VACCiNE 2 - an improved universal gamepad and debugger engine

Hey everyone. I've spent much of the past couple of months (way more time than I should have!) on a complete overhaul of VACCiNE (Volnaiskra's All-purpose Customisable Controller & iNput Engine), which I'm releasing today as Please login to see this link.. This version is greatly improved over the original in many ways: It's more powerful, easier to use, does more stuff, looks better, and runs up to 430% faster.

What is VACCiNE 2?

Well, the simplest answer is probably just to watch the Please login to see this link.below. But in a nutshell, Please login to see this link. takes the stress and complexity out of using gamepads in Fusion. It makes just about any gamepad work seamlessly with an easy-to-use unified input system that combines gamepad and keyboard. It also offers a powerful in-game debugger, a benchmarking panel that includes an A/B testing utility, and a few other little features to make your Fusion experience easier. VACCiNE 2 gives you the same gamepad engine and debugger tools that I use in my game Please login to see this link.. Because I built it primarily to make my own life easier, you can be sure I did my best to make it useful. And because I also made it with other users in mind, I put extra care and attention into removing any rough edges. I tried to make VACCiNE 2 as easy-to-use as I could, but an intermediate level of familiarity with Fusion is recommended.

Please note: due to the amount of improvements, it's not compitable with VACCiNE 1, so users of 1.x versions must remove all VACCiNE code and objects from their game before installing VACCiNE 2.

VACCiNE 2's features include:

Gamepad/input features:

• Makes all major gamepads and a few minor gamepads work - no drivers required - in your PC Fusion game
• Unlocks previously inaccessible gamepad functionality, such as precise analog control, consistent deadzones & 360-degree right stick input
• Universal Input System simplifies and consolidates gamepads, keyboard and mouse into cohesive and ready-to-use Alterable Values
• Improved mouse support compared to VAC1 (integrated buttons 3, 4 & 5 into Unified Input System; improved scrollwheel behaviour; introduced 360-rotation mouse movement)
• Added tentative support for the Ultimarc I-PAC2 arcade controller (untested - if you have one, PM me your email and I'll send you a free copy of VAC2 to test)
• Includes a greatly improved the "stepping" mechanism, which manages an optional type of movement input that's perfectly suited to menus and UI.

Debugger tools:

• Provides a robust in-game debugger panel, toggleable with a key or gamepad button
• Convenient keyboard-activated Freeze-Frame functionality to help you debug
• A/B testing system (literally 1000+ times more accurate than in VACCiNE 1, due to new Microtimer object): Place events in designated folders, and measure their performance against each other with a few keypresses
• Benchmarking panel with performance data about your game, including FPS, Tick duration, and VACCiNE's own measure: VAC score
• Visual alert system to conveniently test whether an event is firing and/or if it has ever fired

General features:

• Major redesign and code overhaul of VACCiNE. Most features improved; many aspects redone from scratch, several new features added.
• Wholesale code overhaul. Input engine up to 250% faster. Debugger up to 430% faster.
• Code is more compact, cleaner, better structured, and more thoroughly commented.
• Comes in several variations for your convenience (including input-only)
• Tick timers that count ticks and keep track of every 2nd tick, every 3rd tick, every 10th tick, alternate ticks, etc. Use them to fire events at particular intervals
• Readymade real-time trigonometric values that can be used to quickly assign a curve or rhythm to something
• Comprehensive demo included - just run the MFA and follow the prompts to familiarise yourself with all of VACCiNE's features
• No longer clutters up your Frame Editor's game area - all VACCiNE elements are now positioned via events, so may be placed anywhere in the Frame Editor, including outside the play area

All the major features are outlined in the video below.

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Screenshot of the included demo:

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Get VACCiNE 2 on the Clickstore:

The original VACCiNE was (and still is, and always will be) free. Due to the crazy amount of time I've spent on VACCiNE 2 (many weeks, not counting all the time I already spent building VACCiNE 1), I decided I had to charge a small price for VACCiNE 2 so I wouldn't feel quite so distraught about how much of my gamedev time it consumed! You can buy it for $3.99 on the Clickstore here: Please login to see this link.

