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Community VRMMORPSS-CS and a new controller

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Hello and welcome! I'm going to share some ideas I've been working on for a few months. First off, consider the fact that musicians routinely use all ten fingers for their trade but we as gamers have only been given the capability of using just four. Think about that, 6 of our fingers are not contributing at all to our experience. Enter the NSTRMNT (pronounced en-struh-ment), a controller design that improves upon the traditional game-pad by adding two analog sticks to its underside, to be used by the middle fingers, and more than doubling the number of buttons available. (When viewing the included image please note that button and stick placements are not entirely accurate to where they would be in application, they are in their general locations only and adjusted so that they do not overlap for easier viewing) The greater number of buttons allows us to do something new with a controller: map a keyboard layout. This capability would change the way we interact with our games since we would no longer need to slowly type out our messages or be required to buy a keyboard peripheral that ultimately reduces typing to just our thumbs. Imagine being in a VR environment, pulling up a screen, and typing out a message without ever having to put down the controller! (Note also that the Key-mapping is only a preliminary idea, I was trying to be symmetrical and there is probably a layout that is much more efficient like Dvorak is for keyboards) Now what about the extra analog sticks? Their functionality will be determined by whatever the imagination can come up with in any kind of game but the idea that they were initially conceived for is this: first person combat. To really understand this idea just take any traditional controller with dual analog sticks (PS controllers work best due to their symmetry) and flip it over so that they are facing the ground, now rest your middle fingers on them and experiment moving them around a little. I fully admit that at first it will likely feel a bit strange and unfamiliar, but to that I put that learning to use dual analog sticks together took some getting used to also, with enough practice it becomes a very natural feeling, almost as though they were always meant to be there. Now, while you are experimenting, consider next that you have a virtual set of hands in front of you like you typically see in an FPS. As you move the analog stick to the left the corresponding hand moves left and so for the right also. As you move the stick forwards however the hand moves up towards your head and down towards your feet as you pull back. So here we have two axis mapped to our sticks and it's fairly straight forward, but obviously incomplete, that is until we map the triggers to our final axis, that is, pulling each trigger inwards would push that hand forwards, away from the body, towards the target. And there you go! Now pretend you're in a boxing match and jab, hook, and uppercut. With that idea in the back of the mind now let's imagine something else new, a Virtual Reality MMO Role Playing Survival Sandbox and Creative suite (VRMMORPSS-CS). What is that? Well its almost exactly as it sounds. Pretend you're playing an MMO in VR with the creative freedom of Minecraft. You're exploring, fighting, crafting and in the process building an immersion with the world. Now imagine that as you're playing you suddenly have an idea that you need to write down, or you're having a conversation with someone and you need to look up a reference but instead of having to take the headset off or even leave the game and break that immersion you can pull up a word processor/text editor and a web browser in a window that exists in the game world. Imagine that in a game like the Elder Scrolls you weren't just able to read books but also write them and have them exist on shelves in a home that you've built. My vision is a game that includes tools like a video editor, native DVR, 3D modeler, spreadsheet editor, an IDE and more, so that work and play don't have to be so separate. So that you can build your dream home and almost live and work from it because the Game and Creative Suite (G-CS) would be able to export documents to your local files or even upload them online to sites like Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub or YouTube. And all these features would have intuitive controls that took full advantage of the NSTRMNTs capabilities. Imagine still that in this game it was possible to create clay sculptures and then able to 3D print the ones you love the most. So far I've worked on these projects alone but what I'd like to do, starting here, is to make this a community project, with the end goal being an MMO that is free to play with an optional subscription very much like Planetside 2. I'm not looking to get rich, I just want this a lot and I think a lot of people will too. I believe that there is an opportunity to make history by creating the first open source VRMMO in a way that puts the power directly into our hands. Imagine, if we as a community could come together to create incredible and massive games for free, the big game companies would have to drastically rethink their strategy because we wouldn't be sitting around waiting and begging them to make our dreams come true anymore, we would have done it. So what do you think? Tear me apart in ways I haven't thought of yet because I've already stripped myself to the bone thinking about this.

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