Just got my OUYA yesterday (an early backer edition) and wanted to inquire about the controller.
I've had no problems with lag or anything but the analog sticks are exhibiting some problems consistent with comments I've seen in other threads; namely they seem to have large independent dead-zones for both axes. I can be holding straight right and then tilt up or down 10-20 degrees and the character continues to move straight right.
You can see the effect in the following video where I move my thumb in a slow circle using both the PS3 controller and the OUYA one. In the PS3 case the character moves in a circle but the OUYA one winds up looking more like a slightly rounded square due to one or the other axis seeming to be in a dead-zone for a disproportionate amount of time.
Another effect I'm seeing is that analog values when the stick is held all the way to the edge are inconsistent and sometimes substantially smaller than other controllers. The effect of this in my game is that an OUYA-controlled character gets outrun by one controlled by a PS3, XBox360, or Logitech controller, especially at certain diagonal angles.
...So OUYA folks, I'm curious if you can provide any info as to whether this situation has or will be changing in hardware or (hopefully) software before launch.. I can try to add band-aids to my game to compensate for things in their current state, but I don't want to do that if there'll be changes coming down the pipe. Thanks for any info.
efroemling
Posts: 45Member
Comments
Website
If you do this and take the angle between the vector produced by the x/y values the analogue stick returns and the vector (0,0), then the graph of the angles should look like this:
but it apparently looks like this:
Or to put it another way, if you draw a line for the 2D vector produced by the stick rotation after every tick, whilst slowly rotating it, it'd look something like this:
Now, I've not had time to test this but when I was testing my game a couple of months ago, and I was testing my stick movement, I plotted the vectors the sticks were producing as lines and got something looking like the image above.
It would also explain why your OUYA controller makes your player walk in a square shape with rounded corners, rather than in a circle
Website
Well, someone who just got theirs complains about it: http://www.zeitscribe.net/2013/05/ouya-awesome-mediocre-sucks-and.html
"I already mentioned this when I talked about the analog sticks. Physically they feel nice but in-game there's something wrong in all the games I've tried. They don't actually seem to be analog sticks but 8 direction arrow keys instead. Playing a game with the analog sticks feels close to PC gaming with arrow keys.
This becomes very apparent when playing games where you control a space ship, tank or whatever from a top-down perspective. While on other consoles you've got used to a nearly infinite directions you can choose.
I really hope that this isn't a hardware issue and the games simply have not implemented this correctly."
I'm not sure if this is *exactly* the same case, but they said this specifically:
"The sticky directional stick was a result of some glue seeping out during manufacturing -- found it and fixed immediately."
So it sounds like the same thing to me - that the thumbstick tends to 'stick' along certain directions, and if I'm right it should be fixed in the final retail model.
PS3 controller on Devkit console:
Edit: This definitely is not a "glue" problem, as my devkit controller analogue sticks have never been sticky or had a problem with their movement. Could be anything from the circuit board under the stick not picking things up correctly, to a bug in the maths causing things to go wrong in the controller API, to anything in between
Website
OUYA's system programmer should read this article.
http://www.third-helix.com/2013/04/doing-thumbstick-dead-zones-right/
Is it same result?
Looks here like it's probably screwed up math when reading the stick values, so fingers crossed this should be fixable with a firmware update.
Please, can anyone from the OUYA dev team chime in on this?
But, If the firmware is in the EEPROM inside the controller, it may be difficult to fix by network update.
I have sent a report of this thread to official support of OUYA.
Here's the left analog stick of my dev controller:
Here's the left analog stick of the retail: