Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

Like with the mouse scroll wheel, there is a reasonable logic to both directions, including whichever direction you don't like.

It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)

It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)

Both of these are natural and everyone does both in real life totally automatically without thinking.

Everyone looks up and down. Everyone grabs objects and moves them to bring different parts into view.

Probably the preference differences are based on a subconscious/unconscious difference in how you imagine yourself in relation to a document. Whether you imagine yourself as being larger than the document like a person vs a paper, you move the paper, or you imagine the document as larger than you like a fly flying over a paper or like you are virtually IN the document, you move yourself.

> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)

> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)

I use opposite directions on my trackpad and my scrollwheel, take that! Ha!

Trackpad I’m grabbing with my fingers so I want the surface to move in the same direction as my fingers.

Scrollwheel I feel like is a roller that sits on top of the surface so I have to roll down to make the surface move up.

Unfortunately, at least in macos, you need 3rd party software to achieve this

My partner has his stuff set up exactly opposite from you!

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.

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.

people underestimate brains "self correction ability".

I use slingshot, unlike gun's sight post slingshots do not have any sight in center of projectile path, basically you eye one of the fork's of slingshot and your brain quickly adjusts to it correcting whatever angle deviation is there.

I can shoot stuff in air without even aiming now, i got so good no sight nothing.

Reminds me of playing Tribes. First start playing, can't hit anything ever because things move too fast and your brain doesn't get the physics. But then you're hitting stuff zipping around at crazy speeds by just kinda intuiting.

Guess we're evolved to throw spears, so we're good at that kind of thing.

This is why I have little patience with people who over do the drama of something being impossible and unnatural. I have my prefferences too but it's just a preference. There is no natural. Humans are ambi-everything. What part of nature is typing 100wpm on qwerty?

> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)

> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)

Except that neither of those is the reason you'd want inverted controls. You want inverted controls because you have to lean back to look up. The model is that the control moves you.

And given how both mental models are reasonable, I think a lot of the preference is going to come down to what you're used to.

For me it seems to be tied to muscle memory too? Because I've noticed that when I play using a Gamecube controller I prefer the camera's x-axis to be inverted, but when I play using a modern controller I prefer not inverting it.

> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object.

I sort of picture my hand on the crown of my player models head and my movements move his skull around.

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