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posted by martyb on Friday December 04 2020, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-push-your-luck-or-pull-my-leg dept.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/28/why-do-video-game-players-invert-the-controls

Imagine you are playing a video game where you're looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick?

If the answer is "up", you're in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting "Invert Y axis", which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism?

[...] "From a cognitive perspective, players who don't invert are 'acting as' the avatar, with movement/steering originating from between the avatar's eyes, controlling the camera," says Dr Jennifer Corbett, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University London's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. "Players who invert are 'acting on' the avatar, with the controls either behind or on top of the head controlling the avatar."

[...] Corbett suggests we could also look at other areas of our technology use for comparisons. "There could be a relationship with other screen interaction biases, like whether or not people invert when scrolling through the pages of a document on a laptop – do they perceive they are moving the page or the viewing window? There could also be a link to more global environmental or contextual predispositions, such as those that influence whether people perceive the now-famous dress as blue and black or white and gold, largely depending on what colour they perceive the illuminating light (eg, outside daylight versus inside a shop) to be."

One thing is clear: players who were introduced to inverted controls by 1980s flight sims, by 1990s Star Wars X-Wing games or by Nintendo shooters are likely to stick with inverted controls through their lives – players who weren't, don't tend to start. Both groups are adamant that theirs is the correct perspective and cannot countenance the alternative. However, as with all the most important things in life, what at first appears binary, is actually more complicated. Some players only invert Y with joypads and not with mouse controls, some also invert Z, a small number start in one group then later swap over, some constantly switch between control methods at will depending on the game. Inversion is a spectrum.

So, fellow Soylentils, which way is it? Push to go up, or pull?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @02:06AM (9 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @02:06AM (#1083856) Journal

    Back in the VRML days, I actually wrote some VRML software because 3d is fun!

    It also involves a lot of vector math, and navigating through a 3-d world. I think the people who invert their controls are indeed thinking like pilots. You pull back on the yoke or stick of an aircraft to go up (but if you pull back too far, you stall).

    What was interesting about most of the VRML browsers I saw was that the controls were bound to a fixed frame of reference. If you pitched up and "yawed", you'd find yourself spinning about a tight little axis on the "ceiling".

    This seemed wrong to me, so when I programmed the controls for my VRML browser I made it "relative to your own frame of reference", as if you were flying a space fighter. You always yawed about your *own* yaw-axis, not an arbitrary Z-axis defined by the world (same for pitch and roll too). I may have even called it "fly" mode vs. "room" mode. The math was just marginally more complicated. The algorithm was something like:

    1. Apply matrix-A which transforms from world to player coordinates. 2. Apply control input. 3. The inverse of that matrix is the new matrix A.

    At least I think that's what it was--it's been a long time; but this feature got praise from one of a hand-full of users. Turns out, performance was more important than standardization in 3-d, and proprietary game engines ran roughshod over VRML and its successor, X3d. Does anybody still use them? I haven't searched on this topic in years...

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    • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @03:29AM (7 children)

      by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:29AM (#1083885) Journal

      OK, it took me a while to decompress the archive of my 21 year old code. Boy do I hate, C++ but I think I might understand what I wrote now. The code is from yesteryear, the comments are from today:

      void CSFRotation::YawLeft(float Theta)
      {
      //OK, we're inside a rotation object because everything's an object,
      //and inside this rotation, we constructed another rotation which is theta
      //about the y-axis:
      CSFRotation localY(0.0F,1.0F,0.0F,Theta);

      //Now we construct what I think is a unit matrix, ie, a matrix that would
      //do nothing if you used it to transform something.
      CSFMatrix expM;

      //We rotate the unit matrix by this rotation, because remember we're inside
      //a rotation object.  This rotation takes us from the fixed world system into
      //our own rotation.
      expM.RotateBy(this);

      //We also rotate it by the control input
      expM.RotateBy(&localY);

      //Here's where the dragons are--this function is too long to post and makes
      // a reference to "Introduction to Robotics (Craig) p. 52".  This must be the
      //part that takes the new rotation and makes it usable as part of the transform
      //that governs the location and orientation of my "space ship".  I don't know
      //why it's so complicated, but I remember it working quite well.
      ConvertFromMatrix(expM);
      return;
      }

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      • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @03:42AM (6 children)

        by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:42AM (#1083895) Journal

        Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole. Believe it or not, I found Craig's intro to robotics text sitting on my shelf and looked at the relevant pages for a few minutes.

