Free-rotating Player with quaternions

Okay, why did my resource appear as a blog?

This resource adds the ability for Players to rotate freely using quaternions. The behaviour of the default player is not changed; you must extend Player to use the free rotation capability for your specific needs. Note: This resource breaks the AIPlayer thinking logic. I'm working on an updated getAIMove function to take my changes into account.

As soon as I figure out how to post this as a resource, I will. I'm taking out all the code changes for now, since I think blogs are public.

A feature I've long wanted is the ability for Players to rotate freely, for effects such as walking around planets in Super Mario Galaxy, or running on the walls and ceilings in AvP. There is an old resource for his, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't work very well (if at all) with 1.5.2 or the network. So here's my shot at it.

This resource adds the ability for Players to rotate freely using quaternions. The behaviour of the default player is not changed; you must extend Player to use the free rotation capability for your specific needs. This might be aligning the Player to the terrain or other objects, rotate based on move input (if your Player is flying or swimming) or whatever other wackiness you want.

Here's a quick overview of my changes. Basically, we add an 'orient' member to Player, which stores a quaternion with the Player's current orientation. We also need delta quternions for handling interpolation and the like. Whenever in the past we've set the Player's mRot value, we now compose a quaternion rotation and apply it to our orientation. The orientation is sent over the network, so this resource *should* work for multiplayer. Like I said, not yet tested. We use our orient quaternion to create transform matrices whenever we need to, and to orient vectors and boxes correctly.