Take Control

This update adds support for controller input and sequence switching for characters.

It also changes the syntax in object configuration for declaring sequences. It’s a small update as I had just under 3 weeks to work on this.

Play

That’s it?
Yeap!

Wait, that’s how you answered last time.
It was, but it takes quite a lot of work to do small things.

Right now, the controller configuration looks like this:

// For a list of key codes, see <https://docs.rs/winit/0.13.1/winit/enum.VirtualKeyCode.html>
(
    axes: {
        // Players are numbered using zero based indices, so player "one" is 0
        (player: 0, axis: X): (pos: Key(Right), neg: Key(Left)),
        (player: 0, axis: Z): (pos: Key(Down), neg: Key(Up)),
    },
    actions: {
        (player: 0, action: Defend): [Key(O)],
        (player: 0, action: Jump): [Key(P)],
        (player: 0, action: Attack): [Key(LBracket)],
        (player: 0, action: Special): [Key(RBracket)],
    },
)

It is structured so that more controllers can be defined, though currently only for keyboard controllers. You can also see that there are four action buttons. Those who have played Little Fighter 2 or Hero Fighter will find these familiar.

Create

Scripting

Character sequences have now changed. Previously sequences were written like this:

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[[sequences]]
  id = "Standing"
  next = "Standing"
  frames = [
    # ...
  ]

[[sequences]]
  id = "Walking"
  next = "Standing"
  frames = [
    # ...
  ]

In this update, the sequence ID is now lowercase¹, no longer ends with “-ing”, and are put into single square brackets:

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[sequences.stand]
  next = "stand"
  frames = [
    # ...
  ]

[sequences.walk]
  next = "stand"
  frames = [
    # ...
  ]

¹ _{Strictly speaking, the game uses snake_case. This is a programming term to describe lower cased words separated by underscores “_”. Since there are currently just single word IDs, it just looks like lowercase.}

What’s Next

So the “reading controller input” half is done, next time we should be able to move the character around.

Onwards!