Saturday, November 27, 2010

An indepth look at ray casting theory and how I've applied it to LittleBigPlanet 2

Full explanation of various methods and theories on implementing a ray casting renderer in LittleBigPlanet 2.
(If you have the beta you can run the samples here:  3D Raycaster Tech Demo  , 3D Raycaster top down/concept view
This assumes an intermediate understanding of the tools in LittleBigPlanet 2

Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Preparing Solid Color Wall Slices
  3. Creating the Rays
  4. Creating The Player Chassis
  5. Putting It All Together!
  6. Different Colors And Textures
  7. Backgrounds, Floors, Ceilings
  8. Character and Object Sprites... are a problem.
  9. Conclusions
Part 1: Introduction
Have you ever wondered how games like Wolfenstein 3D or Ken's Labyrinth achieved their 3D effects? The genius is in the simplicity. They utilize a technique called ray casting, and I decided it'd be interesting to try to get this into LittleBigPlanet 2, and here I will detail all my implementations, theories, and observations of the process.

First off: Imagine the screen as a grid of columns and rows. for example in a resolution of 320 x 280, we have 320 columns to represent the width and 280 rows to represent the height. Ray casting in Wolfenstein 3D is achieved by giving each column of the width its own ray, and testing this ray against a grid of 2D shapes.

For a 3D-like effect, the engine assumes each ray has an origin at the player's eye. It then gives each ray an angular offset to achieve a desired field of view and gives us the perspective effect. Think back to art class, lines vanishing into the distance.
Figure 1: Example of a 3D-Like effect by simulating perspective with a vanishing point.

You may notice something in the above image: Things further away appear to get smaller. This is what simple Ray Casting renderers exploit.

There is a reason Ray Casters like in Wolfenstein 3D and even up to more advanced like the Build engine (Duke Nukem 3D) are called "Pseudo 3D": The routine is only calculated in 2 dimensional space. In the case of Wolfenstein 3D, it is simplified by using a uniform grid, with each cell being able to hold a wall.

We will impose and exploit three very important limitations: The player's eye never moves up or down, the camera cannot roll side to side (eg. barrel roll), and walls will always go from floor to ceiling. This means that the horizon line / vanishing point will be directly in the center of the screen. Renderers like in Wolfenstein 3D operate column by column as mentioned. As each ray is cast from the eye, it eventually intersects a wall and to simulate perspective we simply scale the wall texture vertically; the further the ray to wall intersection is from the wall, the shorter the wall slice will appear, and simply center the slice vertically within the column. When you have a whole series of these lined up side by side, you get your perspective illusion. This is the "3D" effect that we see. Important note: There is a slight distortion in the perspective due to the fact that we're simulating the FOV of something round (the human eye or a camera lens) with something that is flat (the computer screen) ... there is a small step involved in solving for this error in real raycasters but for now it will be ignored in this article, just be mindful of that in case you're wondering what's going on. It can be as simple as just scaling the rays so they're projected in such a way that their arc creates a flat trapezoid shape instead of a round arc.


Part 2: Preparing Solid Color Wall Slices

In LittleBigPlanet2 I've used a solid color to present the most basic effect. Holographic material in LBP2 is extremely versatile, so first things first - let us create the wall slices per distance. We'll go through all the different ways I've come up with.

PRACTICAL METHOD ADo-it-yourself.   Create slabs of holo to represent distances and then overlay them.

Figure 2: Slices of holographic material representing different distances in one column.


For your slices, I recommend setting your OFF color as the same as your ON color. If your walls are red, make sure the same shade of red is selected as your OFF color. Disable animation on both unless you want that funky pulsing effect. You also see the smaller slices get darker. This is another trick of perspective, distance attenuation: things further away appear darker. So I simply lower the brightness per each piece with a minimum of 0.

