Quote:How else am I supposed to represent angles for movement and just how an object is orientated in the world other than as rotation on the 3 axis?
A set of two (or three) angles is not the only way to represent an orientation in 3-d. In fact, it's quite often a
poor way to represent an orientation.
Before trying to offer further advice though, let me ask: what sort of objects are you wanting to simulate here? Humanoids? Spaceships? Rigid bodies in a physics simulation? Projectiles? Ground-based vehicles?
There are a number of ways to represent orientation in 3-d, including a pair of angles (which can represent a subset of possible orientations), three angles, a quaternion, an axis-angle pair, a pair of basis vectors, three basis vectors, a 3x3 matrix, etc. Which of these will work best as your primary representation depends on the circumstances, which is why some more information would be useful.