How to do platformer movement

[Tom J]

Hello Leadwerks people, I haven't been here in a while and it is good to be back, however naturally I bring a question with me

 

The question is about character movement in a 3d platformer, in particular something like in Jak and Daxter, shown in this

which is not the best example but gets how the player moves across. What I'm trying to do is get the player to use WASD to go any direction they want and the character freely turns in that direction. Not only that, but the camera follows the character in the game and rotates around the character to get behind it again if it changes direction, which in turn readjusts the controls for the direction (forwards means forward relative only to where the camera faces). Hard for me to explain, but it makes the movement feels much more free, letting you go in any direction.

 

The problem is how to do such movement like in the video, with just WASD, on the console obviously players just use a joystick on the controller meaning there are more directions. While I am confined to 8 directions max without going out and buying a joystick, and getting any other PC players to do the same. I'm sure there must be some fancy trick that can be done with cameras and character controllers to get this movement going. So does anyone have any ideas?

[cocopino]

Masterxilo made a nice LUA 3rd person camera:

 

http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/1778-leadwerks-soldier-animated-entity-game-script-3rd-person-cam/page__p__16202__hl__%2Bmasterxilo+%2Bsoldier__fromsearch__1#entry16202

 

The code might be useful for you.