Dev Log: Controller Support and its Struggles

Devlog Author: Alex

Afternoon ya'll. Its been a hot minute on my end. Today, I want to talk about what I have been working on for the past few days: controller support. As of now, we are currently using an XBox One controller to test functionality, since the playstation dualshock or dualsense controllers are not recognized by Unreal Engine without the use of plugins (and that one did not work either after testing). First, I want to talk about some of the struggles that come with traversing widgets with a controller, and the I will talk about some of the more easier implementations of controller support.

"Traversing through widgets with a controller? It sounds easy, even *insert game* does it." To that, I say it is a bit more complicated than you might think. The first issue I ran into was the actual fact of registering input to widgets, since they do not contain a player input setup. I did a bit of research, but ultimately I ended up using the On Key Down override found in blueprint to allow controller and keyboard input to widgets. Since that is a deprecate system, my goal is to start using input actions to allow for better modification for input.

When it comes to actual gameplay controller support, this was actually the easiest to work on. Unlike in widgets, since the player's input was done using the enhanced input component, so adding controller input was as simple as making sure it worked with the input action.