Go for a stroll through Britania... using your legs

[Ixnaum]

Hello everyone,

Having recently been hooked on to Step Mania, I realized that my dance pad might have more uses than just virtual dance.

I put together a little script with the help of AutoHotKey that allows for the player to walk using the dance pad in Exult ...

What you need to do is the following:
- Get your dance pad ready
- Install AutoHotKey http://www.autohotkey.com/download/
- Launch my script http://www.florien.ca/other/exult-dance ... roller.ahk
- Launch Exult
- Place the dance pad in a diagonally in front of your computer, Up arrow facing in the NW direction, right arrow facing in the NE direction.
- To walk stand on two arrows at a time and just press one at a time ... NW-NE makes avatar walk N. NE-SE walk E ... etc. It's pretty natural after a while. .... basically left-right-left-right just like walking. Of course walking east and west is more of a front-back-front-back kind of an affair, but feels pretty good too.

Caveats:
- My script assumes the following. Dancepad is detected as joystick #1 in your system. If not you will need to modify all the lines in the script with 1JoyXX with 2JoyXX or whatever your joystick number is
- Your dance buttons map to the same buttons as mine.
button 13->UP
button 14->RIGHT
button 15->DOWN
button 16->LEFT
You can find out your mapping from the control panel joystick test. If the mapping doesn't match your dance pad just edit my script and change the 1JoyXX to whatever number your buttons map to.
- You will soon realize that you don't have a mouse and keyboard handy. I handled this problem by mapping the start button on the mat to combat toggle and the O button to inventory. For mouse movement I just grabbed a hard writing pad and used it as my mouse pad. It worked pretty well, you can organize your inventory pretty efficiently and if your legs get too tired you can cheat and walk with the mouse.

Have fun ... I already finished trinsic and walked to Britain to pick up my supplies from Lord British. But then I thought I could walk to vesper to pick up the Golden Akhn that Lord British said I could borrow ... and the slime got Iolo and then me in the swamp ... I should have ran ... left-right-left-right

Let me know how you like it ... it's definitely a work in progress. One thing that's especially annoying is controlling walking speed so that in the future the faster you walk the faster your avatar walks.

[Ixnaum]

I created a little bit clearer explanation on this web page

[drcode]

Pretty clever! Now I have a reason to get one of these.

[Achenar]

LOL Ixnaum this is a great idea. Now two of my obsessions (of the past I guess) can be combined into one glorious whole!!

I made my own dance pad a while back, so I'll be sure to try this out as soon as I can (once organised after a recent house move .

[Andrea B Previtera]

Oh, please I *beg* you: take a little movie of the whole thing!

[Ixnaum]

... yes, I can while wearing my complete avatar constume The mental image should suffice ...

...Talking about costumes, maybe someone could come up with some novel idea of making a sword like interface have the functionality of a mouse. Then the experience would truly be complete.

[Ixnaum]

I guess if your weapon of choice is a bow, crossbow, musket, fire staff ... or a cannon for that matter. Then a light gun could work quite well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_gun

[drcode]

Didn't some company come out with a mouse that you could wave around in 3-dimensions?

[Dominus]

The upcoming Nintendo (Wii) supposedly has a controler that works like that.

[DarkAvatar]

so does the PS3 (playstation 3) I like theirs better..... because it looks like the previous dual shock controllers...but I give the props to nintendo for thinking of it first...

[Garrett]

The PS3 implementation is inferior though.

The wiimote has full angle and motion detection meaning it can share all the functionality of both a mouse and a lightgun. Also it can apparently tell where it is located in relation to the console(?) which I assume is part-and-parcel of its motion detection.

The PS3 controller in comparison only senses tilting, making it useless as a mouse equivalent. I'm sure you've seen how annoying it is to move a cursor with a D-pad, and the tilting won't be much quicker.

Not to mention the Wii is the only one of the two with a rumble feature. I can certainly see using the rumble for things like sailing and cart rides, to say nothing of combat and spellcasting.