Hey Guys! Been extremely busy lately and haven’t had any time recently to check on this thread. I was contacted by a couple people here on the forum so I figured I’d post an update here. Yes, the links are down and I actually pulled down the old version a while back once I heard plugin support will be coming to the marketplace but more because the older version I don’t think works anymore due to the version it was compiled against at that time. I’ve been slammed trying to get a new video game company off the ground but these plugins do relate to the game I’m currently working on as why I created these since UE didn’t have support built into the engine.
The plan currently is to try and wrap these up to v1 in the very near future and get the last couple issues resolved. Following that, I’ll be deciding if I’ll be bringing at least the Joystick Plugin to the marketplace or if I will just release the plugin for free. It did take me a fair bit of time to get it to the point it’s at so if I do charge for the plugin, it will be a pretty minor fee. But that really depends on how things go for me over the coming weeks. I literally walked out of a very good job back in March and work from early till around 3am - 5am every night, every day and this has been a big dream of mine. The coolest part about that is I’m following my dreams of starting a video game company, the sucky part is my personal life completely suffers and every day I wake up is roughly the same with me starting and ending my day in front of my PC. In just a sheer sense of being able to remotely have or enjoy life is non-existent and can get really hard at times. I have a lot of work ahead but I only planning on charging for the plugin if I absolutely need to and if I do, the fee will be small.
Now for those of you who have the early version of the plugin, I am assuming since these were compiled against 4.2 that they aren’t working anymore since some things changed in how the engine compiles plugins. If you guys who already have it want to reach out to me on PM, feel free and if you help me identify any issues, I’ll pass on future updates and the final version of the plugin for free to you guys. Also as a heads up, I haven’t checked this thread in a while so if you guys need me, you are more likely to get in touch with me on PM.
From what I can remember, here is what is lacking in this plugin at the moment…
- Right now it only has exclusive support for a single HOTAS setup so I need to extend it to support multiple joysticks/throttles if the user wants that
- It doesn’t support hot-reload of USB so if the Joystick is not connected prior to starting the game, it won’t recognize it if it’s connected after the fact (I looked at attempting to implement a DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL notification however at first glance, I would need to actually change a couple lines of source in the engine and get the WindowsApplication.cpp file to distribute them to my plugin. Will look at how I can do it independently and considering Oculus has their own MessageHandler, it has to be possible but after looking through their code, I’m not seeing anything that can help me on this. If any of you want to help out on that, I’ll hook you guys up to. If I can have the code be independent of the engine and detect USB device notifications when they are inserted/removed, then that’ll be ideally what I need.
- Now some of you have reported it kind of working so I’ll have to discuss these issues with you guys to dig further
- One thing I’d like but it would require me integrating it directly into the engine (which is not completely off the table as an option), is having direct support so you don’t have to bind events and can just access it like any other device. Like I said, I may do this, especially if I do release the final version for free.
Here at my apartment, I have a Saitek X52 Pro and was thinking about potentially picking up an X55 but I don’t have let’s say Logitech devices to test with. But it uses the standard model with DirectInput on communicating to Joysticks so they should all be widely supported.
So glad to see that this thread is still active and those of you who already have the old version of the plugin and want to help Beta test out future releases and provide feedback, I’ll hook you guys up since I already distributed it to you and even give you a 4.5 version the second 4.5 drops next week. I’ll keep you guys posted and I should know here in the near future what I’ll be doing with this but I may need a couple weeks before I can commit my time to this. I’ll fill you all in once I have an update… take care guys and enjoy your weekend!
