This week has been partly dedicated to bug fixes and minor improvements. I will not detail everything here but only major issues.
The Xbox pad affair
At Microsoft, they’re very funny and they love to make jokes to developers. At least, I think because we’ve encountered an issue meant to be funny if Microsoft wasn’t the biggest software company in the world (well, maybe it is not anymore, now that a thing like WhatsApp is worth 19 billion, I’m lost).
Anyway, the game is primarily designed for the joystick but everybody doesn’t have one, so we have decided to support game pads, especially the XBOX 360 one, which is very popular, and we have created a table to translate an arbitrary button number, like “Button 10” into “Button X”.
In order to identify that the pad is a XBOX one, we use the name of the device plugged into the computer. We had a pad at our disposal, we’ve plugged it, its name was “XBOX 360 For Windows (Controller)“, the same displayed in the windows control panel:
Everything is beautiful until now, but when a player started to play, his pad wasn’t recognized like the famous XBOX one. We ask him its control panel name then, just to be sure it’s recognized by Windows.
Ta-da:
Great job, Microsoft! I congratulate you to design a pad, who wants to be a standard, and modify its name along with your hardware versions. Please note that it is not even a name like ““XBOX 360 For Windows (Controller) rev2″, no, it’s just the completely inverted name. Go fuck yourself!
So, the bug was fixed simply by searching if the controller name contains the word “xbox”.
Mark II
Mark II keep up going, mostly with landing gear physics improvements this week. Until now, it was more like a prototype, but during these last days, the on-ground behavior greatly improved. Don’t expect hyper-realistic stuff though, there are still few take off and landing phases in the game, but the on-ground maneuvers will feel good.
