Advice about creating a Gamepad Interface

[Jbbrack03]

Hello all!

I'm a first-time poster and I have a few questions for the experts. I'm playing with the idea of trying to add controller support to World of Warcraft along with a controller-friend interface. On a standard 360 controller, I'd like to program the Trigger/Shoulder buttons to be modifiers, and then have the screen pull up a specialized action bar with button-mapped hotkeys that can be pressed in combination with a trigger/shoulder button to execute an action. So to break that down a little bit, without pressing any button, there is no action bar on the screen. When you hold a Trigger/Shoulder, a custom action bar pops up with mapped actions (aka, pressing A is action1, pressing B is action2, etc). Releasing the Trigger/Shoulder makes the action bar go away. If you press a different Trigger/Shoulder button, a different action bar pops up at the bottom with different actions assigned to the same A,X,B,Y buttons (and possibly D-Pad buttons). I'd like to combine this system with WASD to left analog and Mouse to right analog for movement. So essentially you can move around and then press your desired action button to play (plus see your actions in an easy interface). This system would also need to have a frame for programming the actions to a specific action bar set and button.

To provide a little more information on my reasons for doing this, I recently bought an Nvidia Shield portable game system. I'd love to play WOW on it, and this is the reason for my controller-support project. I'm thinking that combining a system like this with the Move-Anything addon will allow you to make a very small-screen + Controller friendly system for WOW. I also know that there used to be a limited controller Addon that wasn't supported for long and wasn't implemented well. Yet it showed that a controller could be programmed to work with WOW through an addon.

So what is your advice, and where would you suggest that a novice start studying to learn how to make something like this happen?

[SDPhantom]

A lot of what you suggest like movement and control could be done by making changes to your key bindings.

[Seerah]

As for the action bars, you can use Dominos or Bartender and configure a bar (in Dominos it's under "show states") to only show under certain macro conditionals (modifiers being a valid conditional). You may need to include that modifier in your keybind for each button, however.

[Jbbrack03]

Originally Posted by SDPhantom A lot of what you suggest like movement and control could be done by making changes to your key bindings.

The trick appears to be that WOW does not accept controller input for keybindings. I know that you can do that with programs like Xpadder or Pinnacle, but you can't use those with the Shield. That's why I'm interested in building something specific that will work for this. The other issue is that even if WOW detected the button presses and allowed you to bind them, you can't bind the mouse camera to the right stick. This needs to be much more customized to be truly friendly.

As far as bars go, I know that you can configure bars with some of the other addons. However, none of them have a controller in mind. My idea is not an original one, it is based on how DC Universe Online handles their action bars for controller gameplay. It works really really well.

[Phanx]

If WoW doesn't accept controller input for key bindings, then it just doesn't recognize that input, period. You will have to use a third-party program to remap the input from your controller to keys that WoW does recognize.

[ravagernl]

If World of Warcraft can't detect a controller, then addons for World of Warcraft AddOns can't either. AddOns are sandboxed to World of Warcraft.

Originally Posted by Phanx Addons cannot access anything outside of WoW. You cannot read from or post to Facebook, Twitter, RSS, etc. You cannot connect to Facebook chat, Skype, etc. You cannot read from or write to files on the hard disk. You cannot show what song is currently playing in Winamp. You cannot show who's talking in Ventrilo.

[OFFTOPIC]From a developer perspective, I don't find it odd that World Of Warcraft(or other MMORPGs) only supports keyboard/mouse input. The game was built around the sole idea of having a mouse controlled interactive interface/environment. It doesn't feel like a game that could be innovated by adding controller support (the game would have to detect USB/Bluetooth/whatever and it doesn't really match with the computer setup the average Blizzard gamer has).[/OFFTOPIC]

That said, keyboard and mouse manufacturers like Logitech and Razer provide software to buyers (in addition to the normal drivers) to emulate keyboard and/or mouse clicks. If you want a controller to work for world of warcraft, you're going to need to find software that does this, write something yourself, or a different hardware setup.

[Jbbrack03]

I do have all of the peripherals that you have listed and I thoroughly enjoy using them. My perspective is that I'm on the go a lot, and WOW is my favorite game. I know that I can get a gaming laptop, but that's quite the setup to whip out on a whim when you're in a car or on a plane (with games needing a mouse and a good surface). The controller makes sense in these scenarios. Another side of the controller is that the buttons are more accessible and can be a big advantage over a keyboard. And for games like WOW that don't used "action" combat, the joystick movement is no worse than what you'd do with a keyboard and mouse. The challenge arises in the interface, and luckily WOW allows you to do whatever you want in this regard.

I realize that WOW does not detect the controller by default as a input device. Nvidia is supposedly working on setting up the Shield to show up in Windows as a controller so that we can map it in Xpadder and Pinnacle. I found the original controller addon that I had referenced earlier, and it looks like this was how they accomplished it (with the addition of a program). I'd still like to setup a controller efficient interface like I had mentioned before. The difference is that the each bar will be bound to keys and then the external software will bind those keys to the controller.

[Seerah]

Originally Posted by Jbbrack03 As far as bars go, I know that you can configure bars with some of the other addons. However, none of them have a controller in mind. My idea is not an original one, it is based on how DC Universe Online handles their action bars for controller gameplay. It works really really well.

My suggestion would work exactly how you described...

[jeruku]

Perhaps OPie could be of use to you then.

[ravagernl]

Originally Posted by Seerah My suggestion would work exactly how you described...

Yeah they do, both Bartender4 and Dominos work just fine, among others. Both of these work with real "actions" (12 times 10 + 10 for the petbar, to be exact) to make sure your setup is stored on the server.

If you want even more customization you could check out Ion.

[Jbbrack03]

Originally Posted by ravagernl Yeah they do, both Bartender4 and Dominos work just fine, among others. Both of these work with real "actions" (12 times 10 + 10 for the petbar, to be exact) to make sure your setup is stored on the server. If you want even more customization you could check out Ion.

I will take a deeper look into this. While the Shield isn't updated to show up on the computer for mapping yet, I can still start working customization and mapping for a 360 controller. When the Shield is updated, it should just be a matter of plug and play.

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by ravagernl If you want even more customization you could check out Ion.

I would not recommend Ion to anyone who isn't already using it, sadly. I used its predecessor (Macaroon) for many years and it was by far the best action bar addon out there, but the author chose to rewrite it from scratch for MoP, and though that rewrite (Ion) is functional at a basic level, it's still missing many addon features most users would consider critical -- such the ability to use different bar layouts or key bindings on different characters -- and many portions of the configuration UI are likewise incomplete. Given that its author has never made any kind of official statement about the addon's future, and the only updates are from third parties pushing critical bugfixes or TOC updates, I'm not hopeful that it has a future.

Bartender4 or Dominos are better options for 99.9999% of users, and I'd definitely second the suggestion to check out OPie -- it already does the "pop up rings of actions" you're looking for, so if you can get your controller button mapping right, you'd pretty much be set.