Today Rasmus and I sat down to try and port the Cellphone controller mechanics with Fly or Die, after just 3.5 hours of messing with the old Fly or Die code we were able to actually get the controller to work. It’s not perfect, but it works as well as King of the Trill did with the same controllers. We tested it with 4 players and it works surprisingly well and not only that but we didn’t use that much time to be able to port it over.

Of course it’s not really that complete, I mean the web interface is still showing the King of the Thrill logo and the web interface isn’t really made for fly or die, however we were able to fly around and have fun. The controllers are a little bit wonky, on the cellphone that is. It seems to turn a little bit more than what it did with the joystick, however I think that’s more a latency thing. That said because of that, steering was a little bit easier. Now all we can do is wish King of the Thrill guys good luck when it comes to showing off the controls and hopefully be able to demonstrate that to whoever they want to demonstrate it to.

I know they are going to work on the game some more, but it was really interesting to see that we were able to fairly easy just port the controller over from the Xbox joystick input method to the cellphone input. I’d like to think that it was because of the input class that we had created for the project that made it easier. However realistically I don’t really think so, it would have been possible to do it straight into the code checks, it would have been more “painful”, but it would have worked. Next thing would be to get Joystick and Cellphone support, that would have been nice, unfortunately I had to disable the Joystick part in the code, so now it’s either Joystick or Cellphone, so we need 2 versions so to speak.

Also I discovered that the joystick code is badly written. Once I disabled the joystick code the game ran very smoothly, so I should take some time to fix my old utility class into something that works a lot better. It’s at least good to know that what I’ve done wrong is only Joystick related, once the Joystick code was out of the game it ran well. So there’s something with the Joystick input that is either checking too often, I mean you only need to check like every 5 or 10 seconds I suppose. Lesson learned so I’m going to re-write the class as I like having an input class that handles all inputs, even if it just wraps existing code into just one class, that I think is more easily manageable.