        There's something about the transforms--they become unstable if you're around 0 or 180 degrees. In the mathematical world they're probably "undefined", but in the real world of trying to make a piece of software work, I probably found a way to force the appropriate value for a smooth control when you were close to the undefined values. That's definitely reflected in the "dragons" function, where I have checks for things that are close to 0 or 180.

        Anyway, I'm done with this for now. I don't think I'll be getting back in to 3-d in any serious way.

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        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:38AM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:38AM (#1083955)

          There's something about the transforms--they become unstable if you're around 0 or 180 degrees.

          Only if you use naive maths. go 4D and you are saved. Quaternions.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotation [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @06:50AM (4 children)

            by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @06:50AM (#1083962) Journal

            That's awesome. I vaguely recall hearing about quaternions in this application. If I were to code it today, that's probably the route I'd take. I wonder how the efficiency compares though, vs. my "if (angle) is close to 0 or pi, then do this" approach.

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            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:00PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:00PM (#1084008)

              This is exactly the problem that quaternions were introduced in navigation to deal with, and is why all spacecraft use it, and robotics too. If you have an articulated robot arm, particularly with multiple joints but really any that has at least three degrees of freedom, you get into situations (called gimbal lock) where you have a mathematical degeneracy in your matrix when you get into a situation where you've aligned two of your axes (so you end up not matching the number of your equations with the number of degrees of freedom). This degeneracy goes away with quaternions. There's other cool stuff to make them useful in that it is easy to point from one direction to another, so you don't need to worry about how you are defining your Euler angles and the order of operations you apply them, etc. Lots of cool YouTube stuff on it, such as (as usual), at Numberphile [youtube.com] and 3blue1brown [youtube.com].

            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Friday December 04 2020, @03:09PM (2 children)

              by crafoo (6639) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:09PM (#1084026)

              It's more efficient, and quaternion math works well with 4x4 (homogeneous) transformation matrix stacks. It also of course completely avoids the gimbal lock condition of euler angles (roll, pitch, yaw calculated directly).

              • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @07:14PM (1 child)

                by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @07:14PM (#1084123) Journal

                The control system never suffered from gimbal lock though. Perhaps it was somehow doing what quaternions do, in a less efficient way.

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                • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday December 04 2020, @08:46PM

                  by istartedi (123) on Friday December 04 2020, @08:46PM (#1084154) Journal

                  OK, the ConvertFromMatrix code has a lot of junk to deal with 0 or 180, but the most common path through the function leads to this:

                  m_angle=acos(CosineTheta);
                  m_x=(r32-r23)*0.5F/sin(m_angle);
                  m_y=(r13-r31)*0.5F/sin(m_angle);
                  m_z=(r21-r12)*0.5F/sin(m_angle);

                  This is not exactly the rotation quaternion in the Wiki article on it, but it's very close so I'm going to say that the "cook book" code I got from that text book was really using quaternions too. The author mentions Euler parameters a few pages later but says a full discussion is beyond the scope of the book and that another name for it is "unit quaternion".

                  So, no; I didn't solve the problem without using quaternions.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:23PM (#1084078)

      I think the people who invert their controls are indeed thinking like pilots.

      This makes sense to me. I played Wing Commander on DOS with a joystick ages before I ever saw an X Box controller. Consequently, my mental model for the joystick on a game controller is the same as a joystick for a flight sim - I don't imaging the controller held vertically, I imagine it horizontally like a joystick. Consequently, there is no "up" or "down," but rather "forward and back." That's why I've always found "Non inverted" controls so confusing. If I move the top of my head forward, I wind up looking at the floor. If I move the top of my head rearward, I wind up looking at the sky. Flight sims with a joystick matched that, and X Box style controls seem to be the only thing that bucks the intuitive convention to me.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:18AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:18AM (#1083858)

    If, as TFA suggests, the difference is the reference frame chosen by the player, I wonder what players do with VR goggles on. If the world is a true VR simulator, then it seems to me that you are 1st person, with no choice(?)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:02AM (#1083943)

      1st person, no choice. and you may see your hands moving around with the controllers, or just the controllers. there are annoying distractions (uneven terrain is immediately noticeable since it doesn't correspond to your floor), but otherwise you can get used to the limited colors, resolutions etc.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Friday December 04 2020, @02:20AM (4 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Friday December 04 2020, @02:20AM (#1083860)

    Flight sim with stick obviously invert Y axis. Why that's even called inverting the Y axis I don't even get - it's the natural direction if you're flying stick.

