The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

So question:
normal or inverted for look up/look down? And can you say why?

I'm strictly inverted. It's either because of all the flight sims, or because I roughly map the control stick to the top of my character's head, so that pulling back / down is like raising chin, tilting head back. (Actually those two explanations aren't mutually exclusive)
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[The Great Unwashed]

Inverted all the way, baby. It's hard to say why, it just seems to make sense, I guess?
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[aderack]

Depends on context. Generally normal, though. The less abstraction the better!
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[ee_emm_ecks]

rumble or no lol

what difficulty do you play on the most lol

whats ure sens in halo tripple lol
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Only a philistine believes in having fun. Rite guys?

[Six]

normal.

it feels weird to consider that twin-stick camera control wasn't ubiquitous until a few years ago. i remember being confused for a little while in halo, as i swapped back and forth between inversion over the course of a subsequent (but irregular) multiplayer sessions at a friend's house. it wasn't that i had trouble grasping the idea of twin-stick control -- far from it: once i got a bit more acquainted with the game, i actually wiped the floor with my xbox-owning buds a few times until the magnitude of their experience finally outweighed that of my mad skillz -- but i guess that in terms of joystick-based first person control, my only precedents were mechwarrior and flight sims and the like. (i also swapped handedness repeatedly when first playing guitar hero at the same friend's house a while back, but i think that's mostly 'cause i'm retarded.)

if i were to play a flight sim or what-have-you on a controller today, i'd probably go with a normal y-axis, but on a traditional joystick i'd invert it without a second thought.
(actually, i hear some diehards are making custom usb adapters for the sidewinder 3d pro, and damned if i'm not tempted.)

[aderack]

[kirkjerk]

It's the one irritating theme about playing through a single player game "tag team" style; the guy I tend to do that with prefers "normal" control, and so we always have to swap.

It just seems odd to me that there's such a fundamental, ingrained difference, and the other method feels so foreign. It seems like a deep schism, mapping a control to part of the avatar vs mapping the control to the viewport.

(It's kind of funny that left/right generally doesn't have this issue, though I've seen it feel backwards, I think it was "Graffiti Kingdom"... pressing left would swing the behind-the-player camera left, which would tend to show what was to the player's right.)

You have to admire games that try to be cute about "learning" which one the player wants to use, like Halo having a guy ask you "look up... look down"
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[kirkjerk]

[kirkjerk]

[Cossix]

I use normal in some games because when I push up on the stick I want the crosshairs to go up and vice versa. Flight games are the other way around. I don't know why this is, but it is.

[Shapermc]

If it is actually "looking" in a 3D environment then I need to have it inverted. My brain is just wired that way and I can't seem to aim if that's not the case. It's nice that in the 360 I can set that option so that everygame uses it.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[ee_emm_ecks]

[kirkjerk]

[ee_emm_ecks]

[ee_emm_ecks]

[kirkjerk]

[ee_emm_ecks]

[kirkjerk]

Heh heh heh heh, he said "troll".

Anyway.

I wonder if mouselook users are more likely to use "normal", since the targetting is a bit more akin to shoving a cursor around, and it not physically mapping to the characters head as easily.
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[ee_emm_ecks]

[extrabastardformula]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[SuperWes]

I use inverted Y-Axis for FPS games and for 3rd person games. As for the X-axis I go back and forth depending on the camera placement. If it feels like I'm controlling a camera I usually use inverted, but if it feels like I'm controlling the weapon in the person's arms I use standard. It's strange!

-Wes
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[purplechair]

I can never remember what I like, and usually just stick with whatever feels right for that game. I'd like to say that I use normal for first-person games and inverted for third-person, but I don't think I'm that organised. In theory, it's just a question of perspective... if it's first person, then I'm controlling my own face (so looking up is looking up), but if it's third person then I'm sort of standing behind them and pushing their whole head (so pushing up on the back of the head makes them look down).

But usually, I think my brain ends up recalibrating itself to cope with whatever the game defaults to. I'll play something like Hitman and get used to that, and then I'll play Phoenix Wright and not have to deal with it, and then I'll try Earth Defence Force and I'll just take whatever they give me. It's only when I have to jump straight from one to the other, when I'm not expecting it, that I get problems.

It's one nice thing about Halo. How they calibrate it based on whatever feels right at the start of the game, etc.

[Scratchmonkey]

Normal in FPSs and Inverted in flight sims. I'd be interested to see what correlations in terms of spatial awareness there are between people who always have one choice or the other, as well as with the people who pick either. Of course, that's the kind of study that would be brutually hard to break down in terms of isolating variables.

In a related note, I learned today that because of the nature of reflecting light, the eyes are actually sending an upside-down image to the brain. This image is then reversed neurologically. The neat thing is that it takes the brain 12-24 hours to make this change, so newborn babies will see things upside down for a short period of time and this continues unchanged as we age, so if you wear glasses that turn everything upside down, your brain will eventually adjust and reverse the image again.

