Hi all,

I am currently writing and protoyping a proposal for my Bachelors of Fine Arts project, which will be a set of educational mini-games aimed at 9-13 year olds and parents.

One of the design bottlenecks is controller/input complexity. I am purposely constraining myself to using 1-2 buttons in total, so the idea has occurred to me that the upcoming Scene It! controller would prove a brilliant help in this.

My question -- will XNA's usual input libraries be detecting this accessory just as it would the normal Xbox gamepad? Can anybody on the XNA team possibly confirm or deny this?

Thanks in advance!

Nobody here can probably tell you for sure, but my guess is yes. The Scene It! controller just has the guide button, back, start, the four letter buttons, and one larger button which will probably just be mapped to either the DPad or one of the two bumper buttons. I'm going to guess that, just like the Guitar Hero controller, it interfaces just the same with XNA.

I would say, "Yes." I recall seeing a GamePadType enumerator somewhere which had quite a few controller types in it, including 'Guitar', but essentially all of the controllers map to the GamePad in some way.

You could also provide a simple 'controller configuration' section to map the buttons from the Scene It to the various functions in your game.

 

At gamefest one of the '2.0' features was 'support for flight stick, chat pad and "big button" controller', though it didn't go into any more details so I don't know exactly what extra support there is.

However as others have sad there are only so many inputs on a gamepad and they all seem to map to something we can read today (other than chatpad!). But the worst case scenario is that you will have to wait until 2.0 releases (Holiday 2007!)

I have my flight stick and SceneIt on order so I will be able to let you know real soon.

Thanks a lot, everyone! I'll look into the input classes a bit more. The game isn't due for exhbition until December 21, 2008, so I will absolutely be looking into 2.0 for this as well.

Thanks again!

Unfortunately I don't think we are going to have Scene It! (what Mitch referred to in his Gamefest talk as the "big button controller") support ready in time for V2. Although the code changes to support it are relatively small, it turned out that support for this is only showing up in a release of the native XDK libraries that is too late for us to pick up. Frustratingly, the release schedules just don't line up well enough for us to integrate this support.

We do have chatpad support working nicely, though.

Shawn, does that mean you can't use a normal GamePad interface with the Scene It! controller or that you simply won't have a separate interface for that controller? It would seem odd if you couldn't just access it the same way as a normal GamePad.

But glad to hear about the chatpads. Now I have a nice excuse to pick one up ;).

The Scene It! uses a different native interface to a regular gamepad. Although we would probably just expose this using our existing GamePad API in the XNA Framework, the underlying native implementation is different.

Ah. Seems like an odd decision (for the people who decided to use a different native interface), but oh well. At least we have chatpads. :)

Remember when they told us that XInput was replacing DirectInput because of how simple it was and how easy it would be to add new devices in the future etc etc etc

Now we have a chatpad add on that doesn't work in windows, a new controller type that uses a different API (which probably means it too won't work in windows)... not the XNA teams fault I know but very inconsistent and frustrating.

 

The ZMan:

a new controller type that uses a different API (which probably means it too won't work in windows)... not the XNA teams fault I know but very inconsistent and frustrating.

On the plus side, at least when we finally do get this support into the XNA Framework, we'll be sure to give you a consistent API no matter what input device you are talking to.

"The XNA Framework: struggling with the pitfalls of native code so that you won't have to"  :-)

Shawn Hargreaves:

"The XNA Framework: struggling with the pitfalls of native code so that you won't have to"  :-)

I'm gonna have to put this in my signature! :)

Now that GSE 2.0 is out, can you confirm that Scene It! controllers are not supported?

Thanks, Patrick

Patrick:

Now that GSE 2.0 is out, can you confirm that Scene It! controllers are not supported?

They are not.

Shawn Hargreaves:

Patrick:

Now that GSE 2.0 is out, can you confirm that Scene It! controllers are not supported?

They are not.

I'm really sorry for bringing up such a old dead thread, and ZMan will probably be pissed at me, because I should know better than to ask about features in the forum, but I really need to know:

Will the Scene It! Big Button Pad be supported in 3.0, for the Xbox 360 ?

I'm not pissed... I want to know too. In fact I b*tched about this at the MVP summit too becuase I'm fed up of 'Xinput is a standard and works on PC and 360' having a little * next to it

 

 

 

* (except the big button controller which uses IR to bring prices down and the text input pad which we just decided not to write a driver for)

The BigButton pad is supported on Xbox in v3.  Not on Windows though.

Shawn Hargreaves:

The BigButton pad is supported on Xbox in v3.  Not on Windows though.

Don't you mean

The BigButton pad is supported on Xbox in v3*

 

 

 

*Not on Windows though becuase the XInput team don't really mean compatible on windows and xbox

Shawn Hargreaves:

The BigButton pad is supported on Xbox in v3.  Not on Windows though.

 Great. Good to know. Now I can design Community Games with the Big Button pad in mind.

 I know this is external to the XNA team, but is there a place on Connect that is read by the appropriate people, so we can go there and request Windows drivers for this thing?

 And one more question. What does the buzzer map to? I know it maps to the dpad when the edges are pressed, but what does the central button map to?

Catalin Zima:

I know this is external to the XNA team, but is there a place on Connect that is read by the appropriate people, so we can go there and request Windows drivers for this thing?

The Game Studio Connect site is the right place to request this. Even though the actual work needs to happen in code owned by a different team, if the limitation shows up in our product, you should report it to us. It's then up to us to act as customer advocates and go explain to whatever other team(s) why any given problem matters and why they should fix it for us. I know this may not always be visible from outside, but we actually do a lot of this kind of cross team engagement - there are several other groups in Xbox that are getting pretty fed up of seeing meeting requests from us with titles like "just want to get together to chat about the possibilities of exposing XXX for community developers" :-)

So you shouldn't have to worry about what team owns a given piece of code. If you're using XNA GS, and have a problem, report it to us and we'll figure out who to pass that on to.

Catalin Zima:

And one more question. What does the buzzer map to? I know it maps to the dpad when the edges are pressed, but what does the central button map to?

We added a new BigButton button.

Shawn Hargreaves:

We added a new BigButton button.

And besides this, when using both the gamepad and the Big Button pad at the same time, they'll be available as a single GamePad, right?

 (I mean pressing A on the gamepad and B on the BigButtonPad will result in a single GamePadState with A and B pressed ?)

How could they be a single Gamepad?!?

Jim Perry:

How could they be a single Gamepad?!?

Simple. Both the Green Big Button Pad and my normal gamepad correspond to Player 1

 The Red Big Button Pad and my second gamepad correspond to Player 2.

 

So they act together as the gamepad for the respective player. I believe it would be wise to get a single GamePadState, with the combined state of the two devices, because that's how it seems to work right now. (If I play SceneIt, I can answer a question (ABXY) both with the Big Button Pad and the corresponding Gamepad at the same time, resulting in the possibility of "cooperative play" for up to 8 people (4 teams of two people))

That's exactly how it works.

Catalin Zima:

I know this is external to the XNA team, but is there a place on Connect that is read by the appropriate people, so we can go there and request Windows drivers for this thing?

 

I have just purchased this "Scene It!" game and found that its "Big Button" IR controllers doesnt install automatically on Windows Vista.

Is there any progress with Windows drivers ? It would be fun to use these also in Windows game development.