useful features suggestion

[narc]

I have tried many many different joystick utilities, Pinnacle comes very close to what I'm looking for. I tried a demo of it last year and again today, and I'm encouraged by the progress, but so far it still doesnt do anything better than my other software does in terms of controlling the game. Here are some suggestions:

Pinnacle has finally added shifted states for joystick axes, BUT you dont have a seperate sensitivity for each state in it. For instance if you hold down the shift button then your joystick could become more sensitive, let it go and it returns to normal. [That way you can have a fairly crude but effective aiming method for playing shooter games.]

Another feature that we are dying to see is a user editable response curve for the axes, I have seen this in only a very few high-end or specialty utilities but its really useful. For instance you could adjust for your stick to be low sensitivity all the way until you reach 90% of its range where it becomes highly sensitive because of a steep response slope. This helps aiming dramatically in shooter games, they become as playable as with an actual mouse since you can slowly aim using most of the range in the stick but also use it to turn quickly when needed by shoving the stick all the way to the edge, or otherwise tailoring it exactly how you want it to behave. Another example is that most joysticks are really stiff in the deadzone area to prevent them drifting, editing the response curve can make it seem less stiff and "poppy" when moving away from center and still give you the proper sensitivity throughout the rest of the stick range.

edited here, I was going to suggest force feedback support but I see now it's already in there

[Pinnacle [Cid]]

actualy you can have the stick increase sensetivity when you press down on the sticks button. just make the button press a hot-swap and have the sensetivity on the profile you are hot swapping to be faster or slower depending on what you want. than you just press the button again to return to the previous profile and your previous sensitivity will be back.[/code]

[Pinnacle [Cid]]

I have noticed that the only posts you have seem to be complaints of what pinnacle can't do, but if you just think about things a little more creativly, you will find pinnacle can do most things you would want it to do. just wondering, is there anything pinnacle does right for you? what is the best Joystick Mapping software out there and why,in your opinion?

[narc]

I'm going to take a look at setting up a hotswappable profile, thanks. -- Pinnacle is the best 3rd party single program solution that I know of, I'm using a combination of rbjoy7, and also saitek profiler since I have a saitek pad. The wingman profiler I used to have was really good and much better than the saitek profiler but it's a proprietary tool only for logitec pads, and I don't really like the the pad logitec is making now so I have stayed with saitek. The rbjoy utility is a really nice freeware and it can do almost everything you need, except I dont think it can emulate a mouse in an analogue way, only digital. -- You could use controlMK for emulating the mouse instead and that makes a totally free 3rd party solution, but theres no real documentation for using those programs and its just the basics as far as features go. so for the novice they wouldnt be able to program the controller using those, and for an advanced user like me they will still want more features such as an editable response curve!

Do you know of any other 3rd party utilities that compare to pinnacle? I may have overlooked some.

[Pinnacle [Rob]]

As you apparently noticed, Pinnacle has been steadily improving since it's initial release and MANY (countless) new features have been added since then... and actually the ones that are relavent to your suggestions have been available for quite a while now (although "standard-shift" joystick commands was one thing recently added)

Like cid67 mentioned, you can do just about anything with a "configuration HOT-SWAP" command, because it allows you to load a new configuration on-the-fly while you are playing your game. So in that sense, even before the recently added "standard-shift" joystick commands, you would have been able to use a "hot-swap shift" to accomplish this in the past.

There are different ways to use the hot-swap... the obvious way is to "toggle" between 2 configs or "daisy chain" between 3 or more configs... but here is a way to use 2 configs in a way that is not a toggle and acts more like a regular SHIFT BUTTON but combining 2 hot-swap in the same command...
http://www.pinnaclegameprofiler.com/...opic.php?t=291

So you see, the hot-swap step is very useful and can allow you to do just about anything in Pinnacle... including an infinite number of shift buttons.


Now as you pointed out, using the standard SHIFT BUTTON can adjust the joystick's assignments and mappings, but does not effect the sensitivity. If you want to adjust the sensitivity on-the-fly, then there are 2 ways you can do that... one would be to use a HOT-SWAP and swap in a config with lower/higher sensivity on the joysticks... or the other way is to use "quick setting ADJUST" steps which allow you to modify the vertical, horizontal, or both joystick sensitivity on-the-fly. If you use "quick setting RESTORE" then it will return to whatever sensitivity it was at when you first loaded the configuration (before any on-the-fly adjustments were made).

