A feature request

[3DModelerMan]

It would be great if the event receiver supported joysticks and other input devices, instead of just the keyboard.

[dlangdev]

Have you tried the mouse?

[Halifax]

There has been talk about re-doing the input system to make it more extensible. But while your waiting, why not have a go at trying to fix it yourself?

[kornwaretm]

while i waiting
since i lack of skill
i use SDL
and i pray so hard

[3DModelerMan]

I use a seperate lib for joysticks to, but I thought it would be great to have something in irrlicht.

[JP]

It's an unlikely addition i would say. Sure it would be useful for game makers but irrlicht is just a rendering engine which means joysticks mean nothing to it. It provides a simple and basic way of receiving input from the standard input devices of a PC and that's all it really needs. Other libs out there such as SDL do the job just fine by the sounds of it so adding it into irrlicht would be a bit unecessary and there's more important features to be focused on!

[rogerborg]

This is actually is a reasonable suggestion. The winmm joystick support is probably good enough for most purposes, and I'm sure that Lunix and WhackOS have similar APIs. Adding new Irrlicht events for joystick inputs won't be a huge task.

The one Thompson in the ointment is that joystick axes inputs are pollable state based inputs, rather than event based. That said, we could probably poll the inputs and send axes events once per tick without the world ending.

"All" we need to do is find someone with the time to implement this (the new events, and at least one native platform) and add some test cases. Is anyone else up for it, or have I found my weekend project?

[hybrid]

There's also the question which joystick is queried, or do we want to query all found, ... I guess the I/O system needs some general flexibility added, or otherwise it will become quite clumsy. However, I'd also like to add multi-touch in some way, sometimes

[3DModelerMan]

I have no idea how to program it but I still think it would be cool.
And what about if you had feedback mechanisms (rumble etc).

[rogerborg]

There's also the question which joystick is queried, or do we want to query all found,

I'd imagine that we'd enumerate and then poll them all, since the user app can ignore any events for devices that it doesn't care about, just as it can currently ignore keyboard or mouse events.

Feedback is probably a bridge too far for an Irrlicht feature. I don't see a neat way to do it without adding a new input device API module, and there are plenty of good 3rd party solutions for that already.

[rogerborg]

Full patch dumped in the tracker.

How does this look for a joystick info event?

Code: Select all

	//! A joystick event. Unlike other events, joystick events represent
	//! the result of polling each connected joystick once per run() of the device.
	//! An event of this type will be generated once per joystick per run()
	//! regardless of whether the state of the joystick has actually changed.
	struct SJoystickEvent
	{
		enum
		{
			NUMBER_OF_BUTTONS = 32,

			AXIS_X = 0, // e.g. analog stick 1 left to right
			AXIS_Y,		// e.g. analog stick 1 top to bottom
			AXIS_Z,		// e.g. throttle, or analog 2 stick 2 left to right
			AXIS_R,		// e.g. rudder, or analog 2 stick 2 top to bottom
			AXIS_U,
			AXIS_V,
			NUMBER_OF_AXES
		};

		//! A bitmap of button states.  You can use IsButtonPressed() to
		//! check the state of each button from 0 to (NUMBER_OF_BUTTONS - 1)
		u32 ButtonStates;

		//! For AXIS_X, AXIS_Y, AXIS_Z, AXIS_R, AXIS_U and AXIS_V
		//! Values are in the range 0 - 65535, with 32767 representing
		//! the center position. You will usually want to add a dead 
		//! zone around this center range. Axes not supported by this
		//! joystick will always have a value of 32767.
		u16 Axis[NUMBER_OF_AXES];

		//! The POV represents the angle of the POV hat in degrees * 100, 
		//! from 0 to 35,900.  A value of 65535 indicates that the POV hat 
		//! is centered (or not present).
		u16 POV;

		//! The ID of the joystick which generated this event.
		u8 Joystick;

		bool IsButtonPressed(u32 button) const
		{
			if(button >= 32)
				return false;

			return (ButtonStates & (1 << button)) ? true : false;
		}
	};

[rogerborg]

Well, I'm having fun with it.

[3DModelerMan]

How did you get the joystick buttons?.

[rogerborg]

How did you get the joystick buttons?.

They came free with the joystick.

[JP]

nothing's ever free rogerborg... clearly the price of the joystick included the cost of the buttons as well!