Aiming towards thumbstick XNA

Question

currently having some fun in XNA programming a topdown shooter towards the XBox-controller but I'm having some issues right now.

So I move my character with the left thumbstick and aim with my right, so essentially I can move in any direction and still shoot in 360 angle. What I have right now works, but it's very sensitive and "tacky", it likes to stick a bit extra on all the 90 angles before it moves on to the next angle if I'm moving the thumbstick in a perfect outer circle.

So this is what I have right now:

direction.X = gpState_new.ThumbSticks.Right.X;
direction.Y = gpState_new.ThumbSticks.Right.Y;
rotation = Math.Atan2(direction.Y, direction.X);

And then when I draw the player I use rotation as the angle of which I'm drawing it. Do you got any tips on how to do this better ?

Fredrik

Answer 1

It looks like this is because of the "deadzone" on the stick. The basic fix is probably something like is to use GamePadDeadZone.Circular. Perhaps before your code, something like

GamePadState gpSTate_new = GamePad.GetState(playerIndex, GamePadDeadZone.Circular);

A very similar question was asked on GameDev (and you can see a more detailed answer there), which you might have better luck on with this kinds of questions in the future.