Two Joysticks? (for a twin stick shooter?)

Loving iStencyl so far, and gradually getting to grips with the various systems. However, I'm wondering if it is possible to have two joysticks on screen (i.e. for a twin-stick shooter)?

It's possible to do, but it would slightly complicate the UI to do this.

Questions

- Would they look the same or different?
- Would a game ever need more than 2?
- Would both act in the same way or differently? For example, a joystick can be fixed on screen or shown whereever you press it - would that differ between joysticks or usually be the same?

Thanks for the quick reply!

Firstly, I think in terms of fixed location or shown where you press, the latter would have to somehow define what stick to show depending on where the user touched the screen, which would diminish any real gains the 'on press location' system would have. Probably be easier to make dual stick controls be a fixed position, but allow us to define the position in Mobile Game Settings?

It would be great to name them too, so they can be easily referenced in the blocks of behavior designs, and assigning a different set of images would be helpful, more so on the outer ring which could contain UI elements for example. This isn't essential if the sticks are fixed in a user defined position, because we can create additional UI if required, so just a luxury

The only scenario I can think of, off the top of my head, for having more than one stick would be a local multiplayer game where you could control 4 characters for example (which could be really fun!) - this could be really interesting, actually!

I think they should look different, so you know which stick does what.

I can think of one game on the Iphone that has two joysticks, "Minigore" has one to control the character (360 movement) and one to control the characters fire, so that you can move and shoot at the same time

@zerosimms yeah thats the standard 'twin-stick-shooter' control system - it's quite a common interface now, perhaps not on iOS yet, but certainly on XBLA/PSN games, where you have two analogue sticks to use for that very control scheme (left stick for movement, right for aiming).

@rhys - perhaps yeah, although like I say, if they are fixed position, then you should be supporting that with additional UI on the outer ring of the stick area, rather than the joystick graphic (mainly because the thumbs will be in the way!)

Sorry if i revive an old topic, but this is the only one which came up by using the search for "two joysticks".

Dual stick control is VERY common on iOS and it should be integrated in Stencyl.
It should be also possible to assign different behaviors for the two different joysticks.

One controlling the direction where my player actor is running, the other controlling the direction where he is shooting for example.

There is also the possiblity where somebody wants to make one joystick to control up and down movement while the other one is controlling the left and right movement.

+1

my next top shooter game may need this feature too.

Twin Stick shooters are a staple game variety; and control method. I'd go a bit further and suggest that the option should be available for tilt based direction of shooting, or direction of movement, making single stick, dual control that incorporates this other input method... as well as traditional twin stick controls.

This is easy to do - The catch is that there are a lot of things the engine can do, and I want to make the usability side as easy as possible to do. what do you propose is a good scheme that supports these schemes and makes them reasonably configurable?

Just a suggestion, how about add it to actor behavior library under controls. You can select one joy stick or two joystick, for one joystick you can select joystick type: show where pressed/fixed, select own joystick outer image & inner image, speed input for actor or rotate speed on the spot(like control a tank turret from it base). Two joystick is the same only you have additional input as above. You can enable it or disable it. It seem easy for me to use this way, no idea about other...

Sorry if i revive an old topic, but this is the only one which came up by using the search for "two joysticks".

Dual stick control is VERY common on iOS and it should be integrated in Stencyl.
It should be also possible to assign different behaviors for the two different joysticks.

One controlling the direction where my player actor is running, the other controlling the direction where he is shooting for example.

There is also the possiblity where somebody wants to make one joystick to control up and down movement while the other one is controlling the left and right movement.

You should first ask if it's already done in action script 3 or flixel, or any flash game library.
But I couldn't find anything either, why not create a separate instance of the joystick?  but using a variable to differentiate them?

like var movement = joystick1; var fire = joystick2; something like that(never messed with joysticks yet or drawing a gameplay as I can't wait to start iOS and Android development.  Even decided on the Samsung note as the device might still stick with the Droid 4 because of the keyboard(I text like crazy and shoot email for work so yea virtual keyboards aren't cool in the business world.)

There won't be a Flash library for this in any format (Flixel, etc) since Flash can only accept a single "touch" (the mouse) at a time, while the dual joystick concept operates on multi-touch. The closest you can get in a Flash game is either dual keyboard controls or (more commonly) keyboard to move and mouse to aim.

I'd be really great to have a support for dual stick controls.
As a basic control scheme on iOS it deserves the exposure .

Would definelty be awesome if we could create games with Twin joystick and have this as a standard behavior in iStencyl 2.0 !