Using the stick tilt angle for shooting height sounds very interesting. Haven't heard anything like that being mentioned mind you.
How do you suppose that would work Trance, I mean you couldn't use the rick stick for tilt whilst pressing the current shoot button.........possibly a trigger button for shooting?
What's your thoughts?
Basically you could use the left stick for both shooting/longpassing height and direction.
You'd need a well-defined deadzone in the middle, since the stick isn't really useful when you tilt it only very small amounts from the center position.
Stick tilt 100% = Alot of height, more height possible for sidefoot-struck longpasses than laces shots due to nature of foot shape.
Stick tilt less than, say, 30% = Ground shot/longpass intended.
There should always be an uncertainty factor about height. You can't learn that tilting ~60% is bar-height and then put all shots there. While the stick tilt should indeed reflect the intended height (this part needs to be fixed so that you can communicate your intentions to the game as clearly as possible, meaning that in a hypothetically perfect situation the player would indeed put the ball at the same height every single time), the challenge will instead be learning that in most (all) situations you will more or less need to compensate for the relative movement of the ball to your players kicking foot, and compensating for bad player positioning/balance. In cases where the ball has just bounced up when shooting or such, you would need to compensate with less stick tilt to avoid the ball ballooning up (the ball is already on an upwards trajectory, and so you would need to almost intend to shoot downwards to avoid shooting over), and also holding off the shot power since more power usually means more ballooning).
I suppose you could think of the tilt angle as a way of shaping the players foot/body more or less, as one can in real life. Different types of strikes, for example using the shot button and longpass button, will have different "strike height potentials" due to them using different types of strikes, shots usually being laces or instep and longpasses being the toe part, simplified.
If one implemented this system in a game, and assuming that the human player plays with completely manual aim for all ball strikes, you wouldn't even really call them shot or longpass buttons, since the only difference is what part of the boot is used, and the general shape of the resulting trajectory aswell as curl. There would be nothing stopping you from striking a "longpass" side-toe backspinning shot towards the far corner, since you could learn to keep the height down and give it more power with the power gauge. Similarly you would be free to use the "Shot button" to strike low laces strikes as crosses into the box. You wouldn't need any more double-tap or triple-tap combinations to achieve certain trajectories (high, medium or low height cross), since you have power, height and direction, aswell as basic foot shapes available as separate controls.
You'd need to program it so that the "height potential" for side-toe "longpass" type strikes is bigger, since those strikes generally has the boot with a low profile hitting low down on the ball, and similar for the other strike types.
But all of the realism comes from you needing to time strikes so that you know how the ball will be moving when you strike it, and can compensate for it as much as possible. Using more power gives more uncertainty to the integrity of the strike.
On top of all this comes player ball strike accuracy/power/technique etc, which will ensure neverending variety by adding a layer of human randomness over all strikes.
Then we'd just need to figure out how to control curling in a good way, which is alot harder.
