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Re: how to deal with varied input devices?

At 8:53 AM -0700 9/05/02, Timothy J. Wood wrote:

This is sort of what we've been thinking of doing. We have some small portion of this in place in an internal library -- basically we have profiles of devices that give names to the inputs and can combine d-pads, etc.

Right, it seems that right now every game developer has to do this. But it's very hard to get profiles for all devices.

An interesting addition to this would be to have downloadable profiles.

Absolutely, that's what I was trying to say here:

- The configuration app should also have the ability to download device configurations from some server on the net, so that hopefully most users will discover that their device is already known and no extra configuration is needed.

Of course it might be nice if the client apps (games) could download profiles too, but I think it's sufficient if the configuration app does so. I know that when I get a new game controller, the first thing I want to do is test it and make sure that it works. I don't really want to launch a game to do so, since if it fails there I don't know whether it's the controller or the game. So, as a user, I'd probably run the test/configuration app first anyway.

On the other hand, it would be much cooler if Apple would write this and provide the config server (and localizers)

True! But do we believe that they're going to do that? They had basically that with InputSprocket, but threw it out with OS X. (Though in retrospect, I don't think ISp was quite the right design anyway.)

Well-supported open-source software is always a safer bet than vendor software anyway... especially when your vendor has proven many times that they're quite happy to kill a well-developed technology no matter how popular it is.

Cheers,
- Joe

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 >Re: how to deal with varied input devices? (From: "Timothy J. Wood" <email@hidden>)



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