Flight sticks, HOTAS and pedals, with a setup wizard

Ported from BT411, which needed the same thing for its glass cockpit.

PadRIO reads XInput, which covers Xbox-class pads and nothing else. A
flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals or a wheel
arrive through DirectInput instead, and until now the game could not see
any of them - the only generic-joystick path left was the 1995 single-
device DIJoystick behind L4CONTROLS=DIJOYSTICK, which is untouched here.

L4JOY is the reader: up to four devices as normalized state blocks, hot-
plug re-enumeration on the same ~3 s cadence PadRIO uses to look for a
pad, and a device lost mid-race zeroed rather than left holding whatever
was pressed when it went. XInput-class devices are excluded by VID/PID
against the RawInput paths carrying the "IG_" marker - without that an
Xbox pad arrives through both APIs and every button counts twice.

bindings.txt gains four rows in the grammar it already had, using its own
vocabulary (deadzone/rate) rather than BT411's:

  joydev <slot> [product-name substring]
  joyaxis <src> axis <axis> [invert] [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>]
  joybutton <n> button <addr> [toggle]
  joyhat <n> <up|down|left|right> button <addr>

Slots resolve to a live device every poll, by name substring or ordinal,
so unplugging and replugging does not rewrite anyone's file.

Two things the pod's shape forced that BT411 solved differently:

  Pedals - a signed composite axis that decomposes into the pod's two
  pedals, positive right and negative left. The pod has a pedal each
  side; a twist grip or rudder bar is one signed control, and pressing
  one or the other but never both is exactly what it wants to say. It
  is a channel name like any other, so a pad stick can drive the turn
  too.

  A joyaxis on Throttle with no rate is a real lever and OWNS the
  channel - full travel maps onto the 0..1 the pod runs on, instead of
  nudging the accumulator that a spring-centred pad stick has to use.

RP412JOYCONFIG=1 (joyconfig.bat) runs the capture wizard before the
console screen: it asks the player to move each control, and derives the
sign convention from the DIRECTION of the move. That is the point of it -
a stick that reads positive pushed right and one that reads negative are
equally common, and no amount of documentation gets a player to work out
which they own. It writes only its own section, between marker lines, so
hand-edited keyboard and pad rows survive re-running it.

The wizard also prints every axis at rest before it starts. A driver that
refuses the +-32767 range we ask for reports its own, and an axis then
sits hard over instead of near zero; seeing "X +1.00" on an untouched
stick is the difference between a five-minute fix and a bug report that
says it configured itself. Each capture reports the move it saw for the
same reason.

Verified on the Logitech Extreme 3D on this machine. Enumeration finds
it and excludes the Xbox pad, which still arrives separately through
XInput. Every row shape parses - 7 axes, 2 buttons, 4 hat directions -
and three deliberately malformed rows (a bad axis name, button 99, a
"sideways" hat) are each rejected by line number rather than silently
dropped. The wizard lists the device with its axes at rest reading
X +0.00 Y -0.01 RZ -0.04 SL0 +1.00, waits on the first prompt without
self-triggering, and with a hand on the stick captures X to steering,
Y to pitch, RZ to the pedals and SL0 to the throttle, inverting the ones
that read backwards.

Running the captures through to a written file needs a hand on the
stick, so that part is the machine's to confirm, not this build's.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Cyd
2026-08-05 10:06:30 -05:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent fd61316a40
commit 91420b5cb2
9 changed files with 1714 additions and 29 deletions
+23
View File
@@ -27,6 +27,7 @@
#include "..\munga_l4\l4steamtransport.h"
#include "..\munga_l4\l4splr.h"
#include "..\munga_l4\l4mfdview.h" // RPWindowLayout_*
#include "..\munga_l4\l4joy.h" // RPJoyConfigWizard
#include "rpl4ver.h"
#include "..\munga\resver.h"
#include "..\munga\resource.h"
@@ -279,6 +280,28 @@ int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine
RPWindowLayout_Load();
}
//
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
// RP412JOYCONFIG=1 (joyconfig.bat): the joystick setup wizard, before
// anything else claims the screen. It asks the player to move each
// control on their stick, HOTAS or pedals and writes the joy* rows of
// bindings.txt, then falls through into the game so they can try them
// straight away.
//
// One shot: the variable is cleared from this process so a rebuilt
// PadRIO later in the session cannot run the wizard a second time.
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
//
{
const char *joyconfig = getenv("RP412JOYCONFIG");
if (joyconfig != NULL && *joyconfig != '\0' && atoi(joyconfig) != 0)
{
RPJoyConfigWizard();
SetEnvironmentVariableA("RP412JOYCONFIG", NULL);
_putenv("RP412JOYCONFIG=");
}
}
#if !_DEBUG
// Arcade pods have no mouse - but desktop/windowed play needs the
// cursor for the on-screen cockpit buttons, so hide it only when