyboard, mouse and joystick) and timers.)

Given an infinite amount of free time, and an infinite amount of free brain power, all is indeed possible. Us people developing for Oolite seem to be falling somewhat short of the mark...

However, all is not lost! If you have some programming experience, do feel free to add all the extra tweakability to the mouse / enable Oolite to use allegro instead of / in addition to SDL!

As always, everybody is invited to contribute: if it works & we agree it doesn't 'break' the gameplay, we can then integrate the new code to trunk. That's how some new hud positioning options (to cope with different proportions screens using just one hud.plist) & the 2nd mode (fastest route as opposed to least number of jumps) on the advanced navigational array got inside the 1.74.1 code in the first place.

While on the subject of custom input, I'm sure it would be really nice to have a key config & a mouse config screen, even though I never felt the need to reconfigure keys myself (and yes, I play using the keyboard, none of these newfangled 'mice' and 'joy-sticks' for me, thankyouverymuch...). Anyone who codes those two config screens will get my eternal gratitude - well, maybe not eternal, but gratitude nonetheless!

I'm not denigrating the fine efforts of all Oolite and OXP developers. Far from it. I am amazed at what has been achieved.

And we can achieve even more!

Anyway, it's always worth repeating that the door is always open for people to improve on the Oolite codebase... that's how every one on the current dev team got involved to begin with.

I myself noticed just a couple of things I wasn't 100% happy with (one was the on-screen text messages tendency to 'stick' to the screen), that was 2 & half years ago & my own todo list has been growing ever since!

Hi all,

Not sure if the inverting mouse option has been implemented or not - for me I badly needed the 'move mouse up - ship goes up' style and the only solution I found was this:

http://www.maf-soft.de/mafmouse/

Some guy has made specialised drivers that give you the option to flip the mouse at the driver level which works with Oolite (among other games) and solves this problem.

Hope this helps.

PC

Hi pc2099, and welcome to the friendliest Board this side of Riedquat.
I'm a 'stick man myself, but that will be useful to many of us, I'm sure.
Cheers.

Hi pc2099,

My first post on these forums was on this subject.

In the end, in the absence of mouse inversion, I opted to buy an XBox 360 controller. I have described my setup (on Linux) here if you decide to go down the gamepad/joystick path:
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Linux_ ... d_Gamepads

Cheers,
Mike