ok yeah the bluetooth version is the only one with the hall effect sticks…
…why?
anyway the sticks on the wired version are very nice, i haven’t had any issues with them whatsoever
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the part is new as of this year and not a drop-in replacement
here’s hoping they’re universal soon
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I had ended up canceling my order for the BT version of the 8bitdo, 'cause I was gifted the competing KingKong2 controller. Really liking it although similar to meauxdal’s description of the 8bitdo, the D-pad on KK2 is super mushy compared to X1/XS clicky pads. It’s especially jarring because the thing is shaped exactly like an X1 controller.
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found a New Guy, paging @BustedAstromech
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wow, this channel rules
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It’s mind blowing how bad the analog controls are in Quake Remastered!
heh
Handling input is one of those things that gets passed down master to student rather than having broad, accepted standards. I’m still reeling from hearing Bungie guys talk about how casually they invented 6 different aim adaptations while playing Halo on weekends.
Relatedly, I’ve been trying to track down a cardinal-direction-snapping behavior the past couple months that’s been driving me CRAZY. On stick release, the character is preferencing cardinal direction facings. So it’s between the controller, the controller software (the Xbox Accessories App), the engine’s input code, the input setup, and the character controller. And it’s gotta be the character controller but I’ve been over that code a dozen times and I’m not seeing it…
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Actually using your brain to read code never works. You gotta hack the shit out of that character controller. Comment out large swaths of essential behavior and spam such vast quantities of debug logs on every control flow branch that you need to write a script to grep the resulting text file.
That’s my Senior Engineer wisdom of the day, you’re welcome
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I think all the binary search algorithms I’ve implemented since school have been hacking apart code to look for bugs
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Chiming in (I thought I did but I guess I didn’t!) on those 8Bitdo Ultimate controllers.
I haven’t tried the custom stuff for the Switch one, so it’s weird that it…doesn’t work on Switch? If what y’all are saying is right? Especially given all their other controllers with the little back paddles worked fine on Switch.
Barring that, it’s fantastic. Just a great feeling controller. Also love that it’s one of the rare 3rd party controllers that can actually wake the Switch, in a sorta unorthodox way (you gotta press the home button and then shake it).
The PC controller…I mean, I guess it has the other kind of analog stick, but I like it pretty well, but. I am having hell with it connecting to my PC a solid…I dunno, 80% of the time.
The fix I’ve found, that works most of the time, is to open Device Manager, go down to the 360 controller, disable it, then reenable it. If I do that? Works fine. Usually.
It’s an incredibly frustrating issue to an otherwise great controller. Well, that, and the rumble doesn’t work on Mister (that might be a thing on the Mister side).
Love the little docks for both of these, though.
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I discovered too late in my project that all movement was being animation driven so tuning it was basically impossible and would break if the characters were resized. This was very aggravating when I made all new character models for everyone and movement was totally busted for a while.
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Yikes, I managed to win a fight to shift our new project away from physics-driven movement and I was glad every day we did.
I should say that I link EternalDahaka’s cranky energy and rigorous testing but I don’t agree with his conclusions. When games clamp movement and aim near cardinal directions (the blue bars in his diagrams), they do it for the same reason Nintendo built notches into their analog stick – players very often want to walk straight forward and back, and want to look directly left or right. Non-expert players particularly have difficulty panning the view horizontally without unintended vertical movement and these bars are a big help. I think EternalDahaka is an expert user that doesn’t represent the bulk of the player population.
It should probably be an option to adjust. Under the older style of menu options, I’d probably leave deadzone adjustment like this out, considering it to add more complexity than the value it grants, but now the thinking is that high-complexity control remapping and accessibility options are worth more than the complexity cost, and it passes under that threshold.
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yeah i was going to qualify the link by saying The Bowtie™️ for thumbstick deadzones and thresholds definitely has it’s place, but i’m glad to entertain hobbyist gas anyway, for fun
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Snapping the movement to the 90 degrees makes sense if you’re trying to replicate WASD.
As someone with a weird fixation with trying to make Q1 work on a controller (and bad controllers at that!), I used to play around a lot with differing sensitivities on the x and y axises for aiming.
I have no idea how call of duty or whatever else people are supposed to be playing on a pad works, but these seem like they’re coming from a considered place.
Or maybe I’m just automatically hostile to anything that uses stock meme images.
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I didn’t watch the video that closely but I was mostly shocked by how bad the right stick aiming appears. It seems to accelerate way too quickly after leaving the dead zone. It makes me feel not so bad about my terrible aiming with dual analog controls. Maybe it isn’t entirely my fault! I understand that it is a hard problem to solve, full of trade offs and no perfect solutions though.
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No one should ever apologize about mixed feelings twiddling the lollipop. It’ll always be bad.
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i watched quite a few of those eternaldahaka videos and i think many of the games featured have straight-up Bad Analog Stick Implementations, for all players. he frequently specifies standard values for deadzones and highlights when games use excessive values. i don’t mind 25% deadzones, really (that’s standard), but are we really going to defend serious sam HD’s egregiously bad 41% square deadzones? that is going to feel horrible for every player, expert or no
in some of his videos (e.g. rayman legends), he isn’t particularly critical, he’s mostly just detailing how the game deals with the analog stick. he goes on to mention that they appear to have put some thought and care into the values, as there are some edge cases and exceptions that were clearly hand-crafted
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I constantly think about how analog controls degrade whenever people talk about this stuff. Like how the magic dust comes out of the N64 controller that reduces the max travel of the stick, or how the switch develops drift after a short while, and how maybe the option to give me a little more dead zone could prevent me from always walking forward. I don’t know, but at least it still feels better than aiming a gun using a bar of soap.
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as an Xbox 360 controller user (which basically requires a 35% deadzone out of the box and is getting worse with age) i completely agree. everything should let me adjust deadzones.
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Deadzone variance seems to have always been a known issue; I remember stick calibration tests in a bunch of N64 games. I assume they were mostly dropped as sticks got better protected but I’m glad system-level deadzone adjustments are become standard (Sony, as usual these days, is lagging behind).
Yeah, I watched the Rayman Legends one and thought, here’s a good example of programming stick input to a different goal, mimicking a dpad, and what you’d want to do. And his analysis is good for uncovering subtle bugs like the facing/moving disconnect he finds, and the different shape of the different tests implemented which are surely meant to be the same.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the curve wasn’t understand by the programmer; it’s funny how different this conception of the data can be from the handful or rules and exceptions that get added over years to form it. Sometimes I dream about tools that can plot the result of parametric functions right in the editor as they’re worked on.
Looking at the Halo curve, it tells an obvious story of design nudges put together in response to watching players:
- I find the aim moving even when I’m not giving input, and it’s different on each controller – ok, ignore the bottom 26% and scale the rest 0-1
- we need more sensitivity on the low end – ok, I’ll make it a growing curve
- we need to turn faster when we really want to turn around – perfect, I’ll bend the curve even more
- I find that I want to slow down just a little at the top end, it feels like everything above a certain value is the same – ok, I’ll slow down the top and now we have an s-curve
It’s a design that ignores how the input device should work in favor of designing around how have adapted to use the tool. Could users be trained to use the entire input space if the game made them? Maybe…but you’re fighting against the entire rest of their experience and need their active cooperation to retrain them.
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