Does anyone have an example of a horizontal directional compass in a game?

The type of compass that is just a strip and moves left/right as the character rotates on screen? So like facing .25 in rotation would be North and so on from there. I don't need waypoints indicated, just have the direction be in the middle when the character is facing that direction.

Example:

I'm working to figure it out as we speak but this time I remembered to poll the community before I do a bunch of work, lol.

I think my struggle is how to turn the rotation of the character in speed for the horizontal compass and so the compass letters line up when a cardinal direction is hit.

Any ideas to approach or pointers, tips, examples are appreciated.

Here's code that almost recreates your visual. I'm not sure how to convince pico-8 to not clip text at the left edge though, and that seems to be preventing "W" from showing when looking directly north. Still, this might be helpful. (assuming you didn't already figure it out yourself).

The key is that pico-8's quirk of using 0-1 as the range for sin and cos means that the direction can be directly used as the fraction of the length to shift the bar. From there you just need to know that the total length of the bar would be twice what's shown on screen if you want the two perpendicular directions to show too.

The reason I used 230 for the total length with an offset to how it's shown is so that the letters would be more readable. 256 would be more accurate if the bar is actually the entire bottom of the screen.

function _init()
  dir = 0
end

function _update()
  if btn(⬅️) then dir += .01 end
  if btn(➡️) then dir -= .01 end
  while dir < 0 do dir+=1end
  while dir > 1 do dir-=1end
end

function _draw()
  cls()
  color(6)
  circ(64,64,10)
  color(8)
  line(64,64,64+15*cos(dir),64+15*sin(dir))
  color(9)
  local edir = dir +.25
  if edir >= 1 then edir -=1 end
  local sdir = dir +.5
  if sdir >= 1 then sdir -=1 end
  local wdir = dir +.75
  if wdir >= 1 then wdir -=1 end
  print("n",230*dir + 8,120)
  print("e",230*edir + 8,120)
  print("s",230*sdir + 8,120)
  print("w",230*wdir + 8,120)
end

Awesome, thanks for sharing. I was heading down a very similar path but just trying different values based on the specific speed I had chosen. Yours lets the rotation speed change and everything else syncs up nicely.

I think this will work great - thank you so much! I'll see what I can do with this, should be useful in my game.

@kimiyoribaka - Your code worked great! I was able to transpose it a bit into the following (~150 tokens). I'm going to connect this into my game and see how it feels. There's a HUD UI already so I hope the compass doesn't make it too cluttered.

-- Math for X position of compass letters
function compass_x(v)
    local d=compass_dir+v
    if d>=1 then d-=1 end

    return compass_w*d+compass_off
end

-- MAIN LOOP
function _init()
    -- initial values; default direction, width of strip in pixels, offset for strip
    compass_dir,compass_w,compass_off=0,256,0
end

function _update()
    if btn(0) then compass_dir+=.008 end
    if btn(1) then compass_dir-=.008 end
    while compass_dir<0 do compass_dir+=1 end
    while compass_dir>1 do compass_dir-=1 end
end

function _draw()
    cls(1)
    -- rotation display; for demo only
    circ(64,64,10,7)
    line(64,64,64+15*cos(compass_dir),64+15*sin(compass_dir),8)
    print(compass_dir,50,2,7)

    -- compass strip; cardinal directions
    print("n",compass_x(0),120,7)
    print("e",compass_x(.25),120,7)
    print("s",compass_x(.5),120,7)
    print("w",compass_x(.75),120,7)

    -- optional intercardinal directions
    print("NE",compass_x(.125),120,6)    
    print("SE",compass_x(.375),120,6)
    print("SW",compass_x(.625),120,6)
    print("NW",compass_x(.875),120,6)
end