We have some options here. In both samples I have each of these different heights overlayed per column and just activate the appropriate piece of holo for the distance ( Part 3 will cover different ray casting theories and how to translate that to your height chunk.) You can also emit the appropriate height rather than having them all overlayed at once: even if it's invisible, having tons of holographic material overlayed at once causes very strange things to happen in the engine - collisions stop registering, the players constantly respawn or fall through the level boundaries, etc.  Make sure to be working in grid mode the entire time.




Very easy to design and implement

Dependable

Easy to punch in depth shading / fog as either preset per piece or with dimmer functions

Easy for low depth-resolution, but becomes increasingly tedious for high ones


A lot of overlayed holographic material causes engine eccentricities.


It may be tricky to get a stable image if emitting the appropriate piece per ray hit distance.



Holographic material's base texture may sit oddly on the slices. Experiment with UV tool.

THEORETICAL METHOD B:   Spread 'em


Here rather than having to hand craft each height for the slice, We'd use some combination of pistons, emitters and more to achieve maximum resolution fill with the least amount of wires. For example, 3 pieces of invisible holo. One on the horizon line, 1 above, and  1 below - with the two off-center being equidistant from the horizon. Attach the outer two to the center holo with pistons, and you'd be able to modulate them in and out in sync to create a boundary. The idea here would then be to use emitters to "fill in" holographic material. Possible ways could be emitting bits of holo out vertically and have them wired to self-destruct when they collide with the barrier (put a tag on the outer pieces, put impact sensor on the emitted pixels and wire it to a destroyer set to "disappear") ,  a single "paint brush" piece of holo that bounces between the barriers and constantly emits a color with a short lifespan (to bounce use impact sensor, toggle, and 2 movers. ... eg. toggle -> Move up, toggle->NOT-> Move down).




Would easily scale to very high depth resolution.
 
A lot less lag in create mode
 
Potential for less wires flying around


Potential for more modularity and easier enhancement.



Impact sensors are unreliable if something is moving very fast
 Bit of work to get the boundaries to scale appropriately

Would take work to get distance shading / fog to work
HAS NOT BEEN SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED.

Part 3: Creating the Rays

Sounds like a pretty fundamental part of the ray caster, huh? :)  Each column is associated with a ray, which all have an origin at the eye position. In any case, the rays will need to use an impact sensor to detect a particular tag. If you want to draw "walls", simply draw material and put your "WALL" tag on it. It helps to be made of holographic material since it doesn't collide.
Figure 3: Overhead view of a player's field of vision. Blue represents walls. This is the space everything is computed in.
PRACTICAL METHOD A: The Shish Kabob Technique.

I call this shish kabob because it's like chunks of shish kebob on a skewer. Essentially, for each level of depth you have an independent piece with this microchip on it.

Very simple, just an impact switch set to INCLUDE TOUCHING - YES, INCLUDE TAG - YES and I set it to a blue tag with label "WALL", which is also wired into a NOT gate. What happens is if each piece of our ray kebab fails to intersect, it'll query the next piece by feeding the output of the NOT gate into the activation input of the next kebab chunk's microchip, like so:

Figure 4: Each link in the ray will check intersection with walls, if there is none it will go to the next one.

This way, we end up recursively checking at predesignated distances and we stop as soon as we hit something. We then wire that impact sensor into our holo slice routine. I combine this with the pre-made slices to get the effect in the sample. Also, since we'll want this to be mobile, glue all the chunks together using the advanced glue tool.

Figure 5: The "ray" is a chain of recursive intersection tests and will cancel out if one of them is true.




Extremely simple to understand and implement.

Extremely stable and dependable.





Very easy for low depth-resolution but becomes tedious to manually wire each output at a high res.

Too many impact sensors occupying a small space can cause them to not register properly.

Also introduces another piece of holo for each step of depth. Multiply that by your horizontal resolution.


