I said I'd work on something else, but I couldn't leave the camera as it was. I knew there had to be a better way to do what I'd been doing, and it turns out there is. Its called quaternions, and its confusing. Thankfully I've found plenty of explanations online, most directed at modeling in 3d. So I'm taking a bit from a few different tutorials to make my camera more robust. The code from NeHe's Lesson: Quaternion Camera Class is coming particularly handy.
I'm not lifting the camera class completely, it doesn't do everything I need, but the quaternion class is handy and saves me the time it would take me to fully grasp how to multiply them and turn them into matrices. So I'm keeping that. I'll still need to read up on them, though. As it is things mostly worked, though I'm still stuck with the controls being reversed after making a half turn (inverting up and down).
After a couple of days of thinking about it, it's occurred to me that the way I'm going about it might be to blame. Particularly with the mouse. I'm trying to keep track of attitude and bearing, both on 360 degrees. I had to, because if I didn't let them move freely (by limitting attitude for instance to +/- 90°) then I wouldn't be able to make full revolutions. The problem is that when I go over 90° I start flying inverted, but moving the mouse still adjusts the absolute angle around the fixed y axis. Which inverts it. I could try telling the program to invert the rotation when I go over 90°, but then if I rolled while flying forward I'd have the same problem.
The idea I'm toying with now is to keep track of the camera's frame of reference. I am not yet sure how I'll go about doing this, though some vector algebra and the cross product seem to offer promising opportunities.
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