But isn't this game suppose to be a classic styled fan game?
Well, it's 3D, doesn't have Super Knuckles in the vanilla campaign, and will fundamentally be an FPS/platformer hybrid no matter how hard anyone tries to squeeze it into a pure platformer. Only a fundamental rewrite of the entire engine would change that. And the classics wasted two buttons on a three button controller. Unless you used Debug Mode.
The main problem is that our third person camera doesn't actually have the center of the screen be where you're firing. You'd have to actually do math to figure out where the shots are being aimed at and make a Star Fox style multiple crosshair, and that's a lot of work for a minor feature, so it's not on the to-do list.
Not to mention that making it work for looking all the way up and down would be impractical at best. It's honestly better that people just learn to use first person. (The only way that the software renderer will ever compete with OpenGL is either for it to support full vertical aiming, or for OGL to become completely unusable. Well, for me, anyway. :P) inb4stuffIalreadyknowabouttheOGLrendererbeinghardertocodefor
I do think that a tutorial is distasteful as I personally hate that type of thing, but I think we've gotten enough data to realize that being subtle and gentle about it isn't working. We expect players to understand things that they aren't understanding, and this is making players feel our game controls are "slippery" and "tank-like" when that couldn't be farther from the truth. There are a bunch of things on the list of stuff to test to try to mitigate that, but I think there's really no way around the fact that if we want players to understand certain things that we can't teach by example, we're going to have to tell them.
The classic example of a game that teaches through "play, don't show, especially don't tell" is Super Mario Bros. 1-1. And even it isn't perfect, as it does nothing to teach you about the sprint button that also shoots fireballs. You can learn that through experimentation, because there are only three buttons left, and one of them pauses the game. Now expand that to a keyboard and potentially a mouse too. The sad fact is that teaching through doing is basically impossible for all but the simplest concepts, unless the player already knows the controls. And there are only two practical ways that will happen. And one of them (a full-fledged manual, which we already have in the form of the wiki) will be ignored by the players who needed it in the first place.
So, tutorial it up.
While we haven't tried it yet, one of the things we've been planning to try out is making the character sprite face the control direction instead of the facing direction for all non-FPS modes. This would help players grasp what strafe is doing better while also using all of those sprites in normal operation.
As long as it can be disabled, I'm all for this. (Not that I ever use third person outside of 2D segments for anything other than peeking around corners in Tag or spectating others, but I'm sure a lot of people do)
As an aside, I'm probably the only person who actually uses the arrow keys
as if they were WASD. Hey, it fit my ancient desk setup from about a decade back. And I'm too set in my ways to really change, unless there are suddenly a bunch more Lua custom buttons I need to fit into what the rest of my left hand can reach.