Game Controller Programming...

Greetings everyone...

I am working on a project (design phase right now) that will be a windows application where I have to interface with 2 game controllers that are connected by USB (1 controller per USB connection). The last time I did game controller programming, I was using a Commodore 64!

I'm considering developing this in MFC/C++ or C#. Is there some standard library I should be looking at? Or some tutorial that describes how to do this? Can someone give me a kick in the right direction? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

It probably depends on what game controllers you want to support. If you want to only use a Xbox 360 controller, I know for sure there is stuff available to do that. Otherwise for more generic game pad controllers, you might be able to do that using DirectX's DirectInput.

Well, as I said... we're in design stage right now.

I'd probably like to make it as generic as possible, but the reality is that it's a single system (very specific situation) and knowing this client (I've done lots of work for them), they'll tell me to get the controller and bill them, so realistically, I can use anything I want...

But thanks for the hint on directinput, I'll have to check it out and see if it makes sense for me.

Thanks.

Microsoft's XNA Framwork provides handy classes for getting 360 controller input. The framework itself is geared more towards making games, but can be used with WinForms and is for use with C#. I'm not sure whether the controller classes/packages are strictly part of the XNA Framework, or whether it's a .net thing.