Hi All, I have done a few brief searches on the forum and didn't see any mention of this, so please forgive me if it has already been covered. I am wondering if you would or have considered building in support for a 3d Mouse, such as 3D Connexion's Spacemouse Pro. In watching the recent demos of the game mechanics I can see a 3d mouse being very intuitive way to zoom, pan, and rotate around the planets. Thanks, T
Does the mouse not allow you to map the buttons and movements etc? I'm sure you could get it to work if you really wanted them without the devs having to do anything other than allowing you to bind keys.
oh wow, i hadnt thought about that. This could be helpful for sure! The specific 3D Mouse the original poster is speaking of does not have any buttons. well, most of them dont anyhow. There are many advanced versions on the market, especially from that specific company. They are primarily used for manufacturing and design purposes, but they had a surge in the gaming community since Decent was released in what?...1995? SpaceOrb and other gaming products were conjoured up in response to this. Not many of them really took off, but they are still used and could be very useful for someone whom is familiar with their functionality.
We've talked about it but we haven't done anything about it yet. Could be cool for rotating planets and stuff.
I want to say that the right way to do this is to give mods everything necessary to hook up an input device. You guys almost certainly don't have the time to support all the weird input device people have built, but the community does. Unfortunately, the device manufacturers make this impossible. Nobody seems to be content to just implement HID; they have to have their own protocol and their own drivers and their own SDK. Even if you could pass those interfaces through without opening giant security holes, they wouldn't talk to javascript anyway. Instead, it might be necessary to let mods talk to other processes on the machine in a more general manner. Open up a named socket, connect to the half of the mod that's jumped through all the device SDK's language, IPC, and permissions hoops, and start shoving data around. That'd honestly be pretty useful for a lot of things besides device input, starting with "javascript sucks at math, good thing I can do all the heavy lifting in c++" and going all the way to "PA sends me email every night summarizing any interesting developments in the month's hundred-man-melee dropin FFA".
I have to agree-- just let it be moddable. I can imagine LeapMotion support that way. Fun. Who knows what else.. isn't that the point of community modding? Making a simple socket listener or whatever doesn't seem too hard?
You mean for designing in CAD? Is it much easier with this type of mouse. I never had any troubles with the keyboard / mouse in 3dsmax. Also does that mouse function like a real mouse in addition to the joystick, or is it similar to a trackball mouse with a joystick instead of the trackball?
I read up a bit on this, probably the best way to describe it is that it gives 6 degrees of freedom, 3 axis of rotation, and 3 axis of translation. The boon in 3d modeling is that you can rotate the object on any axis you want, and move in on a point better. Here is the page that made it click for me, http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacenavigator.html The more basic models go for like $100.
