Hi there,

I'm not new to Freespace or the Open flavours, but there is one thing I'd really like to know. I'm currently doing some interface experiments with Helios (a touchscreen software with an editor that lets you create your own interfaces) and I want to do profiles for basically every space combat sim out there. Working on WC Saga and FS2 right now.

But there is 1 thing that pisses me off slightly - the game code, regardless of being vanilla or the Open varient, seems to ignore device IDs where button presses come from. So when I bind joystick button 1 to fire, every input device apart from the keyboard that sends a button 1 keystroke will fire the guns.

That in itself wouldn't be problematic, but windows handles touchscreens very similar to mouse inputs. So everytime I press some controls on the touchscreen, the ship fires.

Of course there are the obvious things like using the joystick driver to make the stick send keyboard keys and all that, but I'd like to know if there's a way to just make the game stop doing that instead of configuring everything around that problem.

It is kind of ironic - we can use Eyefinity, TrackIR and whatnot, but input devices are sometimes a very tough thing. I know of PPJoy, but to the best of my knowdledge Deon has stopped developing it and disabling some OS features to get it running on my 64bit system is a bit annoying.

Cheers!

There may indeed be someone here who knows the solution to your quandary, but you're probably better off asking this question in the hard-light forums. They do most of the heavy lifting on the open-source code and would know what is possible.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/

You can reconfigure the joystick in-game (in the options configuration) to send different commands - e.g. you can set it so that button 1 on the joystick does nothing ... but from your description I'm not sure that's what you want - I think you want the stick's button 1 to be able to send commands but for the touchscreen's "button 1" to be handled differently. I know you can "turn mouse off" entirely, so it would seem the code does have some way to distinguish different input types. I just don't know how far that extends. Again, the hard-light people would know better.

Good luck! Sounds like an interesting experiment.

Thanks! I'll have a look around there...

And no, I don't want to just unbind stick buttons 1 and 2, that would be too easy. The problem is that when I bind the stick buttons 1 and 2 to something, my ship will also fire on mouse click left or right. Disabling the mouse in the options menu does nothing to resolve this, it only disables pitch and yaw control of the mouse. But the mouse buttons are still active as buttons 1 and 2. I will have solve this with PPJoy I think.

Yeah I figured that would be too easy :)

Who knows, maybe the hard-light people will know a solution? Again, good luck.