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Moving in the World

by Richard Bottoms · in RTS Starter Kit · 03/12/2005 (9:09 pm) · 10 replies

Congrats to all the codehounds who have finally giving me all the tools I need to make a RTS game. I've combined the RTS with the Lighting kit, got ShowTool, and I'm ordering Cartography Shop on Monday after suffering with Quark forever.

Just a bit more knowledge and I am off to make something really cool.

Here's how I want the keyboard and trackball or mouse to work:

WASZ - Forward/Left/Right/Back
Q - Roll forward (like a sommersault) around the center axis
E- Roll backwards
C- Rotate Right
X-Rotate Left

Up Arrow - Roll forward (like a sommersault) around the center axis
Down Arrow - Roll backwards
Right Arrow - Rotate Right
Left Arrow - Rotate Left

D - Zoom in on currently selected object(s)
F - Zoom out on currently selected object(s)

Space - Jump

The track ball should allow free movement in all directions, spinning left. right, rolling up & down similar to Painkiller and other games.

Left Mouse to Fire when it's an option,

The mouse's real function woud be selections from the various menus, shifting the mini-map bounding box and unit selection. The Holy Grail would be for the mouse to not be trapped in the play area when in less than full screen mode and for the cursor in the game area to be inactivated and invisible when the mouse is outside the game window.

Now I know default.bind.cs is where these options are set. My questions center around the yaw/pitch and zoom combinations.

As far as the mouse-in/mouse-out behaviour I am guessing it will take some changes to the C++ code to get that to work.

I am able to pay a reasonable amount to get this done right away so drop me a line. Any scode or script changes I pay for will be given back as freeware. So newbies won't have to re-invent the wheel.
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Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#1
03/12/2005 (9:49 pm)
Umm...just implement the advanced camera resource, and use the orbit mode.

Some of your interface inputs are rather confusing though...jump what? All of the units you have selected?

And when you say roll/rotate, are you talking about a camera, or what you have selected, or?

Torque Owner Richard Bottoms
#2
03/12/2005 (10:13 pm)
Appreciate the dialog.

Advanced camera resource? Keep in mind many folks are coming to TGE, or coming back to a license they've owned for a while because of the publication of '3D Programming All in One'. Nothing in the index about what the Advanced Camera Resource may be. I will look in the forum though.

Space Bar = Jump. That may not apply here as opposed to a FPS.

Roll & Rotate does mean the camera. I 'get' from the discussion that using the RTS means thinking about camera and object movements differently than in a FPS. In this case I want to move the camera as fluidly as possible.

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#3
03/12/2005 (10:16 pm)
Do a search in the resources for "advanced camera".

Also, quite a few variances on new cameras for the RTS-SK have been discussed (mostly for FPS, but some of the thoughts will still apply) here in the RTS-SK private forums..you may want to spend some time and just scroll through the pages and see if anything sounds good!

Torque Owner Richard Bottoms
#4
03/12/2005 (10:20 pm)
For those interested the Advanced Camera Resource is here:

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5471

Torque Owner Richard Bottoms
#5
03/12/2005 (10:27 pm)
Appreciate the suggestion and I will dig in a bit.

Though I am still willing to just buy it. I know it sounds a little heretical, but I have other areas of gaming where I'd rather burn my brain cells, especially when I am sure someone has the know how to knock this out in an hour or two.

Torque Owner Jeff "Ddraig Goch" Parry
#6
03/12/2005 (10:28 pm)
Richard, you might want to look at the coming Torque Constructor See Here before going with Cartography Shop.

Torque Owner Richard Bottoms
#7
03/12/2005 (10:38 pm)
>Richard, you might want to look at the coming Torque Constructor See Here before >going with Cartography Shop.

Thanks. If this was Monday I would have already ordered it.

Torque Owner Richard Bottoms
#8
03/12/2005 (10:43 pm)
BTW, with the announcement of TGE 1.4, I hope the RTS & Lighting guys consider getting together to offer merged versions of their products for the upgrade from version 1.3. I wouldn't bitch about paying a few dollars to save hours of work. More if this is done for the TSE as well, which I also own.

Hunting down all these annoying bugs using WinMerge is educational but not really the most efficient use of my leisure time.

Torque Owner Ed Johnson
#9
03/13/2005 (1:40 pm)
Re: Torque Constrctor... AWESOME!!!

anyway.. hehe...

is the zoom functionality still in the RTS starter kit?
How easy would it be to say assign gui buttons (plus and minus) to zoom in and out (respectivly)

Just two simple buttons...
Plus + to zoom in...
Minus - to zoom out

(from there we could probably figure out implementing zoom the way we want it)

Torque 3D Owner Martin "Founder" Hoover
#10
03/13/2005 (7:56 pm)
@ED, it would be a simple matter to setup + and - gui buttons to control camera zoom. Look in default.binds.cs for this:

function updateOrbitDistance(%val)

Basically it is making discreet changes to the zoom level for each "tick" of the mouse wheel turning. The amount that the zoom changes is specified by the orbitStep parameter in the RTSCamera dataBlock.