THEORETICAL METHODS B & C: The Facehugger and The Bouncing Bullet

I've experimented with using piston and mover based rays. I had a piston based ray working but it broke apart when I added more columns. The idea is that the sensor is on the end of a piston and it'll try its best to hug a surface. It was a little jittery but it did hug the wall. (use impact sensors and forward/backward input on the piston). I also experimented with using a little piece of holo that quickly was shot out and bounce back to the eye. In both cases, the piece of holo touching the wall would have a tag sensor looking for "EYE" and report its closeness to the render column, and from there on we can either extract the analog value and activate a specific height piece or scale and shade one of the theoretical dynamic wall slices.




Would significantly decrease the amount of impact sensors and holo onscreen to achieve a higher res



A lot less wires flying around the level.

Would give a full 0-100% range in terms of scale and shading and/or fog.


 Pistons are extremely unstable. They have tendency to just break apart and go crazy.


Movers are unreliable. Impossible to get enough speed to follow the player well for bouncing bullet.

Even if it was, impact sensors fail at high speeds.

Both prone to ray misses or other eccentricities when rapidly approaching nearer wall:


Figure 6: An example of a piston based ray. If I were to move the ray to the left quickly, it would ignore the truly nearest wall. There are possible workarounds but they end up putting more stress on the game engine than they're worth.

Part 4: Creating The Player Chassis
(This will NOT cover player-wall collision detection.)
 
As important as ray casting itself is the ability to move around in the world. The fact that I need to glue the ray routines to the chassis posed some challenges of its own. 

Figure 7: Basic view of the chassis (right) and a controllinator seat

But it's not too complicated. For the samples I used cardboard for the chasses but you can use whatever material you wish. Essentially, we have one piece to which all view rays will be glued to (this is their origin). This will receive all rotational and movement input from a controllinator. In my sample I use an advanced mover with local space ON to provide full forward, backward, and strafing movement like in a typical first person shooter. I also use the right stick wired to an advanced rotator to provide turning.

The problem is, if this was left as is the center of rotation would NOT be the origin of the rays, but the center of the entire glued mass - it would give VERY odd results. So to keep it relatively confined to rotate around the origin, I use another mass of material and bolt it to the ray origin material. On this is a very strong gyroscope and anti-gravity so it does not fall or rotate, and now the ray origin disc will rotate properly.

Figure 8: The logic behind the chassis. Very simple but necessary to maintain properly centered rotation.

Part 5: Putting It All Together!

Ok, so now you have a single render column, a view ray, and an apparatus to move the player around. We need to copy the column/ray pairs to suit the resolution you want, and glue all the rays to the player eye, as well as rotate in increments to give us a nice perspective effect. Daunting? Well, here's some tips:
  • ALWAYS have grid snap on when you're creating your column and ray and make sure your ray and column each fit neatly on the grid. This will allow you to copy and paste it along the grid without problems.
  • If doing it all manually, make use of angle snap. In the sample I have a 90 degree FOV So I use a 45 degree snap on the very first and very last ray. Then I just went in halves and filled in what was too tight for angle snap by eye. So after putting down the very first and last making 90, I'd split the ray group in half. The one(s) in the middle would be (around) 0 degrees and I'd glue that in.Then I split each half in half, and the one in the middle would be the halfway point between whatever's already glued. 
  • Rotational speed on bolts and rotators refers to how many degrees of rotation it will spin per second. You can create a jig that rotates at regular intervals to give you exact and precise angle between rays.
  • With a little bit of work in the column department, you can create a system that automatically creates the rays and columns for you. (You'd just have to glue it afterwards). Keep in mind that the speed of a mover is the amount of small grid units it will move per half-second. You can create something that moves along the bottom of your intended frame at regular intervals, that also contains a tag. Maybe "Column anchor". Then on your column you'd need to clue a little base to the display portion and give it some logic to follow this "Column Anchor" and deactivate the follower as soon as it's on top of it. Also, a very strong gyroscope pointing straight up. Then, have a small piece of material that rotates and emits the pairs of column/ray from its center at regular intervals. You could end up with a full and precise array of columns and rays like this, at the cost of a little extra logic per ray. Just remember to glue it to the base afterwards.
  • Keep an eye on the thermometer. Even though an individual column/ray combo takes up almost nothing on the meter, adding a ton of pairs will start to add up fast, especially if you're using the overlayed method. If you're using a series of emitters to emit pre-made heights or you're using dynamic slices, it may be different.
  • If your wall slices all have their heights overlayed internally at all times, creating too high a resolution may break the impact sensors. Be careful and if you're doing it all by hand, do a quick function test before you start glueing.
Part 6: Different Colors and Textures

