Give the new update a shot ;D
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Close, but not 100% exactly what I had in mind. Steering still doesn't happen fully in camera space (which sounds weird I know). If the camera orbits 90 deg - yaw becomes roll in camera space. I'd like to avoid that. My idea was to eliminate perceptual alterations/flipping of controls due to viewing angle change, as much as possible. The focus is what is seen in the environment, not the ship.
This is kinda hard to verbalize. It got me intrigued so I made a small demo/test to see if the whole thing makes sense. The idea is to steer almost like in first person view regardless of ship orientation, so when playing, if I want to bring something into the center of the view - push buttons that are in direction of that something on the screen. This I think is best mode of steering in fights where your primary goal is to keep targets in view and your ship's actual orientation is secondary.
In the demo, when camera is not locked, perceptual control direction flipping will still occur when the look direction is opposite of ship's forward direction, but this could be tolerated I guess.
I also exposed some other parameters to play with, including camera lag in locked mode, to better suggest that you're actually steering.
Catharage - controls demo by nenad2d
The password is the name of your game, all lowercase.
Alright, with your demo I do finally understand what you mean! Playing around with it a bunch I do think it would be more problematic for casual players than the current solution though, because the perceptual control flipping is one of the issues testers have brought up with my original, fully 6DOF control scheme. I had assumed your goal, like that of many testers, was to get to a "YGIWYS" kinda control where the relation between inputs and outcomes is always consistent. The lil' cam lag is very nice. In any case I probably won't have time to implement this before NextFest, so I'll have to see how it lands as is right now. Would you at least say that the new modern controls are an improvement and better for you to play with? I definitely appreciate you taking the time to make this prototype and I'll keep working with it to see where the controls go next! ps. can you send me the lil demo on discord or somewhere so I can have it locally?
I'll send you the executable. I can give you the source code as well if you wish so you don't need to reinvent the calculations in case you want to try some of it inside the game.
You can perhaps put something like this as some sort of experimental alternative control scheme into a test build, and see how people react. Maybe it'll be bad for your typical player, I don't know, but as I played with it, I realized I can more easily "do what I intended" than with what you currently have in the game. There's no flipping whatsoever if you keep orbiting inside one hemisphere (front or back)
There's a particularly satisfying (and I'd guess useful) 180 turn maneuver where you yaw or pitch to one side and at the same time orbit the camera to other side to compensate. Try it out.
The main problem with craft-centric yaw/pitch/roll control, except that is exceptionally nerdy ;), is that it's meaningful only if the camera basis is aligned with craft basis, or at least very close in alignment, so that player's mental model of directions corresponds to what they see . In other words, it's for first person or close-behind third person view. As soon as this alignment goes out of whack, the confusion sets in and it becomes very taxing for player to mentally map controls to what they see. It's especially incompatible with free orbiting camera, as the relation between craft and view bases changes from moment to moment. The player constantly needs to look at the graphic of the craft, figure out its alignment on all 3 axes, and mentally re-map the controls to get where they want in the world.
The new controls are better but I still wouldn't call them "intuitive", especially for more casual players who don't have affinity for "realistic" piloting. I'll play some more and report back.
Imo the best way to think about control scheme is to take into consideration what the player needs to do in a typical gameplay loop, and asses which control scheme best caters to it. With classic 6DOF I think you confine the player to the (near) first person view if they want to maneuver without frustration, so they lose the joy of observing what their craft and enemies are doing from various angles while still being able to successfully steer at the same time.