Lock-strafe

Lock-strafe

Strafing for Ratchet & Clank, as the later games have it, for OpenRAC's native port (PAL and NTSC-U discs). With the mod off, Ratchet turns toward the stick and runs where he faces, as on the PlayStation 2.

What you get

The setting Mode chooses one of two:

Mode	Value	Controls on foot
Lock with weapons (the default)	lock	With a forward-firing weapon ready in hand (the Suck Cannon, the Bomb Glove, the Devastator, the Blaster, the Pyrocitor, the Tesla Claw, the Morph-o-Ray, the R.Y.N.O.), Ratchet always faces the camera's way: the right stick turns the camera and him with it, standing or running, and the left stick strafes. The camera does not swing round to follow where he goes. With anything else in hand (the wrench, the Swingshot, the gadgets, and the weapons that do not fire ahead: the Visibomb, the Taunter, the Mine Glove, the Walloper, the Glove of Doom, the Drone Device, the Decoy Glove), Hold L2 or R2
Hold L2 or R2	hold	Hold L2 or R2: the camera swings round once behind the way Ratchet faces. From then on he faces the camera's way: the right stick turns the camera and him with it, and the left stick moves him sideways, back and forward without turning him toward it (jumps too); going back, the walk or the run plays backwards. Nothing pulls the camera back to where he faced at the press. Let go: the game's turning again, the camera left where it is

In both, L1 still looks in first person and R1 still crouches (and crouch-jumps); L2 and R2 strafe. Trace (off) writes a line in the game's log for each pad report, for bug reports (as does OPENRAC_STRAFE_TRACE=1 in the environment).

Known limitation: no strafe animations. The first game has no side-step or backward walk for Ratchet. Going backwards plays his walk or run in reverse; going sideways he runs with the run's animation, facing ahead.

The crosshair. The first game has no crosshair in the third-person view: the Blaster's reticle is drawn only in first person (L1), and the Devastator marks what it has locked on. Both stay as the game has them; the mod adds none.

Where the two modes come from

The later games. Going Commando added a strafe on a held shoulder button (L2 or R2 with the left stick: he walks sideways while facing forward, without turning), and Up Your Arsenal a control option, Lock Strafe, that keeps the strafe on and plays like a third-person shooter, beside its Third Person and First Person modes. Sources: the Ratchet & Clank Wiki's Going Commando controls (ratchetandclank.fandom.com/wiki/Going_Commando_controls: "Left analog stick + L2", walk sideways facing forward), a review of the HD collection on Super Phillip Central (2015: the strafe on R2 on the PlayStation 2 and 3), the wiki's walkthrough of Up Your Arsenal's first mission (ratchetandclank.fandom.com/wiki/Save_Veldin!: the three modes, Lock Strafe the developers' choice) and GameSpot's review of Up Your Arsenal (a "strafe-locked, third-person mode" that controls like a shooter). Going Commando's own strafe takes either L2 or R2; so does this mod.

How it works

How the game turns the stick into a heading, each tick in three steps: the stick handler (Hero_SetHeadingFromStick) sets the hero's move yaw (+0x180) to the stick's angle plus the camera's yaw (D_L00_00166ED8); the state code eases his facing toward the move yaw (Hero_TurnToHeading); and the run builds his velocity along his facing (Hero_SetPlanarVelocity given an angle above pi). He turns first, then runs where he faces. The game has a strafe of its own in one state: in state 0x81 with L2 or R2 held, the state puts the camera's yaw in the move yaw around its turn, and the follow camera's per-tick requests (FollowCamera_ApplyOverrides, PAL func_L00_002E74B0) switch to a strafe camera that slides along with him on a stiff lateral spring.

L2 and R2. On foot the game gives the shoulder buttons in pairs: L1 or L2 enters first-person look from standing (held & 5), R1 or R2 crouches, crouch-jumps and slides out of a run (held & 0xA); nothing else on foot tests L2 or R2 alone but state 0x81. With the mod on, in play (game mode 0) on foot (vehicle_mode 0) and outside state 0x81, it takes L2 and R2 out of the pad's state at each report (Pad_ProcessReport), as the game's own input locks (PadState.mode) take buttons out for a poll, and keeps them for the strafe. So L1 still looks and R1 still crouches, and L2 and R2 strafe. Scenes, menus, vendors, vehicles, state 0x81 and the hoverboard (control mode 0x16, whose tricks are on L2 and R2) keep them.

