List of Joystick 2 Device names

[Volnaiskra]

I wonder which will come first - Fusion 3, Half Life 3, or Spryke?

[Julian82]

I believe all our controller problems / limitations will be resolved with F3. If you you read some of the negative reviews on games made with Fusion 2.5, lack of controller support is always there! I'm kinda glad I don't have much of a project in Fusion 2.5. Even if Clickteam rewrites the Joystick extension I still would not want to *start* anything too ambitious under 2.5+ at this point. That sort of thing should've come many years ago! I'm ready for F3 all the way!!!

As someone who has experienced several joystick 2 issues within the Steam environment and talked quite excessively with other Steam devs about that extension: Don’t ever use it if you develop something with commercial interest in mind. Use the Xbox gamepad extension instead. Steam can emulate almost any generic device as XInput, key rebinding included, and it works flawlessly with Fusion. If CT manages to make a new input collector, I’ll happily give it a shot. In the meantime, even outside Steam, plenty of well functioning XInput emulators exist.

[Edel]

Use the Xbox gamepad extension instead. Steam can emulate almost any generic device as XInput, key rebinding included, and it works flawlessly with Fusion.

I sure love Steam for that. Julian, I've been meaning to ask you... I once played an older demo of Outbuddies and noticed you were using the built-in movements for your player? I figured you did because I would get that shaking / bouncy collision when I would press and hold towards walls. Did you stay with that movement or did you go custom or even switched to the PMO?

[Volnaiskra]

As someone who has experienced several joystick 2 issues within the Steam environment and talked quite excessively with other Steam devs about that extension: Don’t ever use it if you develop something with commercial interest in mind. Use the Xbox gamepad extension instead. Steam can emulate almost any generic device as XInput, key rebinding included, and it works flawlessly with Fusion. If CT manages to make a new input collector, I’ll happily give it a shot. In the meantime, even outside Steam, plenty of well functioning XInput emulators exist.

This is all well and good if you want just the barest functionality from the gamepad. If you want 8-directional, 360-degree, and/or analog movement (eg. the ability to feather the joystick to walk or push it firmly to run) then the Xbox Gamepad extension is inadequate.

I agree that Clickteam need to pull their finger out and address this issue. The Xbox Gamepad extension is practically a misnomer: it may as well be called the SNES extension since, force-feedback aside, it basically only supports pre-1995 features. I personally found Joystick 2 to be an absolute nightmare to use, or at least it was until I spent a hundred hours beating it into some semblance of a logical shape with VACCiNE. But as Julian82's post shows, that turned out to be more or less a waste of my time, since Joystick 2 has a whole new batch of headaches waiting to emerge once you hit Steam with it.

It's hard to believe that Fusion ever released without proper support for something as fundamental as gamepads, let alone that it still doesn't have it 10+ years on. Hopefully someone will hire them for a console port to PS4 and Xbone one day, for a game that uses analog movement, and they'll be forced to finally look into this.

[Progject]

As someone who has experienced several joystick 2 issues within the Steam environment and talked quite excessively with other Steam devs about that extension: Don’t ever use it if you develop something with commercial interest in mind. Use the Xbox gamepad extension instead. Steam can emulate almost any generic device as XInput, key rebinding included, and it works flawlessly with Fusion. If CT manages to make a new input collector, I’ll happily give it a shot. In the meantime, even outside Steam, plenty of well functioning XInput emulators exist.

This is worth examining a bit further. I would like to think my game will eventually make it's way onto Steam - I'm using VACCiNE.

I do believe a recent commercial Fusion release, Dark Devotion had this issue and looking at the Steam page for that game, people are still complaining about it. I wonder if I'd finally finish my game only to find it's success marred by this. Hopefully not...

[c4t]

I agree that Clickteam need to pull their finger out and address this issue.

My only real disappointment with Fusion and most likely the reason i would move on to use another game engine / editor.
A short while back i saw that Clickteam are making and porting games to Nintendo Switch. This made me think that improved joystick might be close and really i wanted the option to port my own games to switch also. Switch has decent pro controllers for sale and its standard controllers that come with the console are also good with triggers and twin sticks. If staff can make those controls work for their own games id assume the user base could have that option also. I asked in reactor about Switch exporter and suggested it be made a DLC like all the others. That request was responded to with. Something about Nintendo licensing stopping them selling the exporter. Disappointing but fair enough.
So how about taking the joystick development from the existing switch work and also the Xbox one and PS4 and write that into an extension we can all have. Don't wait to sell it to us as part of Fusion 3 that most likely is years away.

Like others i think that a decent joystick controller extension should be one of the top things Clickteam should be working on for Fusion. Just write it and give it to all Fusion users as part of an regular update. Am i lucky i have only been waiting 5 years while some have waited 10. that's just a joke really.

Hearing something about this from staff would be great regarding this issue. A timeline of when we can expect the extension to be released would be the ideal. Saying it will be in Fusion 3 is just a tease that could last more years.

Having said all that i love Fusion and have invested a good amount of money and time into it. I am committed like others and will gladly tell others of how i love it. I do want to one day move beyond just making games for my own self interest and release those games to others. I hope that this gets sorted. Steam is for many a main way to market our games and building bad reviews on Fusion games just taints our future plans.

[Julian82]

@Edel : I’ve used a custom engine, it’s just that the early implementation was quite buggy @Volnaiskra : you’re for sure right about that, the Xbox gamepad extension is very simple and lacks some basic functionality joy2 has, like not being able to catch “last active gamepad” really sucks. @Progject : The core of the issue, at least suggested by some data I collected, is a conflict between joy2 and XInput emulation. By default when running Steam XInput emulation is activated. The option is called “Steam gamepad configuration”. It allows controllers like PS4 and most generic stuff to be auto mapped and read like an Xbox controller. What happens with Joy2 is that this emulation reads out as a second gamepad next to the native collection, meaning joy2 will randomly flicker between devices resulting in stuttering or ghost inputs. Also button swaps and permanent input of Dpad and right stick may happen. You can work around this by asking your players to deactivate this Steam feature btw, but I guess many are just not willing to fiddle with that. Also, you’ll loose the “full gamepad support” tag if you can’t support this feature which is a very important thing for many customers.

[Volnaiskra]

@Julian82 : So there's no way to 'catch' Steam gamepad configuration with Joy2? Like, say, tell the game to ignore regular xbox controller input if it detects that "Steam gamepad configuration" is active? I'm guessing the answer is "no", since you say that it flickers in and out of the two modes randomly

[Julian82]

Yes, the assignment is instable and random, I found no pattern, thus no workaround :/

[Julian82]

I think it’s possible to ask Steam tho, that this stuff is always disabled for your game. Not sure 100%