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!

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

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.

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.

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.