What is AntiMicro + Few tips

I told myself years ago I should make a thread about AntiMicro, but I forgot only to remember yesterday, so... Hmmm... Let's get started.

What IS AntiMicro?
Blatantly copied from GitHub:

Does it really work?
Okay, I understand that a lot of people may seem skeptical about what seem to be miraculous solutions, it's normal.

To be honest, when I started using AntiMicro to play Terraria years ago, I had doubts about whether I would be able to build at a good speed or face some bosses. I took it anyway as an extra layer of challenge, and in fact, this required lots of tweaks in the first hours, as well as ideas like configuring multiple sets ("build mode" and "combat mode", for example).

Below I will show some of the AntiMicro's features with animated GIFs, and you judge whether this might or not suit your needs while there's no official gamepad support.


Scrolling the action bar with L1 and R1, switching with Select.


As you can see, the mouse cursor can point to wherever I'm moving or looking, limited only by an invisible rectangle. This feature is pretty useful, since the idea of having to move the cursor with the analog stick (as people usually do) whenever changing the character direction with D-Pad or wanting to interact with a nearby object can get exhausting quickly.


Also, if for some reason you need to walk in one direction while looking the other way, this can be solved with an extra set (you have 8 of them in each profile) where the "retangle trick" has been slightly adjusted. In this case, I configured my "Set 1" to use the "Set 2" while R2 is held. The only difference about this "Set 2" is that the mouse cursor behavior while following the D-Pad input is "half-reversed" (X-axis was reversed, Y-axis stays the same). If you still don't get it, moving the D-Pad to LEFT will make the cursor stay at the right side of the character, but moving UP or DOWN will... Well, move UP or DOWN.


Ok, cool. But how you did those?
Well, I'm not going into the basics. No, I'll assume you the basics and just show some steps to achieve the GIFs results.

On the first GIF it's really simple. All I did was to configure L1 and R1 to act as the mouse "Wheel Up" and "Wheel Down" respectively, and ajdust their speed to 4 notches per second. (Click at the button > Mouse > Mouse Settings)



On the second and third GIFs, I used the Spring Mouse Mode. Basically, all you need to do is make the D-Pad act as the WASD, but also move the mouse cursor to the 4 directions. Like this...



If you don't know how to assign multiple inputs for the same button, here another image. (Click at the button > Advanced > Assingments)



Then activate the Spring Mouse Mode and adjust the delimiters as you like. The spring width and height as you may have guessed will form the retangle (or square if you want to) at the center of the screen, where your character should be, and that will prevent the mouse cursor of getting stray. The release radius value is also simple to understand, it will keep your cursor away the center when the button is released by that amount.



Now, something I really recommend for this game would be checking the "Relative" box for UP and DOWN, this way they will also "respect" the LEFT and RIGHT when using 8-way movement, and if they get far away just use LEFT and RIGHT to reset their positions again. (Again, click at the button > Mouse > Mouse Settings)

And the third GIF... As I said previously, you can configure multiple sets and bind them to buttons, changing all the gamepad layout on-the-fly if you want to or making them work like combos. Moving on the example, to copy a set is also pretty easy.



Then I inverted the cursor movement on the LEFT and RIGHT buttons.



And made the R2 switch to the Set 2 while held! THAT SIMPLE.




The issues
Oh, yeah. Maybe I should have put it up a little earlier...

Well, as nothing is perfect I should point what I think that are the main issues of AntiMicro right now. First one is lack of OSX support, and second is the yet-to-be-implemented button combo feature. So if you REALLY NEED one of these features AntiMicro isn't for ya.


Closing words
Well, that's it. AntiMicro is a very powerful application, allowing several approaches to solve the very same problem. I've just shown the ones I use most, with the proposal to open your minds to some of its possibilities, many of which I haven't discovered myself!