Dance Pad Walking Controller
After playing Step Mania I realized that my pad might be useful for more than just dancing. Gaming is such a sedentary activity so why not use the dance pad to actually walk in a game using your own two legs. My first attempt was adapting the game Exult. This is how you can make it work:
- Get your dance pad ready
- Install AutoHotKey
- Launch my controller script using AutoHotKey
- 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.
- 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.
- If you have problems it's probably because of the joystick mapping
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.
If you like this, you may like Step Maze