Re: Expand of WG's Target Input Devic es - related new chater

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Sangwhan Moon <smoon@opera.com> wrote:
> I agree. But the very fact that the input data is between the mentioned input
> devices (Joystick, Gamepad, and Racing wheels) are getting more and more
> aligned, I think it makes sense to group them into a single specification that
> can cover all three.

Note that as I've stated here before, the "Gamepad API" is named so
simply because it was the least-bad option. I originally referred to
it as the "Joystick API", since that's historically what I've called
game controllers (and what most APIs still use to refer to them), but
that confused people into thinking it was only targeted at joysticks
(like for flight simulators). The plan is to support basically
anything that falls into the USB HID game controller class. Gamepads,
joysticks, and wheels are all in this class. Our current planned spec
will expose buttons and axes, which should cover a large part of the
useful input from these devices. Further updates will probably expose
accelerometers and vibration and other things.

We do want to draw a line between these types of devices and things
like the Wiimote's pointer motion or the Kinect. Clearly these are
both "game controllers", but they're quite different from the existing
set of gamepads/joysticks/etc, and I imagine APIs interfacing with
them would want to be different. In addition, there are a wide variety
of gamepads made by a wide variety of manufacturers, while Wiimotes
and Kinect are currently single-vendor technologies. It feels much
more high-value right now to spec out access to that large market of
well-known devices, rather than try to invent APIs for fairly new
technology that is not as well-established.

-Ted

Received on Wednesday, 2 November 2011 16:35:36 UTC