Being more of a flight sim than a game, it's pretty important to me for Black Road Sky to be compatible with flight sticks, rudder pedals, HOTAS setups and so on. I'm developing primarily for keyboard and mouse, but the option to use weirdo controllers adds a lot to a game like this. I usually spend the first like 2 hours in a new space game just getting my shit set up, and I am normal so I assume that this is what the average consumer considers a 'good time'. The people demand peripherals. Man, I'm gonna be rich.
Anyway, of course input handling is something that Unity does, and of course it does it just not quite good enough for my needs, so of course I wrote a whole new input mapping system. I want players to be able to plug in an arbitrary number of controllers, with who knows how many buttons & axes, and be able to map those in-game on the fly. So that's a thing now. It was a pain in the ass and I almost caved in and spent like $2 on a Unity asset that claims to do all of those things, but instead I spent like a month fucking with it, and it is a thing now.
I'm not shitting on Unity here. If you want to make a game that is controlled by keyboard and/or mouse and/or a standard gamepad, like 99% of games, Unity pretty much does it for you. It's frustrating when I run into things like this where I end up needing to roll my own version, but it also feels good to know that I'm not making something that fits into any '99% of games' club.
The UI that I made for control mapping is garbage and will need to be redone at some point, but everything works, as far as I can tell (I'm only able to test with the peripherals that I own, of course). The first time that I was able to fly around and dock the ship with a flight stick & throttle was actually pretty thrilling. It's the difference between a space game and a Space Game. If you know, You Know.
With the new input system finally in place (this was around the end of March 2020, I think) I moved on to (drum roll begins) a bunch of miscellaneous (drum roll intensifies) gameplay stuff and like additional navigational tools and I fixed some bugs and stuff (drum kit falls over and a single piece of confetti drifts slowly down from the ceiling). Next time!