What's that? Getting bored of having walls just one color? Well, there are ways around that. For example, instead of just using "WALL" we could expand on that impact sensor, and then go something like "if ( collides with wall) {  collides with blue wall? collides with red wall? } "  as shown here.
Figure 9: Example logic to handle multiple colored walls. First there is an "Impacts Wall" check, which will then activate a microchip containing checks for each type of wall. Those are only evaluated if the "Impacts Wall" is true.

This is mainly useful with the shish kebab method, if you only have one sensor piece per ray then you don't need to check for "WALL" first. I am not sure if doing this is more or less efficient than just checking for both red and blue right away, but I have a feeling it should be better to do an extra check on the hit than N checks on everything, hit or miss. Imagine you have 5 different colors, that's 5 different impacts you'd have to check for at each link of the kebab. Mmmm. I love kebab.

And ... textures? Did I say textures? Yes I did. As mentioned, games like Wolfenstein 3D used a uniform grid to test their rays against, which also made it very easy to do uniform texture mapping... we can translate some of this to LittleBigPlanet2.  

One way you could accomplish it is to create a massive square of your desired texture in game,  and then scale it down for each slice and cut the slice down to size, trying to keep the same general look in each column but scaled down. This works best for textures that would tile well from column to column, like bricks.


Though another way that would better and be more open ended, albeit a little more work...

This theory requires either the PS Eye or ample time to draw by hand in the game - of which I have neither therefore could not test yet. If anyone has a PS Eye and would like to help me implement a texture mapped sample let me know!

First off, let's take a texture. To make things really easy, I'm gonna take one that can tile well in vertical stripes - a brick texture from cgtextures.com. (I'll also explain how to do things for textures that wouldn't tile well like that, for the masochists amongst us)
Figure 10: Basic base texture of a brick wall

Now, let's take a slice that we could tile onto the walls. 
Figure 11: Cropped out what will map to a single column in the renderer

And now we resample this for every height in our depth resolution. (Vertically Only)

Figure 12: A full mipmap chain for a single column for each distance. They are only scaled vertically.

We can then take this into the game via the PS Eye. Remember that black is fully transparent when stickered onto holographic material, use this to create translucency in your sprites and textures.

What about slices that wouldn't neatly tile horizontally? What if you want to sample the texture horizontally? Well, then you'd need to do the above process, but also at uniform points horizontally on the texture... which could turn into a daunting task. For example, you'd have to make stripes of the full res texture, and then create a full mipmap chain of each stripe for your renderer's depth resolution. And that's not even the hard part...

There are many ways I could fathom to read in texture coordinates but one that I think would be easiest is to maintain a gridlike style to your level like in Wolfenstein 3D, and have each cell have a separate portion and tag for UP, LEFT, RIGHT, DOWN, so you know which side of the wall you hit. Then have little tags at the corners and a tag sensor on your ray and read the distance to the appropriate corner tag. Then feed the tag sensor into a sequencer so you can map it's analog value to a particular slice of the texture. This however is a massive feat and would require a lot of effort and holographic material, might be best tackled with emitting each particular slice as it's actually needed, I'm sure it would be extremely unstable if it was all overlayed at once. I'm sure this would work. I know this all sounds very abstract, but I cannot test this so I can't detail a full implementation. Again, if anyone has a PS Eye and is willing to help me, let me know!

Part 7 - Backgrounds, Floors, Ceilings

You might notice something about Wolfenstein 3D - the floors and ceilings are a solid color. As I said, the horizon point would always be in the center of the screen so you can just freely split the screen in half, floor and ceiling. Years ago when I coded my own raycaster (which I might provide vids and source code of, it's still backed up), every frame I would blit a bitmap of a solid color floor and ceiling, but they also had a black gradient applied to it to tie in with my distance attenuation shading. It's another great help to the illusion of 2D. 

