Off Topic Productions

For personal and technical reasons, I'd like to know if there's a way to get DE to recognize and use an Xbox360 controller. I have the X360CE emulator (which is great BTW) but I'd like to hear and learn if anyone else has done this. Also, I'm considering getting the keyboard plugin for my controller anyway, so if necessary not as many functions may have to be mapped to a dozen buttons.

You can use something like Pinnacle Game Profiler to map the keys.

However you have yoyake into accountthat Deus Ex is designed as a PC game and will never be suited to be played witn a controller. Think about the UI.

Oh, I don't know. They did a version of Deus Ex for the playstation 2.

Inventory management will be a pain if you don't keep a mouse or a trackball handy though...then it'll be slightly less of a pain.

If you're not used to writing mappings yourself, keep in mind that there's certain interface conventions your body is used to from using the controller with consoles. Where to put the jump, crouch and shoot is the most important stuff in that regard. You should probably try to copy Halo's layout as much as possible, or maybe call of duty's.

The trickiest part will be the analog sticks; you could easily do them as digital sticks, but that would feel pretty crappy I think...so what you need to do is find some way to program the sticks to react like fingers on a keyboard. All the way to the right with the left stick should bottom out the d-key, whereas halfway should click the d-key about half the time, sortof spamming it at regular intervals, giving you a somewhat smooth movement at half speed.

At least, that's the best idea I can come up with.

You could probably do some really cool things with it if you went into more advanced territory: consider if bottoming out the movement stick would also activate the power conservation augmentation and the movement speed one! It would make JC much more agile.

Or, use the joystick support in the Unreal engine?
http://www.planetdeusex.com/dx1/help/te ... /#joystick

I might be wrong, but those commands look digital?

You can't really play a shooter with digital aiming sticks...it's going to be very tricky, at least.

If by that you mean that there is only 1 and 0 and nothing in between (as in: you either move, or do not move, always at the same speed), it does certainly look that way but I haven't tried (I haven't used a joystick since the Amiga days). Not worse than using some third party keymapping software though (unless that supports your notion of fast tapping keys).

Maybe there is software available to emulate a mouse with one of the sticks? That would probably be the best of both worlds. You can already map 'use' and 'fire' to joystick buttons, but the tricky part is the mouselook I think.

yeah, tricky part is definitely the mouselook.

Ideally you could mod up the movement pattern to support analog input within the game itself; that is, change those speed variables for the joystick based on how far the analog hats are tilted.

If Deus Ex uses direct x input, it would actually be really simple to fetch those variables when you use the program quoted in this thread, and simply update the speed variable.

Big question is if those variables are actually constants, or if they're read into the game as variables and can be changed on the fly. I suspect the latter since remapping the controls seems like something you'd want to do without reloading ini files.

In which case, those unreal joystick controls could be hacked to provide a very nice console interface. Simply do a script, get it to run at every loop of the main game loop, fetch the analog stick tilt value from direct input, update the strafe and turnspeeds.

Everything else can run via mapping the controller directly to the joystick controls.

You'll need a programmer and deus ex modder to build such a mod to the game though.

Xpadder?


It can emulate keyboard AND mouse, and its free.

http://xpadder.com/

I think there is ready profiles for most of the controllers ever made.
(even my jurassic impact-controller)

What comes to PS2 version, the controls were changed so much that we really cannot compare the two games.
For example, on PS2 you had to hold L1 or R1 to actually aim without moving your viewpoint (not possible on PC).

I think unreal had an autoaim feature which might have persisted in deus ex

I use Xpadder for Deus Ex whenever I wanna whip out the 360 controller. But honestly this is one of those games where a controller isn't quite adequate for the task Deus Ex has to offer in my opinion.

For this reason I tend to stick with the Belkin N52, which is now owned by Razer I believe with a newer slick keypad.

shadowblade34 wrote:You can use something like Pinnacle Game Profiler to map the keys.

However you have yoyake into accountthat Deus Ex is designed as a PC game and will never be suited to be played witn a controller. Think about the UI.

(Late reply)

I use Pinnacle Game Profiler and it works quite well. I have wrist problems and try to avoid keyboards and mice when I can, so I prefer to play PC games with controllers. The 360 controller is not as good for aiming as a mouse of course, but it's still pretty good.