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Comment by jsrcout | Hacker News Reader

I've always set controls like an airplane stick - "pull back" to look up, "push forward" to look down. And could never get the hang of the opposite mapping. It literally never occurred to me that it was like aiming your physical eyes up and down. Sigh.

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Yes, it's exactly this - and not even a joystick thing. The control is forward and backwards, not up and down, like pushing the top of your head forward to look down. This mapping makes it act like the other controls, controlling the character directly instead of the viewport independently. Even in third person, I can't help but think of controlling the camera as a camera in this same way, instead of a controlling a viewport.

Airplane controls are somewhat of a hybrid between regular controls and inverted controls. Since you do indeed input up to look down and vice versa, but you still input left to turn left and right to turn right.

Isn’t that how inverted joystick controls in modern video games work too? It’s only the Y axis that’s inverted, I thought (and only the “viewing angle” joystick, not the “player movement” joystick).

Many modern games allow one to invert either the Y or X axis or both. Some players do both.

Fully inverted: ‘Like an airplane for up/down, like a yacht for left/right’

A yacht can have a tiller you push right to go left, or a wheel you rotate clockwise to go right.

I recently rented a paddleboat with an extra linkage to invert the rudder control. I was a mess out on the water! But maybe it made it easier for those with no boat experience.

Reminds me of those couple of guys who made a bicycle with backwards controls. They learned how to use it, which then rendered then unable to use normal bicycles lol.

https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0

Airplane stick is actually consistent but in a different way. The stick always rotates the plane around it's center in the direction the stick is moved.

It's an example of "move the object" instead of "move the observer", in that the goal is to control a vehicle not to control the view in the windshield. And the "object" you're "grabbing" is only rotating the vehicle around it's center, not panning around a flat surface.

I started with airplane style. Then after few years I had one game that had only the opposite controls so I switched and never looked back.

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