    Other input methods typically don't need to be monkeyed with.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:33AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:33AM (#1083862)

      But, it's not though, the only reason why people think that is because of mechanical limitations of early aircraft. Had they developed the gear for mechanical assist to move the flaps first, they may well have standardized on pushing to go up as that's what it looks like when you're looking down at the controls.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Friday December 04 2020, @02:42AM

        by coolgopher (1157) on Friday December 04 2020, @02:42AM (#1083867)

        But that's just the thing - that's the aircraft standard. When you're trying to get someone immersed, you're trying to replicate the real thing.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @04:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @04:58AM (#1083926)

        That isn't the only reason it makes more sense either. If you think of the stick as from the head point of view, pulling the head back looks up and pushing it forward looks down (same with the roll). It also matches the somatogravic illusions because of the way we interpret acceleration as pitch and vice-versa.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46AM

        by mhajicek (51) on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46AM (#1083934)

        They could have made it go either way arbitrarily. But if you're in the plane, and it's vibrating and moving and your body and arm have inertia, back=up is self stabilizing, while forward=up is unstable.

        --
        The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ze on Friday December 04 2020, @02:41AM (1 child)

    by ze (8197) on Friday December 04 2020, @02:41AM (#1083866)

    I consider my preference for inversion to be isomorphic, at least on that axis... a direct correspondence between the physical and virtual movements.
    For mice, I've been used to thumb-operated trackballs since the early 90s, and in a first-person game, the ball is kindof my player character's head: rolling the ball back rolls the head back, thus looking up... For joysticks, it's basically the same.
    I'll admit the inconsistency in this is that rolling the ball/stick left looks left, instead of rolling the head to look to the right as would be consistent with an inverted vertical axis... still, that never seems to feel as unnatural to me as rolling something forward to tilt the view backward usually does.
    I think as the last summary paragraph, and some commenters, seem to indicate, that it is largely a matter of what you're used to, and that the pilot angle makes sense for consistency... if you ever play games where the flight controls are one way, maybe you're more likely to find it jarring when walking games flip it the opposite way?

    • (Score: 2) by slinches on Friday December 04 2020, @09:59AM

      by slinches (5049) on Friday December 04 2020, @09:59AM (#1083981)

      I think it's even simpler than that. It's just what plane you consider the right stick to be in. Tilt your head back means the same as look up. So those who consider the stick to represent tilt/pan with the same orientation as the left stick (forward, back, left, right) prefer the "inverted" direction opposite in the vertical axis to those who consider it to be tilt/pan up, down, left and right.

  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday December 04 2020, @03:05AM (6 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:05AM (#1083872) Journal

    Real aircraft stick (WW1, WW2) control is the canonical mode.

    Doing it other way is just childish.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 04 2020, @03:25AM (5 children)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:25AM (#1083883) Journal

      Yes, you're pushing the mouse (stick) forward to push the nose down, not up.

      But if you think that's bad, I use a trackball with a scroll "ring". I have to reverse that, either the volume control is reversed or the page scroll is.

      And when are they gonna make calculator (keyboard numeric) match with phone keypads?

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday December 04 2020, @04:06AM (4 children)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday December 04 2020, @04:06AM (#1083907)

        And when are they gonna make calculator (keyboard numeric) match with phone keypads?

        Yeah, that one is really annoying now that only dinosaurs (and office workers) actually use phones with physical buttons. On a smartphone, it's just a touchscreen, so there's no reason to stick with the old phone standard. I'm much more used to the arrangement on my computer's numerical keypad.

        • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 04 2020, @04:11AM (3 children)

          by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday December 04 2020, @04:11AM (#1083911) Journal

          Now it's alphanumeric. The phone pad is the only logical way to do it for the lettering. The calculator pad is a hangover from the old adding machines.

