Monday, November 22, 2010

So awesome!

There's nothing quite like the feeling of accomplishment getting something done gives. Best natural high EVER!

What is it that I accomplished? Nothing much, just got a true 6 degrees of freedom camera to work correctly and fly around a boring plane. It can roll, it can climb, it can move forward, it can do pretty much everything I want it to do. The control scheme I'm using is WASD to move around the plane, RF to climb or fall, and QE to roll clockwise and counter clockwise, plus what I had done before of the mouse to pith and yaw.

I'm very happy, but I also need to document how I do this.

Keyboard events are generated whenever someone presses or releases a key. The camera class has a number of boolean toggles that are flipped whenever the corresponding event happens. Then, during the camera update, it checks for each of the toggles and if it is true, the camera is moved along the corresponding axis. Here, the use of vectors to store the camera's position and view pays off, since with these already in place advancing is trivial.

To move forward, I multiply the view vector by a scalar that determines my speed. The resulting vector is added to my camera's position vector, and it's done. To move back, it's the same but the resulting vector is subtracted from the camera's position. The other movements follow the same logic but along the up and right vectors. Finally, roll is a rotation of the up vector around the view vector, and is done with quaternions the same as yaw and pitch.

I'm very excited to be able to get around the world like this. Now I just need to populate this world with something interesting to visit. The next few updates should prove a lot more interesting, now that the basic framework at least is done.

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