The keyboard inputs on the UniversalCamera work fine, except I find the “strafe” movement of the left/right arrows to be suboptimal, since that means you essentially must move your hand to the mouse to re-orient the camera direction and explore. Strafing isn’t a natural movement, unless you’re a crab, so I’m hoping to tweak that by using the left-right arrows to re-target the camera (and direction of movement).
Is there an option buried somewhere, or an alternate keyboard input manager, that will use left/right to retarget the camera rather than moving laterally? Or, in a perfect world, one that would still allow strafing as well, but as a shift-arrow combo?
I found this forum topic, but this appears to involve directly handling low-level keyboard events. I suspect there’s a more idiomatic way of handling the keyboard in BabylonJS:
I also found this:
However, when pieced together, the sample code there is incomplete, and it seem to diverge quite a bit from the default keyboard input code here, leading me to think maybe this tutorial may be out of date with the current API.
As far as the documentation being out of date, I’ll take a look at it this week and see what’s going on.
For the current codebase, as far as I know, there is no “out of the box” way to enable keyboard rotation so I could see it being added as toggleable functionality (maybe a boolean camera param?). I could also see it being added as additional input like via WASD or something like that. In any case, I could look into it as well and figure out the best option.
I looked at just trying to adapt the built-in one, but that will require me to actually learn and set up TypeScript, which I’ve successfully avoided so far (I do enough typing in C# :)), so I don’t know if I’d be able to issue a useful PR there.
A Boolean option would work, but if my use case sounds too specific to add another parameter to the camera constructors and addCamera(), I would be happy to just reconfigure keysLeft and keysRight after creating the camera, and set the arrow keycodes to some new freeCameraKeyboardMoveInput properties (keysCounterClockwise? keysLookLeft? keysRotateYMinus? Whatever names make sense…). I suppose that’s the more generalizable solution, since other actions could be added in the future (pitch, yaw, run, etc.).
The only limitation there is that I don’t currently see a way to configure Shift/Ctrl combination keys. (One hacky-but-easy solution there would be to mask some unused bits on the _keys buffer and keysX[] arrays to pass the state of those modifiers.)
Actually @PirateJC, I noticed we do not have any blurbs in the doc about input settings. Would probably be great to add ? so I can put the rotation feature in ?
