Does anyone know how to get 8-directional movement with a joystick?

Unity Engine
1

I’ve been at it for weeks now and nothing I try is working. I get 8-directional movement on keyboard just fine (which makes since as there’s only eight possible inputs on a keyboard) but anytime I plug in a controller I get some very nice 360 movement. This would be great if I didn’t need to limit the player to eight directions for my game to function correctly. Any ideas?

2

You just need to quantize each axis independently before using the result.

Each axis returns from -1.0f to 0.0f to 1.0f.

The simplest way to quantize it is something like this:

int QuantizeAxis ( float input)
{
  if (input < -0.5f) return -1;
  if (input > 0.5f) return 1;
  return 0;
}

You can tinker with the 0.5, which is the deadband within -1 to 1 where you want zero to come out.

You can also put each axis into a Vector2 and then normalize the result so that diagonals don’t go 1.41x (square root of 2) faster than horizontal/vertical movement.

3

Thanks! That was the exact solution I was looking for.

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