Joystick options

[chrisb]

The GUI for the joystick inputs should have more buttons and axis to select, more options to choose, details or a wiki link providing more information. This just leaves 2 options edit the xml file which not everyone can do this or use 3rd party joystick software to map button to key presses. The current GUI setup would leave some players feeling a bit disappointed when they discover there joysticks are not supported very well

Modern joysticks these days are starting too amass a large number of buttons and features
Fair enough things like the mode or a display might be too much, but support for pinkie(shift) would be an easy way to double the number of inputs

I bought my first joystick to play this game, and the playable is exceptionally better, the only downfall is the manual xml editing and research needed to get all the features setup right

[iinRez]

Hello, being a new user of this software I'd like to join in the convo, while I am willing to learn the in's and out's of writing my Joystick xml it will take some time and I do find it disappointing not being able to plug and play. Furthermore the lack of simple binding customization is a major turn off, for the common layman it is not worth the trouble to customize the Joystick mapping in an xml and I could see people ending there use of this software at that. I almost did. I hope that as this project progresses it's made more 'consumer' friendly and a straight forward scripted GUI options menu with key and joystick binding customization is implemented. For instance http://www.gefs-online.com is easy to configure and makes for a pleasant and educational experience for anybody on their first time.

[Kabuki]

I've found the dialog useful for one thing: It creates a proper skeleton document for your joystick -- that you can edit by hand.

The directory /data/input/joysticks is full of coding examples, but (on windows) the actual joystick configuration file used by flightgear resides in the "user" diredctory
(e.g. C:\Users\PCUser\AppData\Roaming\flightgear.org\Input\ in my case). I edit that file by hand. I don't see it as a problem to change something, then reload-input while I'm flying.

There are some problems with the dialog. I noticed that it puts a <dead-band> directive inside the <binding> block, in contradiction to the documentation which says dead-band has to be set *outside* the <binding> part.

I don't think it's too hard at all to hand edit the xml file, and the dialog helps by reading your joystick's name and creating a skeleton. Many of the things I like to have my stick do, requires nasal scripting anyway.

[chrisb]

The in-game joystick gui does make for a good skeleton and can bind most buttons to most common options but anything custom needs to be hand coded.
A drag and drop block based flow chart gui might be a good way to do things.
I assume nobody is doing such a project, I might give it a go
Pick a language... common and cross platform,...

[Philosopher]

Myself and some others did try to start a project, but as mentioned below it basically has stalled:

There's our stalled project to revamp it, which would use Canvas and have more options: https://gitorious.org/fgjoystickgui/fgjoystickgui. We kinda ran out of steam, I think, so it would be great if someone else would help out - not necessarily you, hvengel, but whoever we could snag. (I'm currently working on other Nasal things though, but I could certainly help out again.) I personally think the right choice is to have both options - one proportional for your use, one ternary for hat switches - maybe exposing a simple sub-option to select (but that pretty much requires Canvas to generate another dialog, and hence why I would recommend sticking with the fgjoystickgui project to improve the whole dialog, versus just adding patches, so that we can really make it more configurable and flexible).

Any help of that would be great, but I think proceeding with Canvas is the best idea - PUI is not flexible enough to support even sub-windows, much less drag-and-drop!

[chrisb]

Hmmmm...
At least I've done some work in nasal coding with my joystick config, never used canvas before..
I'd like it to function similar to the niagara framework "wiresheet" for building management systems.

[Philosopher]

Just keep in mind that, whatever you want to do, someone has to code it up .

If you want to start learning Canvas, this is the tutorial that the whole fgjoystickgui dialog is based off of: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Canvas ... submodules

Basically it's all about positioning elements, which can be paths, text, or simple buttons, and making sure everything lines up well. The Canvas developer (TheTom) says he is working on better widgets support (i.e. higher-level layout management), but for now we kinda have to do it manually.

If you do want to get involved, please sign up for a Gitorious account so that we can coordinate the code through there - I can probably find some time to clean up my code so you can hop in easier . If you need help on Git, please check out the articles in this category on the wiki: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Category:Git

[chrisb]

my gitorious username is chrisb

[Philosopher]

sorry that it took me so long, but you should be on the repository now . I still have to see when I'll be able to clean up my code, because the Canvas parts are a mess...