Joystick support.

Joystick support is something that I think should be at the top of the list of features to add to SL. It's surprising that there isn't support for joysticks in SL already.

When I say joystick support I don't mean simple forward, back, left, right, and a few buttons. I'm talking full support. All buttons and axis that a joystick can have. Imagine the kind of vehicles ppl could make with as many control options a joystick provides.

Dont forget steering wheels and my CH Products USB Flight Yoke. I want to be able to fly my lodestar and drive my fairchange GTO.

Please please please please PLEASE.

SL needs this.

I'd love to have dual-anlalog-stick controls, for walking around.....one stick for movement, one for camera control. This can work either in 3rd person (think Splinter-Cell, if you've played it on Xbox), or in 1st-person (Think just about any console FPS you've ever played.)

What I would LOVE:

Several standard configurations to choose from, or the ability to map my own controls onto the controller, including options such as inverted controls in both the horizontal and vertical axes.

The ability for the game to undestand the difference beween "I'd just like to tiptoe up a bit, just at tad" and "I'd like to take multiple steps back and forth with each tap of the arrow button, each time going too far and not really being able to position myself correctly.....hopefully bumping into several people along the way".

Be able to use the same control scheme for scripted vehicles.

YES, I realize that this would mean quick-switching back and forth between controller and keyboard. I want it anyway.

YES, I realize that SL is not a "game", and LL doesn't want to stigmatize it as such with a game controller. Tough. We need a better way of controlling movement, we need more precision and the ability to more effectively emote through our movements. VR walking pads are too far away, too expensive or just too far away from the taste of many residents to be worth implementing before gamepad-style controls.

Please?

I agree.

4 and 5 axis game pads are only about $30 now (the Logitech RumblePad is a good example).

True analog control would be VERY nice.

I agree as well....
This could be very useful for vehicles and walking, as well as for quite a number of other projects, and as Unhygenix stated, button assignment for said joysticks/control pads would help quite a bit.

I use the sidewinder strategic commander with SL and it works great
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/sidewinder/support/compat/stratcom.asp

I bought a Logitech DualAction gamepad for $20. It has two analogue sticks, a D-pad, and tons of buttons. It would be really nice if I could use it fully, but right now I'm limited to mapping buttons and axes to keyboard stuff. I will say that doing so and controlling my avatar and aircraft that way was an eye-opener. It showed me in a visceral way that this environment really can support what most would consider to be serious gaming.

I think what we really need is an abstraction layer that presents axes and buttons/keys to LSL. In this way, a person would write a vehicle control script that would ask for X- and Y-axes and some buttons. Client-side, the user could map the axes and buttons however they wanted between their keyboard, mouse, and any joysticks they have. (You can map axes to keys like PageUp/PageDn and +/-. This is common in flight sims.)

This way, people can write code to drive vehicles and other devices, and it doesn't matter whether you have a joystick or not - it just works for everyone.

I would do better than that.

I would define maybe 4-8 buttons in the scripting language, 5 axes, and then let the client map keyboard buttons and joystick buttons to those axes and buttons.

For a reasonable aircraft flight model, you have to have at least 4 axes. Bank, Pitch, Rudder, and throttle.

I can think of how a 2-stick d-pad with throttle would map to the standard Avatar view:

Walk/Drive mode
X/Y: Turn and forward/backward
Throttle: Zoom
Rudder: Sidestep (Strafe)
Hat: Pan view
B1: Toggle flight mode

Flight Mode
X/Y: Bank and pitch
Throttle: forward thrust
Rudder: Turn (more on this later)
Hat: Pan View

The key to a realistic-feeling flight system is that the avatar/vehicle does not actually turn left or right because the joystick is held left or right. Tilting the stick banks the plane. The sideways force from the wings pushes the plane sideways. The sideways force of the plane acting on the rudder swings the tail around.

Helicopters turn similarly while im forward flight. At a hover, the pilot uses the foot pedals to control the copter's tendency to turn... pushing with the left foot causes a left turn.

I don't even want to get in to Angle of Attack and why it's impossible to control an airplane with the current setup.

So what we really need for those without joysticks is some sort of on-screen d-pad and a simplified control system that involves the keyboard. The best way to do it would probably be to use mouselook as the X/Y axis, and use the left/righ arrow keys (and A/D keys) as the rudder axis. This leaves W and S for throttle advance/retard.

With all this in mind, I might take a crack at a basic "joystick interpreter" for SL. Basically, this would be a program that sits on the client PC and shoves data in to the SL client. It would simply send the analog control positions whenever they change. The vehicle script would recognize the command strings and respond accordingly.

It might even be possible to force the Avatar to walk and look around based on this input as well, as long as they're wearing an object that responds to the control inputs.

This idea could be used on all new vehicles, and it has the advantage of being do-able pretty quickly. We could probably have a basic control rigging up and running in a few days. Then we'd have to get the other script designers to accept this as a standard control mechanism. My best suggestion would be to get several major scripting gurus together to do this, and make the results (of the interpreter) open-source, so anybody could use it in their vehicles.

That's pretty much what I said, isn't it?

This is a neat idea, but I wager current I/O is too laggy. I think you would need to have a response time of 100ms or less, round-trip, from your interpreter through XML-RPC and then having the aircraft actually receive the RPC message and process it and send a signal to whatever does flight control, and for that change to show up in the client's viewer. Please let me know if you can successfully do this, because it would be very exciting for myself and other vehicle scripters. (On the other hand, it would give LL another excuse to put off real joystick support...)

bump

My "better than that" idea was to have an on-screen pad for those who don't have joysticks. Also, I think that tying mouselook to the same input mechanism as joystick X/Y might be useful.

My joystick interpreter will NOT use RPC. It will use standard keyboard I/O and send the messages through chat. This will be about as responsive as the current I/O system. The big advantage isn't the response speed, but the idea of analog control.

Really, it couldn't replace a dedicated client function. Mostly. I wamt to try it as an experiment to see how possible it is to control SL features via joystick.

bump

Perhaps this will help :

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016823/joytokey/english.html

Great idea!

Please vote for Prop: 203 - Support local devices beyond mouse and keyboard
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=203

Open Sound Control (http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/) would be a good solution to this, given some of the performance/security issues with XML-RPC, or at least the current implementation.

See other threads:
Get input from local devices (other than mouse and kbd)
/13/1d/36159/1.html

and

Prop: 203 - Support local devices beyond mouse and keyboard
/165/5d/45382/1.html


Opening up SL in this way could generate all sorts of potential new uses, once the technical/security issues are out of the way.

Vote now!!!

It works fine I just tried it out on SL, World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. I mainly got it for a beta I'm in, since joystick support for it doesn't work as of yet. Didn't try it on a vehicle in SL though.