Confused by input mappings assignment to local players

[KaiDrange]

Hello! I’m an experienced developer, but new to Unreal. I started on a game as a hobby project a couple of months ago and have found a LOT of useful info on this forum. So, big thanks to everyone here. Unfortunately, my first post in here is a request for help…

I’ve been completely stuck on an issue for over a week and are out of ideas. The problem (or at least the symptom I’m seeing) is related to local players and possessing pawns/assigning input mappings. I’m making a multiplayer game supporting both split screen and online players. My issue is for split screen players. A player should have either gamepad or keyboard controls. What I’m seeing is the following:

• Single player, no input mapping assigned - not able to control pawn.
• Single player, keyboard assigned - keyboard control
• Single player, gamepad assigned - gamepad control
• Player 1 keyboard and Player 2 gamepad - both keyboard and gamepad controls player 1.
• Player 1 gamepad and Player 2 keyboard - nothing is controlled.

I’ve rewritten the logic in multiple ways, both as C++ and blueprints, and whatever I do I seem to end up with this behaviour. I’ve added logging and debug texts, and everything looks correct to me. Which to me makes me suspect I’m looking for the error in the wrong place. I was hoping someone in here realise what is going on, or has some ideas to what I could do to debug this. As mentioned, I’m still new to Unreal, so a very stupid beginner mistake is not unlikely.

I’ve tried to find answers here in the forum, as there are several similar topics already. Especially this one: Cannot Control Local 2nd Player (UE5). If it is the same issue I misunderstand that topic (a delay doesn’t make a difference).

I’ll gladly post code and/or screenshots if it might help.

[KaiDrange]

I’ve replaced some C++ code with blueprints and gathered a simplified version of the logic in GameMode. I’m still having the same issue, but at least it is easier to show what I’m doing.

So, an Unreal V5.5.1 project. I’m creating a second player player in the level blueprint BeginPlay (so that I get two local players in split screen). Then, in GameMode BeginPlay I do the following:

This is my Spawn Pawn function:

…and finally, add InputContext:

I’d expect keyboard controls for first pawn, gamepad for second. But both keyboard and gamepad controls the first pawn.

However, if I switch the logic around so that the first player should get the gamepad and the second player keyboard controls, no pawn is controlled.

If I don’t create a second player, the single pawn is controlled by whichever of the two mapping contexts I add, as expected.

Any tips, suggestions or follow-up questions would be most welcome. I’m all out of ideas!

[RAT_Official (RAT)]

if you are doing it inside PlayerController
You can try

if you are doing it inside Pawn/Character
You can try

[KaiDrange]

Thank you for helping me, RAT. Much appreciated! Unfortunately, I still couldn’t get this working, so eventually I let it be and worked on some other parts of the game for a while.

However, after a fresh look today I finally found a silly bug in a place I hadn’t been looking: in my player controller I pass the various input actions to the currently possessed pawn - or so I thought. I was actually always passing the input actions to the pawn of player at index 0.

So, the logic for creating local players, spawning pawns and assigning input mapping to the correct player controller was working fine all along. It was the actual input actions that was sent to the wrong pawn.

Controls for split screen players (on both listen server and clients) now work as long as local player 0 always have keyboard controls. Assigning gamepad to player 1 and keyboard to player 2 is still not working. So my initial issues appears to be a combo of two separate bugs. But, always assigning keyboard to player 0 is fine for now. I’ll consider this solved for now.