Support for Custom Input Controller

[carkey]

Hello,

 

I was wondering if anyone has tried writing code to make a custom input controller work other than spoofing mouse/keyboard events?

 

I have used Arduino and Microsoft Gadgeteer before and written an application that sits in the tray, converting inputs into mouse/keyboard events (system-wide) but I was wondering if there was a more elegant way of doing it?

 

For example, my controller sends strings over virtual serial port (over USB), I have written the Java code to get this stream of strings in and parse them into "button 1 pressed/button 2 released" etc. but I am new to Minecraft modding and don't see how I can then hook this data into input events within minecraft.

 

Has anyone ever tried this? Or would know where to start?

 

I've found this controller mod on github (https://github.com/ljsimin/MinecraftJoypadSplitscreenMod/tree/master/MinecraftJoypadSplitscreenMod/src/com/shiny/joypadmod) but I'm not quite sure where it is hooking into Minecraft.

 

Thanks for your time!

[carkey]

Sorry for the shameless bump but there must be a way to do this right?

 

I can think of 2 ways to do it:

 

1. Create a tray app (separate from the mod) which gets commands from Arduino over serial and spoofs Keyboard/Mouse commands (same as how Minecontrol etc. work).

2. Poll serial within the Mod itself and call functions/spoof keyboard/mouse from inside the Java code.

 

I'd much prefer to do the 2nd method but I can't see how to get access to the Input polling in Minecraft. It is based on LWJGL right? So there must be a Keyboard/Mouse polling thread somewhere? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for your time

[jabelar]

Minecraft has the KeyBinding class that maps all the keycodes and their pressed state, and it has public method to set the state of whether it is pressed.  So I suspect it is possible to interact with that from your serial processing code.

 

The only thing I'm not sure of is whether it would fire the proper key press events.  I think in that case you might need to copy the code that normally happens during key press event, maybe in your own custom event to give some equivalence.

 

Anyway, I think tracing from the KeyBinding code might be good place to start.

[carkey]

Ah okay great, thanks for the info!

 

So does it make sense to have my own thread receiving the serial data and then a locked method for faking keypresses all within the minecraft mod code (point 2. from above)?

 

I'll have a go at looking at the KeyBindings code now and report back.

[jabelar]

Ah okay great, thanks for the info!

 

So does it make sense to have my own thread receiving the serial data and then a locked method for faking keypresses all within the minecraft mod code (point 2. from above)?

 

I'll have a go at looking at the KeyBindings code now and report back.

 

Yes, I think that such an approach could work.