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

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?

 

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:

Code (csharp):

1. int QuantizeAxis ( float input)
2. {
3.   if (input < -0.5f) return -1;
4.   if (input > 0.5f) return 1;
5.   return 0;
6. }

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.

 

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