If you put the nose up you will be pushed back into your seat (good 'ol gravity). When I was a kid this made no sense to me, and I thought someone down the line was an idiot, but if you are in a plane, it makes a lot of sense. If you want to point the nose up you pull back on the stick, and if you want to point the nose down you push the stick forward. The controls are opposite because that is how the controls work on a real plane. Therefore, given that the "joystick" comes from aviation, it stands to reason that its application in aviation games, and "flight mode" in first-person games, would include the "inverted y-axis" as an option. When the yoke is turned left the plane rolls to the left and when it is turned to the right the plane rolls to the right. When the yoke is pushed forward the nose is lowered. When the yoke is pulled back the nose of the aircraft rises.
the camera) pitch downwards, and likewise pulling the mouse backwards would be equivalent to pulling the yoke backwards, making the airplane pitch upwards.Īnd, here is a simple description of how the yoke functions, from a Wikipedia description of an airplane yoke… The most natural mapping of the mouse axes to control the "aircraft" was, of course, to simulate the movement of the yoke (the "control stick" of an airplane), in other words, moving the mouse forwards would be equivalent to moving the yoke forwards, which would make the airplane (ie. Here is a nice explanation from What Grinds My Gears:įlight simulators were one of the first three-dimensional PC games where the mouse could be used as a controller, to control the orientation of the camera (in other words, the airplane).