Gamepad

[Raymond Camden]

I read that the Gamepad API was just recently added to Chromium, but I'm still not seeing proper support for it. I see a flag, but any code that checks for detection, or button events, is never firing. Can someone please confirm/deny this really works?

[Scott Graham]

It should work on all platforms.

There's currently no events (connected/disconnected) as listed in the
spec. However, you can read navigator.webkitGamepads[] to get data.
Elements of that array will be undefined until a gamepad is connected
and interacted with.

Note that you need to press a face button on the gamepad before data
will be available. This is due to fingerprinting concerns.

scott

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[Raymond Camden]

Hmm - I can't get anything to show up in navgiator.webkitGamepads[].

This is what I'm using now - and I'm assuming the events won't work at
all. (Any reason why?)

http://www.raymondcamden.com/demos/2012/may/31/test3.html

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===========================================================================
Raymond Camden, Adobe Developer Evangelist

Email : raymon...@gmail.com
Blog : www.raymondcamden.com
Twitter: cfjedimaster

[Scott Graham]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Raymond Camden
<raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm - I can't get anything to show up in navgiator.webkitGamepads[].

You could perhaps try http://jsbin.com/acuhig to confirm that it's not
a hardware/driver problem.

> This is what I'm using now - and I'm assuming the events won't work at
> all. (Any reason why?)

They're not implemented yet.

[Raymond Camden]

Wow - that did work. So what the heck... digging...

[Raymond Camden]

Ok - what I don't get is this. Assuming my code is 100% wrong. In
console in your link, I can console.dir(navigator.webkitGamepads) and
I see my gamepad. In my demo, I don't. Shouldn't it show in the DOM
(after hitting a few buttons, moving things, etc) on both?

[Raymond Camden]

Wow... so when I slowly merge in your code - I see a gamepad. It's
like the act of asking for webkitGamepads actually gets the gamepad.

Is that... is that how it is meant to be?

[Scott Graham]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow... so when I slowly merge in your code - I see a gamepad. It's
> like the act of asking for webkitGamepads actually gets the gamepad.
>
> Is that... is that how it is meant to be?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Reading webkitGamepads will get you the current values for the
gamepads connected to the system.

[Raymond Camden]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Scott Graham <sco...@chromium.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wow... so when I slowly merge in your code - I see a gamepad. It's
>> like the act of asking for webkitGamepads actually gets the gamepad.
>>
>> Is that... is that how it is meant to be?

What I meant is this. Imagine an HTML page with no content (ok,
minimal content). I'd imagine that if I go to console and do

console.dir(navigator.webkitGamepads);

I'd see my gamepad. Right? But if you go to my demo and try that it
doesn't work. I mean you get an array of 4 empty items. But you don't
get my gamepad. When you hit my demo - disregarding the Firefox event
based code which won't work in Chrome - you won't see your gamepad.
Right?

Then you take your code - which loops over the arrays and just gets
basic data out of it. That _does_ work.

That is what doesn't make sense to me.

>
> I'm not sure what you're asking.
>
> Reading webkitGamepads will get you the current values for the
> gamepads connected to the system.
>
>>
>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Ok - what I don't get is this. Assuming my code is 100% wrong. In
>>> console in your link, I can console.dir(navigator.webkitGamepads) and
>>> I see my gamepad. In my demo, I don't. Shouldn't it show in the DOM
>>> (after hitting a few buttons, moving things, etc) on both?
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow - that did work. So what the heck... digging...
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Scott Graham <sco...@chromium.org> wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Raymond Camden
>>>>> <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Hmm - I can't get anything to show up in navgiator.webkitGamepads[].

[Scott Graham]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Scott Graham <sco...@chromium.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Wow... so when I slowly merge in your code - I see a gamepad. It's
>>> like the act of asking for webkitGamepads actually gets the gamepad.
>>>
>>> Is that... is that how it is meant to be?
>
> What I meant is this. Imagine an HTML page with no content (ok,
> minimal content). I'd imagine that if I go to console and do
>
> console.dir(navigator.webkitGamepads);
>
> I'd see my gamepad. Right? But if you go to my demo and try that it
> doesn't work. I mean you get an array of 4 empty items. But you don't
> get my gamepad. When you hit my demo - disregarding the Firefox event
> based code which won't work in Chrome - you won't see your gamepad.
> Right?
>
> Then you take your code - which loops over the arrays and just gets
> basic data out of it. That _does_ work.
>
> That is what doesn't make sense to me.

I'm not able to reproduce this. For example, if I go to about:blank,
press a button and then enter 'navigator.webkitGamepads' at the
console, I get one element in the array containing valid data.

I've logged a bug here, let's continue the investigation there:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=130633

Thanks.

[Raymond Camden]

Sounds fine... by the way - thank you very much. I was able to get my super important critical paddle game demo working. ;) I appreciate it. (I didn't update the remote url I published earlier - still local to my machine.)

[Raymond Camden]

Just thought I'd update this thread. Today the Chromium Blog announced support for the Gamepad API ( http://blog.chromium.org/2012/07/introducing-getusermedia-and-javascript.html ), however, I am still not seeing support for events ( https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gamepad/raw-file/default/gamepad.html ) which is in the spec. You can certainly use the gamepad (via a requestAnimationFrame), but is there any reason why the event API isn't there?

[Scott Graham]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just thought I'd update this thread. Today the Chromium Blog announced support for the Gamepad API ( http://blog.chromium.org/2012/07/introducing-getusermedia-and-javascript.html ), however, I am still not seeing support for events ( https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gamepad/raw-file/default/gamepad.html ) which is in the spec. You can certainly use the gamepad (via a requestAnimationFrame), but is there any reason why the event API isn't there?

No reason, it just hasn't been implemented yet.

 

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:30:01 PM UTC-5, Raymond Camden wrote:

I read that the Gamepad API was just recently added to Chromium, but I'm still not seeing proper support for it. I see a flag, but any code that checks for detection, or button events, is never firing. Can someone please confirm/deny this really works?

--

[Scott Graham]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Raymond Camden <raymon...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ah cool. So the expectation is that it _will_ be at some point
probably, right?

Yes.

 

I.e., there isn't some philosophical reason against
that part of the spec.

Not at all.

[Raymond Camden]

Thanks Scott. Didn't expect a response so quickly. :) In case you are
curious, my incredibly exciting/I'm going to retire soon demo:

http://raymondcamden.com/demos/2012/jul/31/test3.html