          --
          La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday December 04 2020, @05:52AM (2 children)

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday December 04 2020, @05:52AM (#1083939)

            Yeah, but no one actually uses the numeric keypad on phones for the letters anymore.

            • (Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Friday December 04 2020, @06:48AM

              by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday December 04 2020, @06:48AM (#1083961) Journal

              :-) Not everybody has one of those fancy schmancy "smart" phones

              --
              La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
            • (Score: 3, Touché) by rleigh on Friday December 04 2020, @09:29AM

              by rleigh (4887) on Friday December 04 2020, @09:29AM (#1083979) Homepage

              Want a bet? I still use it. I've get to get a smartphone.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Friday December 04 2020, @03:38AM (2 children)

    by Marand (1081) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:38AM (#1083890) Journal

    I'll either use "normal" X and Y axis or I'll invert both, but which I choose depends on the perspective, because that determines whether I'm moving the camera or moving the player avatar. If a game is in first person, like Borderlands, an Elder Scrolls game, etc. I nearly always choose regular X/Y movement. The camera in a first-person game is placed to be the character's eyes, so I'm moving the head: left to look left, up to look up, etc.

    However, if a game is third-person, then there's an invisible camera floating near the player and focused on it, and that's what I'm controlling; it's not connected to the player avatar in this case, it's just looking at it. That means if move the mouse to the left, conceptually what I'm doing is telling the floating camera to move left, which means the view should pan to the right. So, in third person I always invert both X and Y axes, because I'm moving the camera in orbit around the player avatar rather than manipulating the avatar itself in this case.

    I picked this habit up from 3d modeling programs like Blender, rather than from any game, because I found the easiest way to get a camera positioned the way I wanted was to make an empty node somewhere in the scene and set the camera to remain focused on it at all times. That way I could put the empty where I want the camera to focus, then pick up and move the camera around to pan around it and zoom in until I got it framed how I wanted. That made the camera act similarly to real-life, where you move to the left of your subject if you want to see more of what's to its right, and set the habit in stone for me: third person cameras must be inverted.

    The only exception to this "first person = normal, third person = inverted" rule is first-person with a controller. Maybe it's because I almost never do this since I hate first-person games on consoles, but in the very rare situation where I play something first-person using a dual-stick controller I tend to use first-person with inverted X and Y. I think it could be because stick rotation is slow and imprecise, so perhaps my brain interprets it as camera rotation since rotation around the avatar would be slower than head turning.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Dale on Friday December 04 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)

      by Dale (539) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 04 2020, @02:31PM (#1084014)

      Very similar for me. I invert Y on all flight sim style games because it makes it feel natural. First person views I'm always normal. Third person views for camera control I'm inverted. The article makes me question why for third person it feels normal to be inverted. Is it a preference or a learned behavior?

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Friday December 04 2020, @06:23PM

        by Marand (1081) on Friday December 04 2020, @06:23PM (#1084097) Journal

        The article makes me question why for third person it feels normal to be inverted. Is it a preference or a learned behavior?

        I think it's primarily about perception and perspective, though it has to fight with learned behaviour. When I didn't deal with third-person cameras much, I defaulted to the same non-inverted controls as I used in first-person because they were familiar, but once I conceptualised the movement as "I'm controlling the camera" it became impossible to use it any other way, though it took some time to get comfortable with it. Even if I go months or years between 3rd-person camera controls I still go back to inverted because I had a shift in perception.

        Now, what really fucks with me is when a game situationally swaps between first and third person, like for aiming, because they almost never let you select inverted/normal per mode. I've been playing that Breath of the Wild prequel, which is primarily third person but a few attacks swap you to first-person briefly to aim, and it fucks me up every time because it's inverted too. The camera shifts and my perception goes with it, from controlling camera to controlling character, but the controls don't follow.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Booga1 on Friday December 04 2020, @03:39AM (1 child)

    by Booga1 (6333) on Friday December 04 2020, @03:39AM (#1083891)

    For me it depends on the game's camera perspective.

    If I am in a first person shooter, up is up and down is down because the view is centered on the character and I'm controlling a crosshair.
    If I am in a third person perspective, up is down and down is up because the camera is on a "gimbal" behind the character and I'm controlling it like I would control camera angles using a tripod grip.
    If I am in a plane, up is down and down is up because that's how plane sticks work. Anything else just feels wrong.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Friday December 04 2020, @09:16PM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 04 2020, @09:16PM (#1084167)

      I'm in a similar boat.

      Back in the day, I started playing first-person shootemups such as Quake (+mlook), and forward/up was to look up.

      Then I got into X Wing vs Tie Fighter using a joypad (until I bought a joystick), where I learned to accept that up/forward meant pitch down.

      I also played Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the N64, and can't remember what configuration I used. Was it inverted because it was on a joypad/controller like XvT, or non-inverted because it was a shootemup?

      The net effect is that on the once-in-a-blue-moon occasion that I pick up a console-based first-person game (e.g Portal), my brain finds both inverted and non-inverted to be "wrong" at first. I tend to switch between the two schemes during the first few hours of play, and eventually settle on one. I can't recall which it is, and it might not even be the same one on each occasion!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @03:42AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @03:42AM (#1083894)

    From the summary: ""From a cognitive perspective, players who don't invert are 'acting as' the avatar, with movement/steering originating from between the avatar's eyes, controlling the camera," says Dr Jennifer Corbett, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University London's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. "Players who invert are 'acting on' the avatar, with the controls either behind or on top of the head controlling the avatar.""

    Bullshit. When I want to look up, I tilt my head back. I prefer invert, admittedly mostly because I'm used to it, but in my mind I'm acting as the avatar. The people who don't invert are just directly indicating their attention, instead of acting as the avatar.

    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday December 04 2020, @06:46AM (3 children)

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Friday December 04 2020, @06:46AM (#1083959) Journal

      Bullshit. When I want to look up, I tilt my head back. ... in my mind I'm acting as the avatar. The people who don't invert are just directly indicating their attention, instead of acting as the avatar.

      Nope. When I want to look up, I move my eyes upward and raise my face; when I wish to look downward, I lower my eyes and turn my face in that direction as well. I don't look at things with the back of my head, or an imaginary camera behind me that has to rotate in the opposite direction of my eyeballs/face.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Friday December 04 2020, @07:40AM (1 child)

        by coolgopher (1157) on Friday December 04 2020, @07:40AM (#1083966)

        So it sounds like Magic Oddball's consciousness is face-surfaced, while the GP AC's consciousness is center-brained. Interesting.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:47PM (#1084088)

          Bingo. Different people perceive it in different ways.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:54AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:54AM (#1083967)

        That doesn't make any sense, you don't "move" your eyeballs any more than you would your head, you still rotate them.

  • (Score: 2) by EJ on Friday December 04 2020, @04:28AM

    by EJ (2452) on Friday December 04 2020, @04:28AM (#1083916)

    I will let the expert on the subject comment for me:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAA1xgTTw9w [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday December 04 2020, @04:47AM (4 children)

    by dltaylor (4693) on Friday December 04 2020, @04:47AM (#1083922)

    The "standard" I have seen appears backwards to me. If I want an airplane to change direction toward the surface with the cockpit (not strictly up/down, it could be in inverted flight or in a quarter roll), I want to pull the stick back toward me. Similarly, to roll the wing on the cockpit's left clockwise relative to the cockpit, I want to push the stick to my right.

    Quite a few of the setups I have seen used, particularly when radio control was new seem to be set up entirely the reverse.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by caseih on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46AM (2 children)

      by caseih (2744) on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46AM (#1083935)

      Like many things, the controls of an aircraft are the way they are because of the mechanical design of pre hydraulic aircraft where you were actually pushing and pulling on cables. And that was the way it was because of the way early mechanical farming tools were. When you operated a plow, if you wanted to raise it out of the ground you would pull on a lever which pulled on the plow sheer, lifting it. Back in those days you were walking behind the plow. This notion of pulling up to raise something continued in machinery operation. Even with hydraulics in tractors, they were operated in a pull to raise, push to lower fashion. And still are to this day. Although with the advent of pushbutton control and gamepad style controls it's debatable and many machines now use up is up down is down, but others emulate the old analog way of doing things.

