Space Ship model transform issues

Scripting Issues
1

I am trying to make a space sim in python 2.5 and panda3d 1.7.2
I have the ship loaded, and the key map is set up. The controls even work (the ones that ive made so far, I haven’t bothered with some as I’m still just trying things out and i want to keep my tests on a smaller scale). What I want to do now is have the ship model, not the root node that I defined, and to which everything is parented, to rotate up based on the amount of time you have been pressing the “w” key, and then rotate back to a base position based on the amount of time that has passed since you let go. I don’t understand why my code isn’t working. Could someone please lead me in the right direction on this?
Sorry, I realize this is kind of simple, but I’m new to programming in general.

Here’s the code:

def shipControl(self, task):
		dt = globalClock.getDt()
		self.root.setY(self.root, self.throttle * self.maxSpeed * dt)
		if (self.keyMap.keyMap["w"] == True):
			if self.throttle != 0:
				self.root.setP(self.root, self.handling * dt)	
			elif self.throttle == 0:
				self.root.setP(self.root, (self.handling * dt))
			
		elif (self.keyMap.keyMap["s"] == True):
			if self.throttle != 0:
				self.root.setP(self.root, (-1 * self.handling * dt))
			elif self.throttle == 0:
				self.root.setP(self.root, -1 * (self.handling * dt))
		if (self.keyMap.keyMap["arrow_up"] == True):	
			if self.throttle < 1:
				self.throttle += .05 * dt
			elif self.throttle >= 1:
				self.throttle = 1
			print self.throttle
		if (self.keyMap.keyMap["arrow_down"] == True):
			self.throttle -= .05 * dt
			print self.throttle
		modelRotation(task.time)
		return task.cont
	
	def modelRotation(self, time):
		if (self.keyMap.keyMap["w"] == True):
			self.shipModel.setP(time * -5)
		elif (self.keyMap.keyMap["s"] == True):
			self.shipModel.setP(time * 5)
		else:
			if (self.keyMap.keyMap["w"] == False) and (self.keyMap.keyMap["s"] == False):
				if self.shipModel.getP() > 0:
					self.shipModel.setP(time * -5)
				else:
					self.shipModel.setP(time * 5)

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Thanks
Peter
[/code]

2 
modelRotation(task.time)

task.time is the time since the task started running…
I think you will want to make a new variable to store the time. You could then add dt to it whenever w or s is pressed and subtract dt from it until it reaches 0 when they are not pressed.