Lightguns

[Ender]

Not sure if this is a hardware or software question, but...

Is there currently a way to track the movement of the lightgun withough flashing the screen like mad?

[Styrofoam]

Not sure if this is a hardware or software question, but...

Is there currently a way to track the movement of the lightgun withough flashing the screen like mad?

Sorry I have no knowledge of programming, but that post had me in stitches .... best post ever (seriously )

[Ender]

Ok, I didn't mean flashing like that.

[Kamjin]

just leave the screen white..

You flash the screen white for 2 reasons..
1. In case the person is aiming at Black/Dark pixels
the phototransistor needs light to activte.. black
is the absence of light hence it won't register
when the electron beam passes it (err.. doesn't
pass???)
2. flashing white gives you better responce from the gun..
if you notice in a lot of cases some guns even need the
brightness cranked just to work right.

Although there have been arcade games that don't flash
all the (shootable) imagery is done in bright colors, and the
guns are higher quality.. (not to mention you're about 3 ft.
from the screen)

[Vorrtexx]

hehe, where are people's minds

One way to do it is have it poll the lightgun receptor, like you would for button presses, only enabling GUN mode in the transfer descriptor. However, to actually track the movement of the gun without flashing is possible yes, the only limitation is the color on the display screen needs to have a high contrast....SO... the closer your color is to WHITE, the more accurate your coordinates will be.
If you Video display from your application is mostly a black display, then you will have 0% accuracy, as I've done lots of tests.
Hope this helps

EDIT: and what Kamjin mentioned

[az_bont]

I thought all lightgun games flashed briefly - even Time Crisis 2 on the PS2 does it

[Vorrtexx]

I haven't played a lightgun game in the arcades for a long time, but most of the modern console lightgun games I have played do use the flash screen method.
There was an older method where the objects on screen were displayed one at a time on screen, in a high contrast color. So if you were pointing at the object on screen, the light gun receptor would detect a signal and register it as a hit, and off the object would be a darker color, which wouldn't get registered and would be a miss. There was a cheat though that if you had a flourescent light and shot at it, the gun would always pick it up as a hit
However a method was created ti counteract that also.

[Ex-Cyber]

If you find you do have to flash, you might want to try one or more of the following to reduce the appearance of flashing:

- Only flash shootable objects

- Only flash dark-colored objects

- Flash with less obtrusive colors (e.g. colors that blend with the BG or with the primary visible color of the object, maybe with extra green added to kick up the brightness a bit)

- Spread the flash effect out over several frames so that it's less jarring

- Flash objects in "waves" instead of doing them all at once, e.g. moving from the center of the screen outward over several frames, to avoid the appearance of the entire screen flashing (the idea being that the player will be mostly focused on what they are aiming at and you just need to avoid triggering their peripheral vision)

Just ideas, I don't have any experience with gun/pen programming, just the basic theory which has already been mentioned.

[Ender]

Yea, I knew the basic theory, but was just wondering if anything had changed over the last 15-20 years in that respect. Apparently not.