      In the case of aircraft the stick actions are particularly intuitive in that they mimic the actual action of each axis. Pulling pulls the nose up. Pushing pushes the nose down. Rocking the stick to the left rocks the plane to the left. Sure you could learn to do it the way that you feel makes sense. Just saying there is a good reason it's the way it is. I've always found the flight stick to be intuitive and natural. But I grew up operating farm machinery.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @08:20AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @08:20AM (#1083970)

        hey, you get genuine thanks today. I never realized the plow connection, but it sort of makes sense even for the horse/cattle plow. formally, the lever that you can rotate with your hands has the center of rotation below and in front of you. So pulling the lever back makes the plow get out of the ground, and pushing on the lever means the plow is going deeper in the ground.

      • (Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday December 04 2020, @05:56PM

        by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 04 2020, @05:56PM (#1084090)

        But I grew up operating farm machinery.

        Username checks out. :)

        (former farm kid, used Farmall / IH equipment for the most part)

        --
        The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
    • (Score: 2) by caseih on Friday December 04 2020, @05:50AM

      by caseih (2744) on Friday December 04 2020, @05:50AM (#1083938)

      Also I've never seen the directions reversed in RC control. But there are different ways of assigning controls to the stick. For example many people in Europe use mode 1 radios where the throttle is on the right stick. Whereas I learned on mode 2 which places the throttle and rudder on the left stick. But in all cases the direction of the controls is the same.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @04:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @04:51AM (#1083925)

    Isn't that how the Boeing 737 MAX got in trouble?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:43PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:43PM (#1084085)

    Does anyone hold a controller, or wall-mount their keyboard, so that "up" actually points up?

    Or does everyone keep the controller/keyboard horizontal so the input is really forward/back instead of up/down?

    In other words, the premise is wrong and the whole thread is invalid.

    • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday December 04 2020, @09:05PM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 04 2020, @09:05PM (#1084161)

      It might be wrong for a keyboard, but plenty of people hold handheld controllers at any old angle, including vertically.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:03PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:03PM (#1084118)

    I just wish Terraria would include a setting to invert the mouse buttons for lefties.

    I'd be even nicer if it just got it from the OS.

  • (Score: 2) by dwilson on Friday December 04 2020, @09:38PM

    by dwilson (2599) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 04 2020, @09:38PM (#1084172) Journal

    Saying players move the mouse 'up' is bad terminology, plain and simple. It says more about the piss-poor way human beings think and articulate those thoughts than it does about anything else.

    Here, try it yourself: Move your mouse up. Go on.

    ...did you lift it off the pad? No? Then you didn't move it up. You probably pushed it forward, away from your body. That's not up. That's forward.

    They're probably bang-on with talk of 'being' the avatar vs 'controlling' the avatar, and linking the Y-inversion to flight sims. Which are based on actual controls, by the way. You push the stick forward, you pitch the plane forward ie it goes down. You pull it back, you pitch it back ie it goes up.

    But if I ever meet an actual pilot who talks about moving the control yoke up when they're pushing it forward (or pulling it back, for that matter), I'll eat my hat.

    --
    - D
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:31AM (#1084280)

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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 05 2020, @12:22PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Saturday December 05 2020, @12:22PM (#1084333)

    There's a lot of discussion about the 'natural' way of controlling an aircraft in the discussion about this, and it being 'obvious' that you pull back on the control column to go up.

    Nope.

    1) Pushing forward or pulling back on the column alters the pitch of the aircraft with respect to the airflow. Whether that produces an increase in altitude is another question*.

    2) It turns out that at the time of WW2, pull back to pitch up was the British and American standard, push forward to pitch up was the German standard. You can argue for either to be correct, and the preferred way can be engineered in to the control linkages.**

    *And, to be clear, moving the control column to the left or right induces a roll in the aircraft. It doesn't turn left or right like a car on a road. To execute a turn, you need a combination of rudder (which controls yaw) and roll, and the rudder is usually controlled by your feet.

    **Weirdly enough, I can't find a reference for this, although I have known this 'fact' for years. So, I'll post it anyway, confident that if I'm wrong, someone will point it out.

  • (Score: 1) by jman on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:19PM

    by jman (6085) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:19PM (#1084343) Homepage

    Guess Apple's chief designer for many years was in the "Invert" camp. Turning off that stupid reverse up/down mouse scrolling preference is the first thing I do on any Mac...

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