Controls, configuration, and more

Posted onAuthorsam

Here’s just a brief update on what I’ve been up to over the past few weeks.  Most of the work has been focused on further improving the usability of the game (better UI, controls, customisation, etc.)

Construction controls improvements

I’ve redone the part resizing input code so that now when you press a resize key it responds immediately (before it was kinda sluggish to respond).

I’ve also made a tweak so that you can now freeze the selected construction in place while aligning to another construction, this can be useful to check positioning and so on before committing to attachment.

Configurable key and mouse button bindings

The main thing I’ve been working on recently is a complete overhaul of the input system.  You can now fully customise key (and mouse button) bindings to the various actions in the game.  There’s now a new tab in the controls settings where you can set this up.  You click the button for the action you want to configure, it’ll then wait for a key press, that key then getting bound to the action.

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I’ve also modified the player controllable parts (e.g. motors) that have configurable key binding to work in the same way.  This means you can now bind any keys to them, not just letters and numbers.

The only thing still left to do here is to allow configuration of joystick / controller inputs, something I’ll revisit at a later date.

Improved graphics settings

The other customisation improvement I’ve made is to the graphics settings.  I’ve done away with the (vague and too high level) “quality settings”, and set up proper options that’ll give you more fine grained control when configuring the graphics quality vs. performance of the game.

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Other things

Some other bits and pieces I’ve also done:-

  • More UI design tweaks and improvements.
  • Better audio mix, updating sounds, etc.
  • Various bug fixes.

I’m working hard on getting another demo release out so that you can try all this new stuff out.  Unfortunately there always seems to be something that gets in the way!  Currently I’m in the middle of upgrading to Unity 5.6 which has broken some rendering stuff, so that’s what I’m working on right now, hopefully I’ll get this sorted soon.