Script Access To Player Controls

[Damon Caskey]

Topic.

Two things that as far as I can tell are not really fesable at the moment are disabling player controls, and the classic "interface screw", as in reversing direction cotnrols, scrambling buttons, and so on. Both are common features of professional games.

The first can be sort of simulated with the noaicontrol flag, but that also disables physics control of the entity - which most of the time you still need. The second as far as I can tell isn't possible at all without scripting the entire control scheme from the ground up; way not worth the effort and I'm not even sure if it would work anyway.

What I thought might be to simply have variable for each input that can be set to override its default value (say, Direction UP becomes Direction RIGHT) or disable it outright with NULL or some such. Note I'm referring to the command input, not the actual button (IOW the UP key is still the UP key; you're only substituting what the engine does with it).

Thought of taking it on myself, but took a look at the control code and it promptly spun my head around.

DC

[utunnels]

I think you can change playkeys using changeplayerproperty in somewhere like update script,  thus the player control is also affected. But I never tried such stuff. Guess it may work in some way, but maybe something like freespeicial/run will not work as expected.

If you want to see how player controls are updated, you can check inputrefresh in openbor.c. But I made some change there a while back to buffer several steps of your inputs to simplify the freespecial and cancel logic, so it will be a bit more complex to fullly control them via a script now.

[Damon Caskey]

I think you can change playkeys using changeplayerproperty in somewhere like update script,  thus the player control is also affected. But I never tried such stuff. Guess it may work in some way, but maybe something like freespeicial/run will not work as expected.

Tried this, it only works on press/release, which can be disabled with keyscripts anyway. It has no affect what so ever on holding the keys, meaning the player can still walk about and control midair motion.

DC

[utunnels]

I see.
So besides playkeys property, you probably need releasekeys, keys(those that are still being held) and newkeys(those newly registered).

But I've added some new properties, so things have become a bit more complex, they are inputtime, combostep and combokey. Inputtime and combokey are two arrays that store your recent inputs for freespecial.

And there are some related stuff such as bothkeys and bothnewkeys.

So instead of messing with getplayerproperty, a better solution is adding a new script function that only mimics the behavior of inputrefresh, let the engien handles the complex part and leave the user black-boxed.