The strafe, in src/lock_strafe.cpp, in the run (states 2 and 0x73), the jump (7) and standing (0), on level ground: Hero_TurnToHeading eases the facing toward the camera's yaw, and while Hold's swing lasts toward the facing latched when L2 or R2 went down; Hero_SetPlanarVelocity builds the velocity along the move yaw, as the game's own run start from a standstill does; the follow camera asks for the game's strafe camera, which slides along with him and does not turn. Hold's swing turns the camera behind the latched facing through the game's own request to look along a heading (PAL func_L00_002E9DC8, what the level's camera volumes use: a turn standing in for the right stick's, which the stick overrides). It is asked for only from the press until the camera is within 0.05 rad of that facing, the right stick is pushed 0.3 or more sideways (the game's own test for the stick moved) or 120 ticks have gone by; after that nothing turns the camera toward the old facing, so the right stick's turn stays, and Hold plays as Lock does. Both turn him standing too, early in his update (Hero_UpdateMotionInput), at the rates state 0x81 uses (Hold once its swing is done).

The backpedal. The game has no animation for walking sideways or back. In the run the walk (sequence 3) or the run (4) loops: the walk/run routine (PAL func_L00_002293E8) sets its speed (hero +0xA90) from his ground speed, and Ratchet's own animation advance (Hero_AdvanceAnimation, PAL func_L00_00232EF0) moves it on by that speed times the key's rate (+0xA94). That advance only goes forward (a negative speed would leave the blend below 0 without ever stepping a key back; the moby's own +0x58, which plays other mobys backwards, is not what moves Ratchet). So while he strafes with the move yaw more than 110 degrees from his facing (until it is back under 100), the mod steps the walk or the run back itself, by what the advance would add, and leaves the blend that much lower, so the advance ends where the step back did and does the rest (sounds, the items that follow his speed, the distance moved) as the game does. The cycle plays backwards at the speed the game chose. Only a sequence looping on itself is stepped (keys A and B in it, no blend from another sequence, no sub-range or restart pending); the blend into the run from a standstill plays as the game has it.

Everything else is the game's code: each of the six hook points (Pad_ProcessReport, Hero_UpdateMotionInput, Hero_TurnToHeading, Hero_SetPlanarVelocity, FollowCamera_ApplyOverrides, Hero_AdvanceAnimation) calls what it replaced, the game's own or another mod's, and whenever the hero is not strafing does nothing else. Each disc's addresses and function names are in src/discs.h; the decision is in src/strafe.h, apart from game memory, and tested by hero_strafe (ctest); lock_strafe_load loads the library against a host table of its own and checks its hooks.

Not done. Sideways he still runs with the run's animation, facing ahead: no turn of the hips toward where he goes. The engine's joint modifiers (AttachManipulator, the blink and the NPCs' head turns) would carry one, but they act on the joints a class lists for them, so the hip would first have to be found among Ratchet's, and turning it turns the spine and everything above with it, which a second, opposite modifier on the spine would have to undo, about axes that depend on each joint's own frame. A level's camera (a wall, a camera volume) can still turn the camera while L2 or R2 is held, and once the swing is done he turns with it.

Settings

Key	Type	Default
mode	choice: lock, hold	lock	Lock with weapons, or Hold L2 or R2
trace	bool	false	a line in the log each pad report: the mode, what the strafe does, the hero's state, item, buttons, whether Hold is latched and still swinging, the latched yaw, the right stick sideways, his facing, move yaw, the camera's yaw, his position, whether he backpedals, and his animation (sequences A/B, keys A-B, blend, speed)

History

In OpenRAC 0.8.0 to 0.8.4 the strafe was an option of the port's own, the row Strafe (experimental) on the title menu's Video page (the strafe key of the port's settings: off, hold, lock). It became this mod when OpenRAC took mods as plugins (docs/port/MODS.md); with the mod off, the game is the console's. Its history in OpenRAC: d5fe4f64 (the first lock-strafe, PAL and US), e67d5a80 and 0ca783b9 (Hold L2-R2 and Lock with weapons), 17a034ea (Hold follows the camera after its swing), 81e687b2 (the walk or run played backwards while strafing back). It was written in C on the interface's table at first, and is now the SDK's reference C++ mod (openrac/mod.hpp), with the same behaviour and tests.