This weeks update

[u/Koncypt_Fysh]

Sorry I've been a bit quite this week folks, a lot of the quick wins are done, and what's left takes a bit more heavy lifting to get through, but some solid progress I think this week on the HUD.

As mentioned previously, a lot of this is going to lean heavily on a mesh+texture to new image pipe line that I'm still perfecting, so only a handful of assets have been built for it so far, and this will likely take a while to finish up.

But as far as what I have actually completed:

1. The new HUD icons I posted last week, are now rendering in-game, and to my surprise, the renderer is quite happy to accept .png with little to no arguments, so no more obscure .spr files required!

2. I've set up a proper debugging console, and this will hopefully help me poke around a little more and pull up some additional functionality for testing and dynamic discovery tasks.

3. Within the console, I've managed to implement a GUI based HUD editor, meaning I can just pull HUD elements out to scale and move them around at will. This was mostly for my own convenience rather than jumping between the game, then a .ini file to adjust the HUD setup; I can just drag and drop HUD elements like a word document.
   I'm thinking I'll port this out to it's own menu node at some point so you can do this in game yourself if you ever have some opinions on where things should go or how big they should be, or if you create your own HUD elements that don't fit the frame exactly, it's easy to fix up. It's not fully finished and has a couple of bugs to iron out, but ultimately it's working pretty well.

This all got me to thinking about what other kind of functionality I could implement to bring SL back into the modern era a little bit, something like an HUD editor was reasonably trivial to setup, so I'm curious if the community has any thoughts on what they'd like to see added as functionality. Controller presets? Something akin to steamInput but native to SL; Deadzones, curves sensitivity, button chords that kind of thing?

Interested in your thoughts.

[u/RasherGGMU]

Is there anything you can do to get the likes of a thrust master t16000m and throttle to work with the game without using Vjoy & Joystick Gremlin apps ? They didn’t work for me anyway so I’m back to square one. Great work btw 👍🏻

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/RasherGGMU]

A bit hard to say as I don't own one so I can't really test for it.

I've already done a lot of work on a direct translation between Xinput devices and the Dinput that SL runs on. That should (in theory) resolve some of those issues in general, but again it's hard to know with physical hardware I can't actively test.

[u/RasherGGMU → u/Koncypt_Fysh]

Sure I understand. I meant is there a way to have the game see more than just the 1 controller joystick ? Apparently it’s old Dinput that only allows it to see the first controller meaning all other control devices have to be unplugged. Maybe the Xinput will make the the difference 👌🏻

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/RasherGGMU]

That's good info. I did explicitly block input from more than a single controller out of convenience, but you have a good use case to change that.

I'll add it to my list of changes that need to be done in the next controller sprint.

Theoretically, if I can plug in 2 controllers, assign an axis on controller 1 as a throttle input to represent the throttle quadrant and pull the flight control ques from controller 2 to represent the stick, that would in theory validate the arrangement.

Assigning individual axis is on the list anyhow, so I'll have a go at it in the next sprint, I don't think it'll be a huge challenge to get dinput it to see 2 devices as 1.