It's certainly possible, and I'm sure VACCiNE would be of some use, but it would also involve a lot of tweaking of the engine from you. VACCiNE already does a good job of detecting multiple gamepads and telling them apart. However, it funnels them all into a single-player input system. So you'd have to change the code so that instead of funneling everything into a single-player input system, it keeps track of the different gamepads and funnels their inputs into separate input systems.

It's also probably worth mentioning that this is not something I'm ever likely to add to VACCiNE myself in a future update, since my own game is single-player only.

Hey [MENTION=17875]PBarwick[/MENTION]. Sorry, I missed these posts earlier.

Yes, I think you're right about the preceding-tick thing. I can't remember for sure, but I'm pretty sure the reason I did it this way was because it was less complicated in the long-run. Certain parts of VACCiNE do need to be at the bottom to work correctly, such as most of the the debugger stuff (so that it can accurately read the states of various values/strings/animations, once they have finished being twisted and turned by your game's events). So I had to either put everything at the end, or split up VACCiNE into two parts. The latter option seemed clunky and with greater potential for mess ups, so I opted to put everything at the end. I figured that input lag of 1/60th of a frame (or 1/120th in Spryke's case, as its engine runs at 120fps) wouldn't really be noticeable anyway - though I never actually tested this.

I think you're very right to point this out. I've since included "input only" versions of VACCiNE that don't contain most of the debugger stuff, so it doesn't really make sense to keep everything at the end in those cases. I think I'll have to look into this. I'll try and make a quick 1-tick-delay and 0-tick-delay version and get some testers together to compare between them to see if there's any discernible input lag in the 1-tick-delay version. If so, then I'll try and modify VACCiNE to remove the 1-tick lag.

I probably won't have time to look into this for many months though, so I can't promise anything. But if anyone is particularly interested in this, it's certainly something you can do yourself, so have a go at shifting the appropriate code yourself. It may literally be as simple as dragging the VACCiNE - INPUT group to the front of your code. Though I'd need to look into it closer to be 100% sure that there isn't some other event or component that needs to be tweaked also.

Yes, the right stick has a stronger deadzone. I personally found that this was beneficial. The right stick is easy to knock by accident when hitting buttons with your right hand. And because it typically spends a lot of time without the player's finger on it, it's more likely to wobble around when the gamepad is moved vigorously. So I gave it a deadzone of about 300, whereas the left stick has a deadzone of 150. You can easily change this though, by modifying the number highlighted below:

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Quote from elvisish

[MENTION=15682]Volnaiskra[/MENTION] Don't have two ControlX objects in your frame by accident, it breaks keyboard interactions if a gamepad is plugged in.

Good to know! But are you saying that VACCiNE2 currently has two ControlX objects in a frame somewhere? In which frame? I had a look but I can't see it.

Quote from elvisish

Also, MenuToggle is still referenced as inputCancel in the documentation.

Thanks. I appreciate it! I'll fix it.

Quote from Retrobolt

Have you or anyone else ever combined all the vol products. Like the gamepad and camera engine.

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly have I've only ever published stuff on the clickstore that I use myself. Basically, all the things I've released are just tools that I built for my own use in Please login to see this link.. If I'm particularly proud of the tool and think could help others, then I polish it up, add better documentation, and release it on the clickstore. It takes a fair bit of time to turn some slapdash tool I've made into a self-contained and robust thing that I'm comfortable releasing to the public - but I don't mind, because it ultimately ends up benefiting Spryke, since I end up with a better tool than I would have had otherwise.

I do my best to make the tools modular and self-contained, so they work independently of each other without stepping on each others' toes. The only caveat is that some of them should be in a particular order in relation to each other in terms of their events (I think I mention this in their documentation somewhere). Here's a screenshot of all of the volTools, in their optimal order. Basically, VACCiNE should go after volCAMERA, both should go after your main code, and volPROFILER has two groups that should be placed at the very start and very end, as indicated by the group name. (Also visible in the screenshot is my super-fantastic Please login to see this link. skin XD)

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VACCiNE 2 uses two qualifiers. One ("Calculation") for all HUD elements, and one ("Radar: Neutral) for the little alert boxes. If you have the 2.5+ DLC, you can use the custom qualifier icons I've attached below. It's probably a good idea to do so, as it might help prevent you from using the same qualifiers for something else in your game down the track, forgetting that they're already used by VACCiNE.