Topic: I think I know what the "HOME" button is...

[KDR_11k]

Let's say you decide to change into a more comfortable position. That already results in a different controller position.

Anything more complicated than hitting "Home" when you've moved will confuse the casuals. Context-sensitive behaviour (game/paused) leads to confusion.

Nasty situation for your method: You play Smash Bros with someone else. You start to make a smashing movement but he hits Pause for a moment and unpauses again. Your center position is messed up.

[PaLaDiN]

KDR, but won't it register the movement until you press "Home"? I don't see how that avoids anything.

"Let's say you decide to change into a more comfortable position. That already results in a different controller position."

If you were pausing, that wouldn't matter, because your movements wouldn't be registered. If you weren't pausing, then pressing "Home" wouldn't help you either because movement would already have been registered before you pressed it. So if you move to the right and then press "Home" your character would already have moved to the right before you pressed it.

I'm not sure if we're looking at this differently. The way I envision it, lateral position doesn't matter, lateral movement does. Pausing means that none of your lateral movements affect the game itself. There is no neutral lateral position in the same way as there is no neutral mouse position. The game doesn't register how far you are from a certain position, it registers whether you're moving the controller left, right, up, down, forwards or backwards and how fast you're doing it. There is only a neutral tilt position (pointing straight towards the TV or straight up or straight left or what have you, depending on the game) in the same way as there is a neutral analog position. Of course you could tilt the controller while pausing and when you unpaused the game would register the new tilt, but that's the same as pausing and holding left on the analog stick before unpausing.

zakkiel, fine, how about if the game is paused, all registered movement only goes towards moving the cursor on the menu screen. No need to press select. The menu screen would have boundaries like a normal desktop screen where if you moved further right for example the cursor wouldn't move past the edge of the screen. Once you unpause, you can continue making lateral movements that affect the game.

So to take KDR's example, your friend pauses for a moment so your smashing movement is cut off before you execute it. Instead of moving your controller back to the "center position"(?) and pressing Home, all you have to do is make another smashing movement once he unpauses (assuming smashing takes lateral movement... if it just takes tilting then it's even easier, just press the button again because your controller's already tilted).

It sounds complicated but the way I imagine it, it isn't really. This is all a bunch of words because it's hard to describe the controller's movement in 3D space.

I'm having trouble seeing exactly what you visualize the Home button doing though. Do you want a neutral lateral and vertical position so holding the controller to your right means your character moves to the right indefinitely? I can't imagine that being comfortable, you'd have to press Home everytime you forgot exactly where the controller's neutral position was. A tilt neutral position is feasible because "pointing towards the TV" is easy to keep in mind. A vertical or lateral position is not because "one meter above the floor" or "two feet and five inches from the right wall" are not.

Edit: I can't help but feel you're both raising very valid points that I just don't understand. This would be easier if we had some standardized method of describing controller movement and position.

[KDR_11k]

No, it sets the current controller position as "center" when you press Home.

The controller has to have a "neutral" position because you cannot move it farther than your arms allow. If it represents e.g. the position of your sword the system has to know where it should assume the character so it knows whether a position is to your left, to your right or in front of you.

Obviously the gyros won't be a good substitute for an analog stick in some situations, telling the player to hold the rod to his right to walk right is no more intuitive than pushing right on a dpad or analog stick. The rod has to remove abstraction, not add it. Like the mouse and the touchscreen the rod is better for absolute controls (moving the controller moves some game element over an equal distance) than relative controls (position of the controller equals velocity vector of the controlled object).

[Artimus]

Home for the controller is when it's still. You don't need to recalibrate it after moving because there's nothing to recalibrate. If you have a room three squares wide, it doesn't matter if you're in the first, second or third squares, it just matters how far you move the controller. Moving the controller from square one to square two gives the exact same movement as square two to square three.

Recalibrating makes no sense, because for that there would have to be a home position and you'd never be able to continuously hold the controller in some pin prick point in space. Paladin is right.

[PaLaDiN]

"Obviously the gyros won't be a good substitute for an analog stick in some situations, telling the player to hold the rod to his right to walk right is no more intuitive than pushing right on a dpad or analog stick. The rod has to remove abstraction, not add it. Like the mouse and the touchscreen the rod is better for absolute controls (moving the controller moves some game element over an equal distance) than relative controls (position of the controller equals velocity vector of the controlled object). "

Ah, I think we're getting to the root of the confusion now. I'm not holding the rod to my right to walk to the right indefinitely, I'm pointing it there instead. Moving controller = absolute control. Turning/Pointing controller = relative control, for most games at least. If the rod is shoved to the right, the character would probably dodge in that direction. If it's pointed there, he'd just walk or run.

Obviously for FPS and sword swinging the controller becomes your hand and things get a little more complex, but in most other games that's how I imagine it happening.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Or you can imagine Mario holding and throwing objects in a variety of directions depending on how you swing your arm/controller, somewhat related to the sword-swinging application.

[KDR_11k]

Artimus: You'd need to recenter it if your position changes during gameplay. Say, you play that drumming game from the "trailer". For some reason or another (say, GF walks in and wants to sit next to you) you move somewhere eldse while playing the game. The game doesn't notice you moved your body and the drums would be in the same place. To hit them you'd still have to hit the same spot in the room. Might be hard to do if you moved more than one or two metres.

[Artimus]

Quote
Originally posted by: KDR_11k
Artimus: You'd need to recenter it if your position changes during gameplay. Say, you play that drumming game from the "trailer". For some reason or another (say, GF walks in and wants to sit next to you) you move somewhere eldse while playing the game. The game doesn't notice you moved your body and the drums would be in the same place. To hit them you'd still have to hit the same spot in the room. Might be hard to do if you moved more than one or two metres.

No, you don't. Because the game would always hold your sticks at centre. Just like a mouse in a PC FPS, you're going to be centered. And in any game where you're not it won't matter either.

The controller judges movement, not position. Just like a lightgun, and just like a mouse. If I unplug my mouse and move it, when I plug it back in I don't need to reset it.

[KDR_11k]

So you couldn't move the sticks to the sides? Sounds horribly limited.

To make your mouse analogy harder and more accurate (because I clearly said "during gameplay"): You can neither unplug nor lift the mouse, it registers all movement. What do you do?

[Artimus]

Press the pause button. That's why I said unplug. Pressing pause would stop all readings and when you sat back down you'd be fine.

It's pretty safe to assume you aren't going to be changing seats without pausing anyway, at least in any fast paced game.  

[PaLaDiN]

"So you couldn't move the sticks to the sides? Sounds horribly limited."

Yes you could. Why couldn't you?

What Artimus means by "the mouse is always centered" is that when you stop moving the mouse, the cursor stops moving. Holding the mouse stationary in the upper right part of the mouse pad doesn't mean the cursor keeps moving towards the upper right.