[kirkjerk]

[Harveyjames]

[kirkjerk]

It's not nice.


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[sediment]

i strictly use inverted.

seems more organic. I pull my head back to look up, after all.
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[simplicio]

inverted in everything- First and third person, flight sims and rail shooters, stick and mouse.
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"Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space."
-Kurt Schwitters, 1919

[jjsimpso]

I've had to think way too much about this lately. Ever since mouselook was implemented in first person shooters on the PC I've been using inverted controls for the Y-axis. This trend continued on the Gamecube and PS2 in third person games(I still only play FPSes on the PC), but it wasn't until I bought a PS3 that I played a third person dual-analog game. I was kind of surprised that neither Warhawk, Uncharted, or Armored Core 4 felt right unless I also inverted the X-axis(except for the planes and turrets in Warhawk, where I keep the X-axis normal). It looks like I'm wired the same way as Wes because I also think it depends on whether I feel like I'm controlling the camera or the avatar.

So, everything was great until I tried to play a PS2 armored core game which doesn't allow X-axis inversion. I spent a few hours yesterday retraining myself in armored core(both PS2 and PS3) and luckily everything seems ok. But warhawk still doesn't feel right without inverting the X-axis. I guess the camera is just too far away from the avatar to make the mental switch. Plus there are times, like when climbing a ladder, where the right stick ONLY controls the camera.

I almost gave up and switched everything to normal, hoping I could focus only on the cursor. I think I'm going to try to play all games with a normal X-axis first from now on though. Hopefully there aren't too many Warhawks out there that will give me trouble.

[sediment]

i lied. in Morrowind I can't stand having my mouse inverted for reasons I can't understand.

inverse axis in 99% of everything I play.
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[helicopterp]

Actually, now that I think about it, inverted except for Rez.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I used to play inverted for the longest time, then recently switched to normal and haven't gone back. I don't know why, but there it is.
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Mr. Mechanical

[sarsamis]

I'm strictly inverted when using analog sticks, but prefer normal for mouse and stylus control. And when using analog sticks, I typically make little twitch movements to aim.

[aderack]

Let's see if this works:

Normal: eye-look
Inverted: head-look
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[sediment]

yeah, that's about it.
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[squidlarkin]

[RadarScope1]

invert invert invert invert invert

my brain can't handle it any other way

[aderack]

I am the solvator!
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[simplicio]

[aderack]

Well, not the whole question. That's an element of it. There's also an element of tracking and focus. And a good deal of interpretation.

I think we're getting somewhere, though. You raise a good question. What translates as eye movement, and what translates as head movement, and why?
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[sarsamis]

I think FPS's are more geared towards head movement, or really body movement in general, as opposed to eye movement, since you're manipulating the gun as well as your perspective. I think of it as though the analog stick is on the character's back with the broad part of it being perpendicular to the end of the gun. Well, for the Y-axis at least. Inverting X to make that image completely accurate would be a bit too funky for me,

[aderack]

But what of the crosshairs? If you're moving that around the screen, surely that's more a function of eye movement?

I think when one views the game on an interface level -- slicing the environment into 2D planes according to the current view on the TV -- the tendency is more toward eye movement. At least, this is true for me. if I want to aim at something a bit higher on the screen, I move the crosshairs up. When movement (or the interpretation thereof) is more physical or intuitive, perhaps head movement is more natural? (You see something above you, you reorient your imaginary body to face it.)

In a case like this, you see different things as abstractions depending on your means of interpreting the game. If you're looking at the game as logical input and output, based on the TV display (eyes), a reversed Y axis seems like a bizarre conceptual complication. Up should move the cursor up, right? If you're imagining a physical analog between the controls and your own body movement (head), normal mapping seems like an intrusion of conscious interface into what should be intuitive.

Does this sound about right?
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[kirkjerk]

That is probably on track.
Another nuance: if you are mapping to the plane of the screen, it's kind of like you're holding the joypad vertically, ie with the joystick pointing at you, so up is up, as opposed to forward is up.

Inverts a more thinking of a mapping that happens to be like holding the controller flat, so the stick is parallel with gravity, and the rest flows from there.
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[helicopterp]

It would probably be useful to bring up the change in control from the first two Metroid Prime games to the third one. Using the wiimote, it's normal rather than inverted.

I think that's probably bad for the game. It makes you feel like you're controlling a remote control rather than controlling a character.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[kirkjerk]

[sarsamis]

Is it possible to set invert for the wiimote? And if so, would anyone do it? I don't think I ever would.

[kirkjerk]

[sarsamis]

Damn, I rather liked my new sig :/

I think I'll just go sig imageless for now

[kirkjerk]