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! :)