Camera control experiment for 3D Flash/molehill and WebGL

Posted on:December 30 2010

I'm currently adding a new method to CopperCube for controlling the first person shooter camera when using 3D Flash (molehill) or WebGL. The problem with first person shooter controls in embedded applications in websites is that you don't have control over the mouse cursor position as programmer. But modifying the mouse position is essential for this type of control. So a workaround is to do something like this: (Note, this is not molehill but the software renderer of course, since it is not yet public):

Controls: cursor keys to move, mouse to Look.

It is not perfect of course, but this is as close as you can get without that feature. So please, dear Adobe Molehill and HTML5/WebGL developers: We need something to control the cursor position. Otherwise you won't see any first person shooter games with nice control at all.

Comments:

cursor control would be great. +1

oleg

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2010-12-30 10:16:00

First I thought it would be a little awkward, but actually it works quite well. Of course it's not quite as efficient as the "real" FPS-control, but for a web application it's really cool!

Telepath

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2010-12-30 12:11:00

Truly indispensible.. Great work.

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2010-12-30 12:56:00

Modifying cursor position should not be necessary, that's a bodge. If you're designing the framework form the start, just design in the possibility to get raw relative device motion update events, and make sure they don't stop when a cursor hits an "edge" of the screen or something, because that's retarded - there's no reason for coupling the two.

Florp

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2010-12-30 17:35:00

the main problem is if you click outside during shooting. :)

but offering mouse cursor functionality (and going fullscreen and such stuff) for molehill/webgl is problematic too since it could be abused by websites with malicious scripts. this would have to be well thought out.

horace

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2010-12-31 13:44:00

just dont use the mousebuttons for shooting then

Matthias

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2011-01-11 14:24:00

My fingers are crossed for mouse-center functionality but due to browser security issues I have my doubts. I noticed in one of Adobe's demos they were using a 'steering wheel' for a driving game so maybe they will have support for gamepads & joysticks?

beer3d

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2011-01-13 21:32:00

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2011-01-20 17:04:00