Playing with a gamepad did not work: all six move_* actions had no joypad
event at all, so a pad could yaw/pitch/roll/turbo but could not translate.
Nothing caught it because every action existed and the game booted fine —
no assertion checked that an action is reachable on *both* devices.
Controller layout, on the 6DOF convention (left stick aims, right stick
translates), using all six of the pad's analog axes for the ship's six
degrees of freedom:
left stick yaw + pitch right stick strafe + vertical
LB / RB roll RT / LT forward / back
L3 turbo R3 ball camera
Input is now read with Input.get_axis instead of is_action_pressed, so
triggers and sticks are proportional. Keyboard values are unchanged.
Three rotation bugs found by measuring a real Ship rather than reading the
code:
- apply_torque() is world-space and the torque was never rotated into the
hull's frame (unlike thrust, which uses -ship_basis.z). Roll input became
pitch after a 90 degree turn and inverted at 180, so the controls were
correct flying up-field and backwards flying back.
- ship.tscn's inertia is Vector3(7, 1, 7) but a flat torque was applied to
every axis, giving yaw 7x the angular acceleration of pitch and roll
(172 deg/s vs 52). Torque is now scaled per-axis by inertia, so
rotation_acceleration means rad/s^2 and all three axes match. Yaw is
unchanged.
- pitch_down pitched the nose UP: get_axis's arguments were reversed, so
the I/K keys and the stick each did the opposite of their label.
Menus were unusable on a pad for a separate reason: Godot 4.7 gives
ui_up/down/left/right joypad events by default but leaves ui_accept and
ui_cancel with none (verified against a pristine project), so a controller
could move the highlight and never press anything. A confirms and B goes
back. Gameplay exits on a new leave_gameplay action (Escape / Start) rather
than ui_cancel, so carrying B for menus cannot abandon a live match.
Bindings for both devices are rebindable in Settings -> Controls, persisted
to user://input.cfg — a separate file from settings.cfg because
VideoSettings.save() rewrites that file wholesale and would drop any
section it does not know about. project.godot stays the source of truth for
defaults; overrides are only ever a delta on top of a boot-time snapshot.
Verified: 268 unit tests, the ENet integration gate, and a 16-sample
before/after comparison of networked prediction residuals showing the
physics change does not regress them (median 0.083m -> 0.065m).
Note for follow-up: every policy in Game/bots/ was trained against the old
sluggish, world-axis rotation and will over-rotate until retrained.
Godot's ConfigFile writer does not round-trip comments in project.godot. An
observed rewrite deleted both `;` blocks outright and spliced the three-line
`#` block above run/main_scene.dedicated_server onto the setting's own line,
leaving it commented out — which would send dedicated builds to the
interactive main menu instead of server_boot.tscn, with nothing failing until
someone noticed a server process rendering a menu.
Move the explanations into the code that owns the settings (server_boot.gd for
the dedicated-server override, video_settings.gd for stretch mode and vsync)
so they cannot be destroyed by a rewrite, and leave project.godot holding only
assignments plus Godot's own regenerated header.
Add tests/cases/test_project_settings.gd as the backstop: the feature-override
assertions read project.godot as text and reject a line that has been folded
into a comment, since ProjectSettings resolves `key.<feature>` overrides at
load time and never exposes the suffixed key. Verified by reproducing the
exact corruption, which fails the test, and it also covers the Jolt physics
engine, the required autoloads, and that no test-hook autoload is ever shipped
registered.
Josh Creek