In my LBP2 raycaster sample, I just used 2 pieces of blue wood (it's very neutral when colored) and gave them a light hue and used the black gradient tool to aid in the illusion. They are always behind the walls being drawn.
Figure 13: The background of the LBP2 ray casting sample

They are dark enough to not present too many artifacts on the "shaded" walls (remember, their shading is just them being translucent and showing more black), but light enough to notice when there isn't a wall on top of it. If you were inclined to make colored walls and floors, you could just draw them in for each height slice (or if you're using dynamic slices, make secondary barriers that will rest on the desired view frame, and do the same filling technique but for ceiling and floor colors - filling inbetween the frame and moving boundaries).

Part 8 - Character and Object Sprites... are a problem.

Tip: Remember that black is totally transparent on holo. Use black backgrounds behind your characters and objects to make a clipping mask.

Of course there's no fun in just running around neat hallways. You need something to shoot at! Unfortunately, there are problems here. It is easy enough to create the sprites themselves; just like creating a slice of the wall per distance, make a scaled copy of the sprite to fit for distance. One problem is clipping against the walls; there isn't any. Sprites would always appear to be drawn over walls no matter what, there is no way to clip them like in Wolfenstein 3D. In that game when the walls are rendered there is also something called a depth buffer that is created, and all game sprites are clipped against this so they are not drawn over walls they're behind and most certainly not out of the rendering frame as would be the case in LBP2. 

As mentioned, you could create the scaled sprites easily enough. You would NOT be using the same rays or the same ray casting technique as for walls with sprites, you'd just use a simple tag sensor on the EYE to detect the distance and maybe hook it up to a (positional) sequencer to allow selection of the appropriate scaled sprite. 

For the position on the screen, I  suppose you could try to emulate the inverse camera matrix multiplication done in Wolfenstein 3D, but I'm not sure how effective that would be. I think one way would be to just make a solid arc encompassing the full FOV and on intersection with tag "ENEMY"  and have a tag sensor on one corner reading how far from the left or right side the ENEMY is and use that to manipulate pistons holding the enemy sprites. But again... it's a bit of a pain to get that working, if it can be done.
Another possible option is to have a smaller resolution of solid rays (Not linked like the shish kebab method) and have fixed horizontal coordinates where enemy sprites could appear, and activate the appropriate scale still using the "distance from the eye to ENEMY" technique. Of course this would mean you could only effectively determine one enemy / game sprite at a time... 

Which means another option still is to just use a very low res shish kebob method for sprites. And use that to determine horizontal coordinates AND scale, without using the "distance from EYE to ENEMY" technique. I'd say just use your existing shish kebab, but then you have the problem of duplicate hits and you'd end up with blurred sprites. That's why the resolution has to be... low. Though like anything there are workarounds, but it's all a matter of it being worth it or not, being too much stress on the engine, etc. 

All in all I'd say game sprites in a full 360 freedom of view holographic material based Ray casting engine is just too problematic to effectively implement in LBP2.

Part 9 - Conclusions

So, we can get some pretty interesting pseudo-3D effects in LBP2 and I hope this has helped you understand how I've been going about it. There are some limitations with the engine that prevent it from being too great. Limits with how much holographic material can be onscreen and/or overlapping, limits with how many impact sensors can be active in the same space, etc. put great constraints on how much detail you can squeeze out of your image. 

Using emitter based techniques to draw may help squeeze more real estate, but I doubt I will ever reach my target resolution of 320 x 280 pixels. More research will be highly necessary, and I'm sure I could get a better resolution than I have now. It's all a matter of pushing a little bit at a time to make sure it still works. The sample's resolution is 45 x 22 if I remember correctly, but this was with all the columns being overlaid and not emitted, putting great strain on the engine. I will eventually experiment with emitter based techniques to improve the quality and reduce engine load, but for now the sample will do as a proof of concept and I'm sure this article will also aid its cause. 

Note that there is also a delay to the logic computations in LBP2. You can notice a lag in the fill rate due to the nature of the signals passing down the chain in the shish kebab method.

The techniques and methods here need not be limited to this type of rendering. For example, you can use the ray cast technique to simulate an enemy's line of sight. I will also post in detail of a knockoff of this rendering technique, my pseudo-3D dungeon crawler, which easily supports game sprites. I hope you enjoyed this read and look forward to seeing what everyone will come up. :)

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Collecting dust since the 90s... games I never finished!

So I still have plenty of games lying around that I still never finished!... some of them I doubt I could get even a quarter for so I might as well play it! Any suggestions are welcome, especially for PS1 or PC games:

Playstation 1:

Alundra
Azure Dreams
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Brave Fencer Musashi
Breathe of Fire 4
Final Fantasy 7 (WTF you can't be serious Foofles... I AM I AM!)
Lunar 1 & 2
Star Ocean 2
Tales of Destiny 1 & 2

Thousand Arms
Tombu 2
Xenogears

Dreamcast:

Blue Stinger
Evolution: World of sacred Device
Elemental Gimmick Gear / E.G.G.
Resident Evil Code : Veronica
Shenmue (!?!?!??!?! WTF AGAIN)
Silver ( Maybe)

Nintendo 64 and Gamecube:


Duke Nukem : Zero Hour (In honor of Duke Nukem Forever especially)
Super Mario Sunshine
The legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

A lot of RPGs on that list! Any good RPG suggestions are welcome! :D

Sunday, November 21, 2010

LittleBigPlanet 2 - Dungeon Crawler concept

Well folks, here's more from me in LBP2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmzE2VcOsgI

This uses similar concepts to my pseudo-3D raycaster except the 3D illusion is even more fake and you're restricted to moving in sort of "tiles" and can only turn in 90 degree angles.

Those restrictions make it easy to make some detail though, in this sample I have 3 unique "corridor" tiles, corner tiles, and a "dead end" tile. Also a "Monster".

I'm thinking of making this into a full fledged game complete with mazes, doors you can unlock with keys, and of course monsters. Also need to improve the rendering process slightly. It only uses about a single notch on the thermometer so it has plenty of room for variety!

The main differences between this and my other ray caster are that this launches a single ray outwards and while it does stop when it hits a wall, it also reads every grid tile it hits before it gets there - the other ray caster is not bound to a grid and only reads up to a wall. I will provide a very in-depth series of videos about both systems, including the full theory and implementation through the next couple of weeks.

But in short, for each level of distance there is a slice on the display, that is why it has this gridlocked sort of appearance. A very necessary limitation to achieve the cool textures. Which are at the moment just cheated with stickers, as indicated by their low resolution and the beta info text in the bottom corner of each slice. Higher quality art can be done by manually drawing with holo material.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

LittleBigPlanet 2 - Get modularity with microchips.

Did you know you can turn microchips into easily reusable functions? You can give them custom-named inputs and outputs and use them just like the built in logic tools!

Check out the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiPXvpBaNKU

Here is a small tutorial that should give you some ideas on how you can create easily reusable pieces of logic that I will henceforth call functions.

When you wire to and from a microchip, it creates ports and will remember where each port is wired to, so you can then copy the microchip and plug in any acceptable input into a port. Functions do not have to return anything, but in this simple example we're going to make a function that implements a "dead - zone" : The signal will only be used if it fits within a certain % range.

A sequencer set to "Input Mode : Positional" Will use its analog input to adjust the current play cursor to fit within the given % of the total range. Confused?

For example: If your sequencer has 10 columns and you feed a signal of 50%, the cursor will rest right between column 5 and 6 - activating anything there such as batteries and tags.

I use this to provide a threshold. Keep in mind, only the absolute value is taken into consideration: A value of -50% will still be halfway on the sequencer.

