Forums » Help » XBox 360 Controller Input Binding

I'm a huge fan of games like Super Meta boy and how they allow you to use the XBox 360 controller for PC gaming. Since I'm building an action oriented game it would be great if people "could" plug in a 360 controller. Searched online for a while but couldn't figure out a way to make this possible. Any leads or ideas?

I know I'm probably being a bit ideal here, but I can't find any info out there on how to do this.

This isn't really a help topic. :) IMPACT will never natively support controllers as it just cant. That's not to say you can't use a controller though.

Wiimotes use bluetooth and can easily connect to Mac and I'd assume PC too. I use a Wiimote and Osculator, but that's probably overkill for most people as there's bunches of other free apps that do the same thing. A quick google'll find tons of results. The great thing about using a Wiimote is the ability to use all of the controller extra's too, like the classic controller and nunchuk. MAC or PC

I did a bit of research into using a 360 controller but I found the Wiimote to be easier/cheaper and I don't consider that to be ideal. Here's a link that'll help with the 360 support though.

Too poor to buy a PS3, I haven't really looked into using a PS3 controller. From what I read it's pretty easy to set up for both PC and Mac.

The 360 support article is quite a bit of information, but important. Don't quite understand it all. Any ideas on how to convert the button command codes into binded JavaScript inputs? That seems to be the big hurdle in using it unless I'm missing something here.

Although Impact might not support controllers to prevent bloat in the code, I don't see any reason not to develop a plugin for controller support.

Impact (and all javascript) is limited by what the browser can accept as input. It's not something you'd do at the level Impact runs, it's down to the OS to manage the input from devices and pass it along to applications. If you're going to convert input from into a keyboard so that your browser can pick it up, you wouldn't write that in javascript, it would be a low level driver most likely written in C.

I was guessing that the browser couldn't handle it since JS like you said only handles browser interaction. Was hoping there was some magical way to do this with an unknown JavaScript function or something. Guess I'll just have to hope that somebody develops a Firefox / Chrome plugin to interact with the controller.

There's a 10% chance of that even being possible. :P

Actually as in browser games evolve I'd expect it to become more and more possible. A friend of mine here in Chicago might be interested in leading a project on this. Going to bring it up next time I see him.

If you can do it, charge for it. :P

Just to check, you know you can do this already right? There are programs out there that just convert gamepad button presses to keyboard keypresses which already work with all javascript games. Obviously some are better than others, and I have no idea what PC support is like, I can't imagine it's worse than Mac.

Yeah, familiar with that. Really want to give people the ability to pick up a controller and just plug it in without any configuration. Most people probably wont want to configure a controller for a 20 - 30 minute game.

PC support isn't too bad for controllers. XBox 360 controllers work pretty darn well since game's just look for the controller's profile.

We can always use JoyToKey though right ?
but yeah, that's kind of an extra manual setup :P

Just thought i'd update this post with Boomstick: https://github.com/STRd6/Boomstick

Tested, works with my 360 controller. You can give people information on how to add this extension to their browser. Not ideal, requires a little setup, but might be worth it for people who want to use their controller.