You can even use those steps in a command that is assigned to TILTED ABOVE or TILTED BELOW on the joystick... thus you can create very significant "jumps" of sensitivity on your joystick without involving any buttons to adjust it (since it would adjust it's own sensitivity via tilted above/below).


... Which brings me to the next subject about "editable response curve for the axes". Although I am not entirely sure what you picture in your mind when you think of this, but there is a feature in Pinnacle now called "Joystick Acceleration" which is used to create the sort of effect you mention. The effect where the small joystick movements near the center are very gradual scale (enabling you to aim much easier) yet if you push the joystick to the outer edge then the acceleration will rapidly increase the movement speed, allowing you to turn quickly and run away if you need (or even just to make running through "corridors" easier as you turn left/right). So again, I'm not sure what the last version of Pinnacle you tried was, but if you took a look at new features and didn't yet try playing a game again with the new version... I think you'll find that the mouse sensitivity for playing FPS is very good now and plays BETTER than some of the FPS games I have on my PS2 console (where of course the controls are built-in). In fact when I was working on the Joystick Acceleration, I worked with my PC controller in one hand and my PS2 controller in the other... and I tested the way FPS aiming/turning works on a console like PS2 (in various games) so I think Pinnacle now allows you to use your gamepad to play FPS in a way very much like if it were on a console (where of course the mouse is not usually available).

And although the Joystick Acceleration feature (found in PREFERENCES) is not customizable, it does fall into complex scheme that is greatly effected by the Joystick Sensitivity. So I think somewhere between 1%-100% you are bound to find something that works much like you were looking. In fact the values near 1% are so slow they are probably useless in just about any game... likewise the speeds near 100% are so blazingly fast, I don't think you could use them practically either. But the scale in between is sloped so that from 20%-80% the values are all very useful depending on what game you are playing and what you want to do... plus for demonstration purposes, Pinnacle can move the mouse incredibly fast, incredibly slow, or anywhere in between.

Joystick Acceleration should also help with the "popping" out of a deadzone that you mention because with Joystick Acceleration enabled, the smallest value on the scale is always 1 pixel movement (except on 95% sensitivity and above where it starts at 2 pixel movement). So in a sense, every joystick has many small/slow speed values near the center of the joystick... and adjusting the Joystick Sensitivity will more or less only increase the maximum speed achievable... but of course when you do that it means that more "notches" on the scale are taken up by gradually higher speeds, thus there are less "notches" remaining near the center for the slower speeds. It's a pretty complex system and I would be surprised to find any profiler that could do it better (in my opinion anyway).

Also another step you may find interesting is the "mouse goto COORDINATES" which can be used to move the mouse to a particular place on the screen (in absolute or relative coordinates). So for instance you could use that to create a "quick 180 turn" command in an FPS game.

And you can add force feedback steps directly into your command, or hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard when assigning commands and you'll see and alternative popup menu appears for "quick force feedback" assignments.

Although there are some small freeware apps out there that can send keys and move the mouse, I don't think there is anything that comes even close to resembling Pinnacle and what it can do. In fact my original inspiration for creating Pinnacle was the fact that my Logitech profiler couldn't do half the things I wanted it to do... and I think the Logitech profiler is by far the second best profiler behind Pinnacle (although Logitech profiler is proprietary and only works with the controller you bought it for). Another point I'd like to make is that the proprietary profilers like Logitech and Saitek profiler that come on the disc when you bought your gamepad... those programmers are in a unique position because they wrote the hardware driver for the gamepad and they also wrote the software profiler... thus they can incorporate the 2 and have the software profiler adjust the way the driver behaves. That allows them to do a few things that Pinnacle couldn't because Pinnacle is not written for 1 gamepad, it is compatible with any gamepad or joystick... and Pinnacle does not have any access to the driver. Yet Pinnacle makes up for that with a million other features that those profilers don't have... not because they can't have them, just because they don't (not to say all Pinnacle's extra/advanced features were easy to add cause they were not, I just mean there is theoretically nothing to prevent those other profilers for having them too). Since the very first line of code was written for Pinnacle, the goal has been to provide gamepad support to any game and to make it feel like REAL gamepad support, not something you are stuch "having to use". I think that goal has been accomplished and from here on out the goal is to allow Pinnacle to do absolutely anything you could possibly want your gamepad to do. Oh yea, and the support here is pretty good too!

