Last time we found that although we could stop the wavering of our character when we released our controls, we also introduced a lot of weird feeling Kinaesthetic Artifacts as a result of deadzoning our axes independent of one another.
These “square” deadzones do have their uses (in console FPS games where players mean to sweep their aim perfectly across the horizon, but, when using a “purer” signal, would actually find their aim wavering up and down as they tried. This is one of the subtler forms of aim assistance going on in most console FPS games*) but nothing about the visibly circular restrictive outer limit of the XBox controller screams “make me stick to cardinal directions!”.

Fig 1. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H & I: These are all lines.
It stands to reason that a circular input wants to result in a circular output: the affordances of the interface should be matched by the expression space inside the game itself. In our example, square dead zones didn’t work in our favour, so let’s try Circular Dead Zones instead.
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