16-direction emulation (on WASD) thumbstick mode

[marcos-diaz]

Problem

Games without support for mixed input can be played with WASD emulation for movement, but after being used to mixed input it feels like a downgrade in control and immersion.

Steam Input solution

Steam Input layer has a feature called Analog Emulation, this solution emulates analog behaviour both in direction (adjusting the balance between WASD keys) and radius (adjusting the rate of emulated key presses).

Input Labs proposed solution

Many games (specially 3rd-person camera games) have issues with fast key rates, mostly due to broken animations, so we propose to a solution that limits the complexity of the output and increases compatibility with games:

• Instead of 360º freedom for the direction emulation, it should be limited to 16 directions.

• No radius analog emulation, but rely on game's walk and/or run keybindings assigned to thumbstick inner/outer rings.

• The 4 cardinals segments trigger the assigned keys normally (W|A|S|D).

• The 4 diagonal segments trigger the assigned keys in pairs (WA|AS|SD|DW).

• The in-between segments hold one of (W|A|S|D) + its nearest segment in a 50% intermittent pattern (with adjustable rate).

Combining the 16 directions with the 2 (or even 3) radius keybinds, this solution can bring a maximum of "48 degrees of freedom" for directional movement, a substantial improvement over classic WASD, but with better compatibility than full analog key emulation.

This should be implement in the Alpakka firmware as an additional thumbstick mode.