Gamepad control for Avatar movement

It would be nice if SL supported Gamepad Control, for basic AV movement... possibly with support for the XBOX 360 Controller... allow the main control stick to control av movement and the second control stick to control camera... better would be user mappable but whose counting...

I tried this once with a dual-joystick gamepad that allowed remapping of all of the buttons. Turns out that it was a lot less useful than I thought it would be.

First of all, mapping the buttons to alt or control didn't work so well. Second of all, when I did that, it turns out that it was pretty difficult and hard on my hands to hold a button for alt and use a joystick for the camera, so that kind of prevented camera control from working too well. I mapped the right joystick to the mouse axes, but it turned out that it was really difficult to control the mouse pointer with any degree of accuracy, and therefore it was also difficult to control the camera.

All in all, it didn't work out nearly as well as I thought it would. That said, if you're really interested, get one of those gamepads that allows you to remap any button, and go to it

What I've settled on is a Razer Diamondback mouse that has fully remappable buttons, including 2 side buttons on each side. I've got the ones on the left side mapped to alt and control, so I can move my camera with just my mousing hand. It works really well.

Jolt: Refer to my post @ /13/ba/127397/1.html

This would be a similar system and work just as effectively

I think it would be more useful if it was properly mapped... This is a case where its better to do it in the actual application than try to use an add-on to rely on keyboard mapping...
You can account for different things if its actually *IN* the application package... Ill be honest, its hard to control something designed for a keyboard with a mapped controller.. thats partly why it has to be integrated to make it usable. it wouldnt fake a mouse or keyboard input, just control the avatars movement with one stick, and the camera control with the other (a common layout in most commercial game systems).. if you only have one stick (traditional), just control the movement..


That said, thanks for your suggestion about using software. Unfortunately at this point my driver does *NOT* support keyboard mapping.. Though theres an aftermarket package that does a rather good job..

I can't imagine I would find it very useful. I like to chat in SL, and holding a controller would just take my fingers away from the keyboard. But people use SL in different ways... so it might be just the thing for some people.

Holding the *mouse* takes your fingers away from the keyboard.

Also, with the ability to remap keys you could do things like using a DDR mat for motion, or using some of the Bloody Useless Interweb Buttons (TM) on modern keyboards for shortcuts. It's not all about NintendoStationBox style controllers.

So you've got a stick which would be good for moving around with, you still need a
setting for the camera... ok, not hard.

But then you also need to type.

I suppose it depends on what you do with SL.

Do you treat it as an online game or to exist in a 3D world where you can
hang around with your friends and chat?

For me it's the latter.

ICQ on steroids.

Wolfie!

You can get a keyboard with a dozen extra buttons, two thumbwheels and a trackpad.

And you can't do anything useful with them except duplicating mouse functions.

Map them to camera and motion controls, and you could move around while your focus was on a chat window, look up and down, etc... all without moving your hands from the keyboard.