your thoughts on my idea for this key mapping plugin/feature?

[haimbilia]

hello all,

I was thinking i will run this by you before submitting a feature request.
The problem: many computer games don’t have a joystick support and needs to be individually mapped.
another way to look at it is we don't even know which games work well with a controller and which are keyboard only.

i have an idea to make a joytokey profiler plugin that will create a joytokey profile per game (like rocketlauncher does) but it will also let you map your joystick in the game (or in bigbox) with a wizard.

so while the game is running you can have a wizard prompting you to press jump, shoot, left, right etc…
you can even have it creating a controller layout image to be used in the pause menu or maybe as overlay.

in order to create such a tool you need first to have a database with profiles of all the moves of all the keyboard based games.
so i was thinking we can use the launchbox community to contribute the profiles for this project by having the profiles shared to the launchbox games db.

maybe we can even throw that info into the games metadata.

For example: the entry for Hexen will look like this:
Move forward = UP
Move backward = Down
Run = SHIFT
Fire = CTRL

etc…

so, what do you think about this approach?
do you know of anything similar to this idea?
do you know of a way to easily find the controls of some games?
do you think it can be implemented with a plugin or maybe some deeper integration is needed?

Edited June 6, 2022 by haimbilia

[sundogak]

You might look into the Keyb2Joypad Project (Jemy Murphy) that in essence has done similar work on database for keyboard to controller.  If you are on Discord, the ExoDOS channel has a separate section for that 3rd party APP where the author posts occasionally.  DosBox Pure has incorporated the database into code base.  See this youtube link for more info.  It might be something where you could use that existing database via plugin vs having to start from scratch. 

[haimbilia]

3 hours ago, sundogak said:

You might look into the Keyb2Joypad Project (Jemy Murphy) that in essence has done similar work on database for keyboard to controller.  If you are on Discord, the ExoDOS channel has a separate section for that 3rd party APP where the author posts occasionally.  DosBox Pure has incorporated the database into code base.  See this youtube link for more info.  It might be something where you could use that existing database via plugin vs having to start from scratch. 

WOW, that's amazing, i will definitely give that a try.

i still think crowd sourcing is the best way to go with such massive projects but im glad someone already picked up the glove.

thank you very much