Re: Gamepad scope

On 2011/10/06, at 11:27 AM, Ted Mielczarek wrote:

> I just thought I'd put this out there, since I'm not sure we wrote
> this down anywhere. After hacking on a prototype implementation of
> gamepad support in Gecko, playing with multiple controllers and
> reading copious documentation on the internet, I have a pretty good
> idea of what I'd like the scope of the Gamepad API spec to be. There
> are obviously lots of interesting things out there, but in the
> interest of maintaining a finite scope we'll have to draw a line
> somewhere. Therefore, I'd propose the following:
> 
> Things we will definitely spec:
> * Support for multiple axes and buttons per controller
> ** Including pressure-sensitive buttons/triggers
> * Support for alternate controllers like driving wheels
> 
> Things we should spec, but possibly not in the first revision:
> * Accelerometer support (really neat, but need to get a feel for how
> consistent it is across devices)

The geolocation group has something similar to this here:

http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html#deviceorientation

Could be used as a starting point, but also having two specs doing very similar things
will either result in duplicate work and/or fragmentation. Not sure if we want to go down
that road.

> * Rumble/vibration support

Would be nice to have in a separate scope of gamepad, since force feedback can exist
in a non-gamepad context. (i.e. force feedback + touch events for Bejeweled like games,
or force feedback + orientation for driving games comes to mind)

The catch is probably the fact that it's too minimal to cover in a separate spec (since, most
of the implementations I've seen have only a handful of methods in the API) - although it
seems like the Device API WG does have a separate Vibration API in their charter.

Doesn't look like a lot of effort has been put into this particular subspec, maybe it's better to
sync up early and make sure we don't duplicate work.

> Things that we will definitely not spec:
> * Wiimote pointer motion
> * Camera sensors (including Kinect)

I'll have to say that the elephant is in the room, when it comes to this and vibration.

Probably worth taking a separate discussion about the elephant.

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Sangwhan Moon <smoon@opera.com>, Opera Software ASA
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Received on Thursday, 6 October 2011 04:52:08 UTC