using the butt of a borked bbgun, some infra red leds, a perfboard, some resistors, a ****load of wire, freetrack, an infrared converted quick cam, a mini joystick out of a rc helicopter remote, and my 12-bit joystick controller and matrix board, as well as a ****load of solder and electrical tape, ive come up with a new way to play quake.
post pics
kinda difficult since i converted all my webcams for infra red. theres still my laptop camera, which was too laggy for motion tracking.
i intend to make it look more pretty and make it more comfortable to use. the joystick on the side is somewhat cumbersome to work with your thumb, after the first 3 levels of quake i was tired of using the thing. i want to add buttons and more joysticks (i can put up to 8 axes 32 buttons and a hat switch on the board). i wanted to use a momentary action toggle swithc but i couldnt kind one (after 3 radio shacks) i also ordered some replacement psp joysticks which might work better than the one taped where the barrel should be.
because of the lack of a barrel i really cant put a sight on it yet. i keep checking the dumpsters to see if anyone threw away some 3/4 inch pvc pipe if i find a piece i can clean it up and dremel it down to size, then put some sights on it. not that a sight would do much good as right now, since im using it with mouse emulation. ive been going through old fps engines (quake 2 and some quake based engines like dark places) looking for something i can modify to use freetrack or at least joystick emulation and some degree of absolute positioning. my original idea was that anything you did with the track gun would be copied to your gun in the game in a 1:1 sorta way. this would allow you to aim around corners or over walls, ect. i was also thinking of using a second camera for head tracking, while the vertical axis would be absolute the yaw axis would be thresholded and anything past that threshold would turn the player as opposed to just the view.
my search for an engine still brings up nothing. skimming through the quake c manual doesnt give me anything i can use, no way to access joysticks from in quake c, though there is a hackish way to set the camera, theres no way to get data from joysticks. then i looked at dark places, which adds a lot to quake c and has much better joystick support (opening the possibility to use ppjoy), however still no way to gain acess to it. i could modify the engine code directly, but its not sopmething im to familiar with. quake 2 loads a dll as opposed to a semi-interpreted language (which quake c essentially is). im curious if within such a dll i can include the freetrack interface or at least gain access to joystick data.
the other option is to modify my wip space sim engine into an fps engine. given its current state id have to write a bunch of now absent subsystems, even then there would be nothing to shoot at right off the bat. when it comes right down to id id have better luck using it in freespace to control turrets and stuff. once i mod a game engine to be controlled with it then it would be kind of badass.