[SantiN90]

I am shocked!
I haven't realised of all the features that Pinnacle has
Since many games come with support for gamepads I didn't put to use Pinnacle to much...
I think it's quite a HUGE software

[narc]

Hi, Im using the current beta version of pinnacle with max payne 2, and have tried out the things you recommended with it -- the dynamic setting adjustment works great and I have set a momentary delay button that remaps sensitivity, the hotswappable configs worked too but had about a 0.5 second (very noticable) pause while switching over and causing all input to stop during that time, I dont know if thats normal?

To better explain what I mean about editable response curve -- only a very few controllers allow for the adjustment of a response curve such as on the thrustmaster cougar [heres an image of that from a toms hardware review]


Typically only flight sim games provide this adjustment in software, there are other specialised 3rd party utilities that allow you to modify it in some ways, or perhaps they fake it, such as in joystick-to-mouse.

http://www.my-t-touch.com/joy2mse/jtm250.htm

Acceleration?
We went to the wall with this feature - what is called "acceleration" truly does not fit the dictionary definition, rather it creates a response curve for velocities calculated as the joystick moves off center. This "modified" approach was required to give the joystick the right "feel". The TurboCharged cursor acceleration is true acceleration, i.e. change of velocity over time - but we added tweaks to that, too!

Here are a couple technical articles on response curves. I had asked the author of RBJoy some time ago about this but I dont think he is updating the program any more. He said he didn't know how to implement it properly because of the issue you mentioned about no access to the driver, but he mentioned the msdn article below may have the solution for that. Your joystick acceleration in pinnacle works well but it's not too flexible, for instance I would want to edit the spline of a response curve almost totally flat so that movement on the stick barely registers, until it reaches a very exaggerated incline near the end of the full range, and at other times I would want a more linear response curve. I think that would be the holy grail for input devices, to be able to have a customised response curve that suits each user for each application, perhaps even to switch between them without latency at the push of a button!

game algorithms article
http://www.tar.hu/gamealgorithms/ch05lev1sec3.html

msdn article
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/de...ingcpoints.asp

[Pinnacle [Rob]]

the hotswappable configs worked too but had about a 0.5 second (very noticable) pause while switching over and causing all input to stop during that time, I dont know if thats normal?

Although there is a known delay for a hot-swap (it has to reload a lot of stuff), it should not really be noticible... I think it was more like 0.15 second delay when I last clocked it. I think it's possible that maybe Max Payne 2 is "eating" more CPU cycles and so possibly it would be slower for certain games. I'll try to reinstall MaxPayne2 and see if I have the same long delay.

And now I see what you are referring to about the response curve. There are a couple things to note there... first and foremost, Pinnacle cannot change the way other programs read from the controller (as it could only if it had access to the driver)... so even if the response curve were customizable within Pinnacle, it would really only effect the mouse emulation in Pinnacle and nothing else (it wouldn't translate to your built-in support of games that can already read the joystick without Pinnacle).

So I'm not sure if that changes your interest in the ability at all, but if not I still think this would be very difficult to implement something like this. As of now there is a rather complex system that creates a hard-coded "response curve" that should be suitable in most cases; however, trying to go back and make that customizable would be very difficult. Also of course it would be important to not change the experience of existing users when adding or modifying features... which further complicates the process of adding customization here. So if you are still interested in the idea (with the above explaination about in-game support in mind), then I will look into the possibilty of making some sort of customizable response curve... but I will have to see what in all is involved and it is likely that it would not be added until a little further down the road either way.

As for those MS links that you posted from the RBJoy author, I do not really think those are going to be any real help... in fact if those did work then it would enable Pinnacle to have an impact on other games reading from the gamepad (as explained was NOT possible above). To expand on that I should say there are a few DirectInput methods provided that can in theory modify the way other games read from the controller... but unfortunately they rarely work (only about 10%-20% of the games I tested responded properly). And from the looks of those pages, it seems like these probably fall into the same sort of catagory of functions... but I will take a further look to see if by any chance they are more useful than I am thinking right now.