Anyway, hope this helps. This is fully scalable to any amount of inputs/ outputs until the game crashes. :) Just remember the one on the bottom ALWAYS activates/deactivates the entire chip.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

LittleBigPlanet 2 Music - Lonley Galaxy / Cosmic Tears

Clicky here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFNFa4uRt10

This was a song I wrote by request for a space theme. I think it turned out pretty well! I have the MP3 of this straight from the PS3's audio out. I am going to be transcribing this to real midi so it won't be gone forever when the beta ends.

LittleBigPlanet 2 - Cursor Based UI - Basic Menu Tutorial 2

 Check out the youtube video Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nKPkZE1mIY

So you want to improve the technology of your menus and use some of that new-fangled point and click functionality? No problem!

Creating cursor based UIs is actually a little more intuitive than the digital counterparts. First thing we'll need is your cursor

- this can be any kind of visual, from a cross-hair, to an arrow, a finger, anything! The visual aspect is insignificant - it's the

HOTSPOT we care about!

The hotspot can be a small piece of invisible hologram material - perhaps a tiny circle - that will act as the user's cursor

position, and will interact with clickable objects. Be sure to scale the thickness of this to match the objects you want to test

against - it MUST intersect them!

Glue your hotspot to your cursor and place a microchip on it. If you'd like to keep your cursor level at all times, you could put a

gyroscope there to make sure it stays put. Also put an advanced mover there - set speed to your desired cursor speed. I also like

to set the acceleration to 100% just to keep it constant, and also the deceleration to 100% to make sure it stops when you want it

to. Alternatively, you can use a setup with some NOT gates on your desired analog input and hook those up to anti-gravity object tweaks

with dampening set to 100% - That makes absolute sure!

At this point you probably gathered we want to wire our movement input (eg, left analog stick) to the appropriate left/right and

up/down speed inputs of the advanced mover. That's great! we have a cursor that moves around! But it doesn't do anything...

What I like to do, as shown in the video, is put some tags down. Tags are an extremely powerful feature of LBP2 and should not be

taken for granted. For things like UI I like to use white tags, so put a white tag on your cursor hotspot's microchip and name it

MOUSEOVER. You guessed it - Anything that now intersects with the hotspot can detect this tag and perform a "OnMouseOver" style

function. For mouse click, put down another white tag but name it MOUSECLICK - you can activate this however you'd like to register

a click, eg. the output of X from the controllinator. Depending on your intentions, you could also implement an ON TAP (see the

blog post) function if you'd like to differentiate between rapid clicks and/or holding the mouse button down.

Now that we have a fully functional cursor, let's make something to click on! Everything clickable only needs to implement means to

read MOUSEOVER and/or MOUSECLICK. Implement? MOUSEOVER? This sounds like real programming! Shablago!

But it truly is. This is an object oriented style approach, where each object in the world has its own role and methods. But

anyway, all we care about is - YAY, BUTTONS. First you need to make sure your object - or your object's hitbox (an invisible piece

of hologram you can use to handle intersections) - contains the appropriate IMPACT SENSOR switches.

For MOUSEOVER, make sure your impact sensor is set to INCLUDE TOUCHING - YES, and REQUIRE TAG - YES - White, MOUSEOVER. Now this

can do whatever you'd like. Perhaps you have a sackbot, and you'd like to now loop an animation for "YAY PICK ME". Or maybe it's a

button and you want it to glow. YAY, BUTTONS.

That's great, but how about on mouse click? Same deal! Make an impact sensor set to INCLUDE TOUCHING - YES, REQUIRE TAG - YES -

White, MOUSECLICK. And now this can be wired to do amazing things. Like start a game. GNARLY.

There can be a lot more you can do with mouse cursors. For example, clicking and dragging objects. Maybe picking something up and rotating it with the SIXAXIS, differentiating between two types of cursor clicks, the sky's the limit. That all goes beyond the

scope of this tutorial and hopefully the basics have served you well.