Basically, I'm just wondering what recommendations everyone has for going about adding X-Box 360 controller support into my game; if there's any tutorials I should look into or if there's any existing libraries that would make the process go much more smoothly than trying to code it myself.

I don't have a controller yet but can borrow one when I'm ready to make this work, but I thought you had to use Xinput to access 360 controllers and that they didn't show up over the DirectInput interface?

*is reading up on some Xinput stuff*

Well, from what I've read so far, 360 controllers do indeed show up in DirectInput, but there's a big problem, at least for the type of game I'm making: On 360 controllers under DirectInput, the triggers, being analog, function as a single axis, where one trigger reports full negative when not held and the other reports full positive, resulting in a return value of 0 for the trigger axis. You could detect pushing one trigger or the other, but not both at the same time because this would ALSO result in a 0 return value.

To read each trigger independetly requires the use of the Xinput interface, and since I'm making a twin-stick game, this is pretty much a necessity.

So... yeah. Any recommendations for tutorials or libraries to utilize?

Well, the good news is that, from what I've read so far, Xinput only has like, 8 functions, 2 of which are audio related, so there's not much to learn. As is typical with Windows stuff, return values tend to be structures containing all the return data.

Heck, I might even be able to pull this off without a tutorial, just wing it with the MSDN reference materials in hand. Just have to see about borrowing that controller now.

...does anyone even own one of those?

I remember wanting to submit a patch so that Allegro 5 could support Xinput behind the scenes. Actually, if I had followed through with my plans, support would of been in there since 5.0.0! The thread I made we were still on 4.9

It sucks not having free time.

Anyway, useful docs in case someone wants to make that patch at some point: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee417014%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

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