Now with "fly by... tablet?!?!?"
Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:27 am
Now I normally play Oolite running on Windows Vista (32 bit), but I've been poking about with various flavours of Linux to see whether it really is worth dumping Windows at some stage in the future - especially when moving to any 64-bit OS will mean practically reinstalling everything. So I've been running Ubuntu 12.04 in a VM VirtualBox just to see what it's like - and of course, decided to install the Linux version of Oolite as a test (1.75 - yeah, it was a while back). Fired it up just to see how it would start, but didn't play it at the time because Linux performance on my VM setup is incredibly laggy...
Anyway, last night I fired up Ubuntu in VM and just for the heck of it started Oolite as a new Jameson. I launched in the old Cobbie Mk III - and immediately found that my ship was inexplicably thrown into a full continuous roll to starboard. Tried to break out of it, but to my surprise the keyboard attitude controls wouldn't respond: not only could I not break out of the roll, pitch and yaw controls were out as well. I exited, restarted the game and launched - and the same thing happened again, the keyboard flight controls were well and truly munted. What was going on?
This time I hit "Pause" and went into the settings. And to my amazement I found that the Ubuntu Oolite had inexplicably decided that my Wacom Bamboo tablet was now the joystick! It all made sense to me now - the reason the ship was in a hard roll was because the table pen was in its holder on the side of the tablet...
I went back to the game, and this time was able to bring the ship somewhat under control by moving my tablet pen about on the surface of the Bamboo - but I certainly can't recommend using a tablet instead of a joystick as it's really counter-intuitive, especially when I discovered that tapping the stylus fired my lasers! (Brings a new meaning to "drawing a bead" on someone though
)
Anyway, last night I fired up Ubuntu in VM and just for the heck of it started Oolite as a new Jameson. I launched in the old Cobbie Mk III - and immediately found that my ship was inexplicably thrown into a full continuous roll to starboard. Tried to break out of it, but to my surprise the keyboard attitude controls wouldn't respond: not only could I not break out of the roll, pitch and yaw controls were out as well. I exited, restarted the game and launched - and the same thing happened again, the keyboard flight controls were well and truly munted. What was going on?
This time I hit "Pause" and went into the settings. And to my amazement I found that the Ubuntu Oolite had inexplicably decided that my Wacom Bamboo tablet was now the joystick! It all made sense to me now - the reason the ship was in a hard roll was because the table pen was in its holder on the side of the tablet...
I went back to the game, and this time was able to bring the ship somewhat under control by moving my tablet pen about on the surface of the Bamboo - but I certainly can't recommend using a tablet instead of a joystick as it's really counter-intuitive, especially when I discovered that tapping the stylus fired my lasers! (Brings a new meaning to "drawing a bead" on someone though
)