Skip to main content

Controllers and Game-state Management

The two issues I worked on this past week were getting game-pad controllers working with our project (~6 hours), and general work on the game-state systems to iron out some of the kinks and add some more functionality (~3-4 hours).  Unfortunately neither of these tasks proved 100% successful due to some set backs.

The game-pad controllers are so close to working, movement and look controls are fully functional, but I cannot get the Super Hands components to pick up the button events from aframe-extras.  The easiest way to see this is by looking at some code: 

<!-- Camera -->
<a-entity id="rig"
            movement-controls
            position="0 0 0">
    <a-entity id="camera"
                camera
                wasd-controls="acceleration: 125"
                look-controls="pointerLockEnabled:true"
                position="0 1.6 0"
                capture-mouse
                static-body="shape: sphere; sphereRadius: 0.0002"
                super-hands="colliderEvent: raycaster-intersection;
                    colliderEventProperty: els;
                    colliderEndEvent:raycaster-intersection-cleared;
                    colliderEndEventProperty: clearedEls;">
        <a-cursor id="cursor"
                    cursor-extend
                    downEvents="gamepadbuttondown"
                    upEvents="gamepadbuttonup"
                    rayOrigin="entity"
                    far="5"
                    interval="100"
                    objects=".grabbable, .clickable">
        </a-cursor>
    </a-entity>

The above code is the player element in the scene which is composed of a rig, camera, and cursor.  The 'movement-controls' element is the component that implements the game-pad controls and every time a button is hit on the controller it emits a 'gamepadbuttondown' event on the 'rig' entity that has the value of the pressed button in the event.details.index.  The problem is that the cursor element and the 'grabbable' component on grabbable elements need to listen for this event, so I created a custom component, 'cursor-extend', to see if I could extend the event down to the cursor element, but the cursor still does not hear the event.  Looking at the source code for the Aframe Cursor, I can see that the cursor component watches for inputs at the Canvas level of the document, so it looks like I would need to route the event through the canvas for the cursor to pick it up. 

Seeing as there is still a lot more important work to complete for our final deadline, I am going to leave the controller button support for if I have extra time later.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storyboard and Physical Layout

I finished up on some graphical elements for the user interaction specification component of the proposal due this coming Friday. This includes the storyboard panels and the physical layout diagram. As I was researching Oculus Rift physical setups, I had to determine how many sensors we would need for our game. I believe that 2 sensors will be sufficient, since we do not need a true 360 degrees experience as the Builder player will primarily be focused on the 180 degree space in front of them (i.e. the fireplace, the TV, and building the furniture). Our game is not an action packed game with any running or shooting. Of course, the player will still be able to fully look around but they shouldn't have a great need to move in the other 180 degrees of space. This would also take into consideration accessibility to our game, because it costs extra to buy a third sensor (the Rift only comes with 2) as well as requiring adapters and wire extensions. I spent about 4 hours researching ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sprint 2 - 3D Modelling the Environments

This week's focus has mainly been on writing the design document and preparing for the alpha prototype (~2hrs). A great majority of the written sections in our proposal is complete while a large chunk of graphics remains to be developed in the coming week. The sooner the design document is complete, the better of an idea we have in how the project will turn out in the end.  On my end, I am responsible for 3D modelling the environments that will be used in the alpha demo. These are also necessary for producing design comps. The environments will be very low poly environments using primitive shapes and basic forms to form the rooms, nothing too extravagant. Below are a few screenshots of the environments in their current state: Living Room (~3hrs) that will be played in VR and the Warehouse (~4hrs) on desktop; all modelled in Maya. Warehouse Back Side Warehouse Front Gate Warehouse Top-Down View Living Room Back View Living Room Front View Living Roo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sprint 4 - Alpha Presentation and Furniture

This week, the team presented our proposal for our project as well as demonstrated the alpha build. In its current state, the living room and warehouse environments are at their most primitive states and will be developed further over time. In future plans, I will have to redesign the living room to allocate more space to the user. It's currently too small and claustrophobic, which makes it difficult for a VR user to have enough building space. I spent the days prior to the presentation polishing the design comps then producing OBJ files of the environments to insert into A-Frame. I did this by going back and forth between a-frame and Maya and resizing the scene until it was the ideal size. This way, Mitchell is able to simply drag and drop the obj into the project without having to tweak the transformations (~5hrs). Table Model with UVs Chair Model with UVs Shelf Model with UVs After the presentations, I began working on modelling the 3 pieces of furniture that pl...
Post a Comment
Read more