Post by Nikoichu in Cattle Crisis comments

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I see. I'll try to avoid those pitfalls when designing the rebind menus in my own games in the future. Thank you for sharing your unique viewpoint.

Out of curiosity, doesn't Steam offer something similar with the Steam Controller Input menu thing? The one that lets you configure and rebind your controller on a per-game basis, and even emulate KB and mouse with it. I think you can add non-steam games there and still use it if I'm not mistaken. How does it compare to JoyToKey? Note that I haven't used either of those.

Conflex Games176 days ago

In Steam, it is possible to create profiles for non Xbox and PS controllers, but in my experience, the process is needlessly coercive and confusing. Like, if I plug in an N64-to-USB controller, and go into Steam, a menu navigation layout will automatically be imposed on the controller. Supposedly, this is meant to be a nice thing - after all, if you have menu navigation automatically imposed, that means you don't have to use a mouse and keyboard, and it is true that I don't like using a keyboard in a living room. The problem is, you have to play trial-and-error to figure out what layout Steam imposed, and it also means you have to create a layout for the controller, while some other layout is already active, and to me, that's incredibly confusing.

If you do find Steam's custom setup process easier than JoyToKey's, I think that anecdote is reasonable, although I believe that Steam has gotten gamers used to thinking that keyboards, mice, and ordinary Xbox controllers are the only peripherals that PC gaming really needs, which is a conclusion I resent.

For the last few years, I've been working on a Steam alternative, which uses JoyToKey as its foundation, and that's one of the reasons I'm chatting with a lot of developers right now, trying to see how they react to my emphasis on JoyToKey-friendliness.

Nikoichu176 days ago

I see. That does sound pretty confusing, yeah. Especially if you try using non-"standard" controllers like the N64 one. I've always been a KB&M enthusiast myself, so I don't have a lot of experience with controllers, and I own only generic x-box-like ones, which realistically cover my needs of occasional gaming on the TV.

Your project sounds really cool, and while it's probably a godsent for people who want to be in full control of controller bindings, unfortunately I think it's is too niche to reach a broader audience. For most people, an xbox controller IS all they need for gaming.

That being said, I think it's still important for projects like yours to exist for those who need it, because more accessibility is always a great thing, and games should be as accessible to as many people as possible. That's why I try to give as many options and key rebind settings as possible. In my current project I have 4 input methods that can be used independently and are completely sufficient to play the game and access all functions - those are Mouse, Keyboard, Controller and Touch.

And having gone to all the trouble to implement all these, I can see why some developers don't want to bother with input remapping and even supporting controllers/touch input - it's a lot of work for something that not a lot of people use (touch gestures in particular are a nightmare). For these games I'm glad tools like JoyToKey, AHK, XBMC and Steam input exist, even if I'm not using them, they're making someone else's gaming experience that much better and that's awesome.

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