Posted by Dave K. on January 07, 2002 at 12:53:29:
Just an FYI for the BYOAC crowd. I bought the great looking gun off ebay (Mechanized Attack like operation wolf style) thinking it was a positional gun, but its an optical gun (damn should have done my homework first before rushing to buy this).
The gun looks and feels great. Its on metal base that can swivel in both x and y axis (twist and up/down). I thought at first to just connect some joystick pots to the axis points and run through the analog joystick inputs on a controller. But after renting Silent Scope and Silent Scope 2, I realized for a gun controller to work, it has to be totally positional. This means the position must be fixed for x,y. An analog joystick will move continusly in a certain direction so that won't work.
The best hack would be for a USB mouse (since its supported in the game) and will give absolute x,y position tracking. After noodling over this for some time, I realized the degrees of rotation on the gun's x/y axis' isn't enough to turn a mouse's opto wheel incoder far enough for detailed x,y tracking. In other words, I can't turn the mouse wheel very much.
Well maybe someone on the board has an idea (some sort of gang turning knob or set of gears). But I've tabled the project for now. Maybe I'll hack it into a regular optical gun for Dreamcast/PS2, and take advantage of the cool recoil cycliner inside for realistic feedback (this thing it big and heavy).
-Dave