SUGGESTION: Joystick compatibility

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Who uses joysticks these days anyway, except for flight sim geeks? Aren't gamepads a lot more common?

Like I said, it's easy to make it use more buttons, and what's a joystick if not a gamepad with more buttons, as far as the computer is concerned?

just, if AGS does ever have joystick support - make your games have keyboard support too!!!

That's the beauty of the programs Ashen and quintaros have been so generous as to look for. It's programmed in keyboard, and also available as gamepad.

[Blaquesmith]

I know this is from looooooong ago, but... anyone gave this issue further consideration?

Gamepad support could be very handy, since modern pads have 8+ buttons AND the direction keys, which could mean that you can have many actions just in the pad, with no need for a GUI at all, and you could have a big game screen with a full background (I'm thinking the 1024x768 resolution, wich is the maximum that AGS supports, but if it was ever scaled up, it'll look even better.)

In my case, i have a PS2 gamepad hooked to an USB adaptor. I get 4 directions and 12 buttons in digital mode, and 4 directions, 12 buttons and 2 analog joysticks in the analog mode. I could have the 9 basic SCUMM commands, plus main menu, inventory, and game log buttons. I think it could be really handy.

[GarageGothic]

How ironic to see my own reply from five years ago. Ah, but what would youth be without its foolish arrogance? At the moment I'm actually I'm hoping to implement gamepad support myself through a plugin - eventually that is, it's quite far down on my priority list. But it's definitely possible, most standard C++ libraries like Allegro and SFML have functions to poll various input devices, so passing that info to the game through the AGS plugin API shouldn't be that big a deal (I'm sure I'll eat those words once I try it myself ).

Not sure how well analog stick control would go together with AGS' walk animations though (since you can't change walking speed while the character is moving), so you'll have to write your own animation code if you want variable speed depending on analog input. BTW, mapping 9 SCUMM commands to buttons sounds quite confusing - personally I would try to reduce it to four interactions (mapped to the cross, circle, square, triangle buttons) and handle inventory switching with the triggers.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Since ags is using directx CJ would need to open up directinput so you could write a hook function to the controller.  It wouldn't take much effort at all once this was done, just a few wrapper functions in a module script to access the computer hardware and poll the gamepad and allow the user to load and edit the button/hat/analog/trigger values.  I suggested this ages ago and would love to see it happen but it's nowhere near a priority since it's not strictly an 'adventure game' feature.  There are some third party programs that will let you do this (like JoyToKey) but I have found them to be pretty clunky and prone to issues like losing focus on the inputs.

[Wonkyth]

Since C# is now an option, using XNA for gamepads would be easy.

[Wyz]

Actually I was already working on a plug-in, it's nearly done