Now all that said, I have another idea for you that may work just as well as if you could edit the response curve (for your purposes anyway). You mentioned you want the mouse movements to be very slow toward the inside and then rapidly increase toward the outside (like Joystick Acceleration but to a greater difference between slow and fast speeds). So my idea is for you to set your Joystick Sensitivity to a low level (providing the slow mouse movements on the inside). Now if you assigned the corresponding "turn" keyboard keys to the outer edge of the joystick... such as left/right/up/down arrow keys... I wonder if that would be the fast enough turn you are looking for? In that case you would basically be using the mouse emulation on the inner areas of the joystick... and then when you push to the outside, the keyboard keys kick in and increase the speed to the digital turn speed (although techically the mouse movements would cause it to be a little faster since they would still be ON at the outside of the joystick just would be very slow yet depending on your sensitivity settings. I have not tested to see how this would "feel" in the game, but I don't see why it wouldn't work... unless the arrow keys don't turn fast enough for your liking in which case the only way to turn faster would be with the mouse sensitivity increase.

And similiar to that idea is the one I briefly mentioned before... you could create a command to increase/decrease the sensitivity... and then assign that command to the TILTED ABOVE setting on the Joystick Command... and thus it would automatically increase the sensitivity over 85% tilt (for example). So you could set to say 45% Joystick Sensitivity from the start and then assign a command like this to TILTED ABOVE...

Adjust Sensitivity command
Pressed Event
quick setting ADJUST | JoySensitivity=75%
Released Event
quick setting RESTORE


I actually think that may work better than the idea for combining the mouse with the arrow keys, so please give this sort of idea a shot and I can further explain what I mean if you aren't sure how to set it up. Unlike the keyboard+mouse idea explained above, I have done this sort of tilted above command before and it works very well... so I think if you set this up and play with the sensitivity a bit then I think you'll probably find something that works just as you like. You can even right-click on the TITLED BELOW and turn it into a 2nd TILTED ABOVE, which would give you even more abilitiy to "warp" the sensitivity.

[narc]

That info on the MS site raised a question for him if it really is possible or not, but he never experimented with it to see. I wonder would it be possible to just make a generic set of drivers to go along with pinnacle, it would give you the freedom to fix these sorts of things in a more proper and direct way. In any case Im all for seeing a fully editable analog response, even if its just for the mouse. A spline editor for it would be ideal.

Thats a great idea you had there, the tilted above/below modifying the sensitivity works suprisingly well, my only complaint with that is it eats up 5 whole percent of my range on either side of the spectrum it would be closer to what I'm after to have it more like 1% or even a fractional percent of the range at either end, I would want it to use the least possible amount of range at the edge. After trying this I got an idea to make a banded "axis command" with each zone having a sensitivity modifier but pinnacle forces your zone sizes to be somewhat large. This might be a good way to fake up a response curve if the zone sizes could be made smaller.

[Pinnacle [Rob]]

Yea, that would have been the next suggestion to use the Axis Commands as sub-commands of the Joystick Command (new in v4.0). But as for the tilt percentages... the reason that it jumps in sets of 5% is because the differences even in 5% intervals is very hard to notice. I really don't think it would feel much different at all to go from 5% to 1%. One thing that may be deceiving is that there is a sort of "reverse deadzone" on the outside of most joysticks too. That is I mean with some controllers you will hit the maximum value (either 0 or 65535) before you actually hit the physical limit of the joystick... meaning that the last bit of physical tilt doesn't actually register to the PC. The Xbox360 controller is pretty good in that this isn't really an issue, but I have a Saitek controller that hits the maximum response values long before it reaches the maximum physical boundry.

So I'm not sure if this is happening on your controller, but if you go to PREFERENCES > DEVICE SETTINGS > ADVANCED, then click the 'show 'wizard' link at the top... go through the wizard again, but when you get to the green dot tester pages, you'll notice that it displays HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL positions live on that tester... so you can move you joystick around to view the EXACT values that your gamepad is providing to the computer and see if that is happening on your controller. If so then that can be deceptive, but there is nothing that can be done about that from a software angle (not even a driver could fix that I don't think).