Author Topic: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?  (Read 24199 times)

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Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
well, this is a simple question really, but i just want to clarify the whole thing.
i  just downloaded FS2 Open and tested it a little and its great. graphics and sounds are greatly improved, and with Soulstrom's Launcher its really easy for me to play user-made campaigns and the like.
the problem is that i do not own a joystick, so i'm planning on buying one.
i want one with Force Feedback ( since i never had one with that feature  :( ), but i've been reading old posts stating that FF and HATs do not work in OS X...
also i read about GamePad Companion, but i won't be able to test it until i buy the joystick...
so...
i was planning on buying either the
Logitech Joystick Force™ 3D Pro or the
Saitek Cyborg evo Force Feedback Joystick
has anyone tested this joysticks under OS X?
has anyone tested another fully supported joystick under OS X?

thanks for all your help!!!

 

Offline taylor

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Force feedback isn't supported, at the moment.  I coded up FF support for Linux a few years ago but I was never able to get it working 100% (mostly due to my old hardware I'm sure) and so I never introduced it.  OS X FF support was to be next on my list but I never had, and still don't have, any way to actually test it.

One of these days I'm finally going to have enough time to write the code, but it's pretty low priority at the moment.

 
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
well... i'm no coder at all, but if there's anything i can do to help bringing Force Feedback to FS2 on OS X, please let me know.

thanks for all your effort talyor!

 

Offline ni1s

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Force feedback isn't supported, at the moment.  I coded up FF support for Linux a few years ago but I was never able to get it working 100% (mostly due to my old hardware I'm sure) and so I never introduced it.  OS X FF support was to be next on my list but I never had, and still don't have, any way to actually test it.

One of these days I'm finally going to have enough time to write the code, but it's pretty low priority at the moment.
If it's way down on your list, maybe you could post the diff of the code you have. I would like to take a stab at it, and maybe by MS Sidewinder 2 FF won't just be an ugly block of plastic sitting on my desk...

 

Offline taylor

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
If it's way down on your list, maybe you could post the diff of the code you have. I would like to take a stab at it, and maybe by MS Sidewinder 2 FF won't just be an ugly block of plastic sitting on my desk...
You are welcome to it ... if you are willing to brave the horror.  ;)

http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/misc/joy_ff-unix.cpp.gz

I don't have a diff for FSO, since the code was written against the icculus.org version, so this is just the single source file.  It should be simple enough to get into FSO though.  I think that the only change beyond this one file as for the joystick init code to pass the joystick name that SDL was using, so that the joystick SDL was going to use and the joystick that the FF was going to use would be the same.

Keep in mind several things though (before you think that this will actually work):

  • I was trying to use a joystick that didn't have enough memory to handle all of the effects.  I had talked back and forth a bit with Johann Deneux (the dev that wrote the kernel driver for FF support) about this problem and the only solution at the time was simply to get a better joystick.  Not willing to actually get a new joystick at that particular time, I rewrote the code to have some half-assed, failed attempt at some basic resource management.  Needless to say, I pretty much failed, miserably.  The resulting code was rather insane, and probably way off from the start.

  • The code was written at a time when the FF support in the kernel was still new.  This meant that during the development of this code the FF input API changed several times and I had to keep rewriting the code.  After I stopped working on the code I didn't really keep track of the driver development any longer, so I'm not really sure if the code I've got will even compile with current kernels.

  • The code is four friggin years old!  I had only just started to code the year before, so my knowledge and experience at the time this was written was laughable at best.  I haven't looked at the code since, so I would take it with a grain of salt.  Be sure to proof it for any problems before you try to actually use it.

  • There is actually supposed to be a high-level lib for this stuff now, so the low-level code that I wrote should no longer be required.  I haven't looked into libff since hearing about it, but it might be a good thing to check into before you get too involved with my low-level code (unless you are just curious).

    EDIT: Nevermind.  Just checked on libff and it doesn't look like it ever even got off of the ground (not as far as I can tell anyway).  I do seem to remember some FF related talk on the SDL-devel ML not too long ago though, so perhaps a search of that might turn up some info that's a bit more recent.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2007, 12:16:33 pm by taylor »

 
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Still hoping for Force Feedback with OSX...

maybe this helps?

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/iauxinpcinputdeviceapilibrary.html


 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
It may.  It may help SDL to access the devices on OSX, or it may help us access them directly, bypassing SDL.  Who knows?  :)
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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
It seems to Be multiplatform and free for noncomercial use at least.

So this could serve as Common Solution

 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Holy crap, it IS cross platform.  I didn't notice, what with that being on Apple's website, and the name starting with 'i', just assumed it was an Apple only thing.  There's a very good chance we could replace our joystick handling with that then, possibly all input sources.
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"You may not sell or otherwise commercially exploit the source or things you created based on the source." -- Excerpt from FSO license, for reference

Nuclear1:  Jesus Christ zack you're a little too hamyurger for HLP right now...
iamzack:  i dont have hamynerge i just want ptatoc hips D:
redsniper:  Platonic hips?!
iamzack:  lays

 
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Yes, same to me, idn´t realize it is multi platform until i followed the link.

To bad i'm not into PC/OSX/Linux programing, no chance to imlement this myself...

 

Offline Iss Mneur

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Holy crap, it IS cross platform.  I didn't notice, what with that being on Apple's website, and the name starting with 'i', just assumed it was an Apple only thing.  There's a very good chance we could replace our joystick handling with that then, possibly all input sources.

Yes, but it is shareware.  According the vendors website it is free for non-commercial and educational uses, but I was unable to find the actual verbiage of the license. So whether we are allowed to use this as part of FSO I can't tell.  Also, because it would be released to us as a binary blob like TrackIR, it would have to be yet another external dependency.

Though, I have to say, the feature list looks nice.
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Offline chief1983

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
External dependencies shouldn't be much of an issue down the line.  And we are non-commercial so I don't really see an issue with that.
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"You may not sell or otherwise commercially exploit the source or things you created based on the source." -- Excerpt from FSO license, for reference

Nuclear1:  Jesus Christ zack you're a little too hamyurger for HLP right now...
iamzack:  i dont have hamynerge i just want ptatoc hips D:
redsniper:  Platonic hips?!
iamzack:  lays

  
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
It states however in the licensing ruls thatone needs to Show the Logo and the credits someplace reveringt to the use of the Lib.

Maybe we should simply ask this Guy about it. I believe he can Sport some Press.

Seems to be a rather Small russian Company.



 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Sporting the logo would be difficult since the existing retail content can't be modified.  We could only do that in the MediaVPs and future total conversions.  Credits we can do I think.
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"You may not sell or otherwise commercially exploit the source or things you created based on the source." -- Excerpt from FSO license, for reference

Nuclear1:  Jesus Christ zack you're a little too hamyurger for HLP right now...
iamzack:  i dont have hamynerge i just want ptatoc hips D:
redsniper:  Platonic hips?!
iamzack:  lays

 
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
Maybe it's good enough to show the Label next to the force feedback setup in launcher. Or even have a specific page in launcher that allows for changes to the Force Feedback behavior (since never any changes where made to the original game interface this should be the only place for such a thing ).

I`m quit willing to do debug testing on Windows and OSX since i run an iMAC using boot camp.

As said before i am an experienced embedded control guy an am fluent with C (as well as a little bite Objective C and C++ )

but i have no clue of the OS Based programming like Windows or OSX....

 
Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
oh and just forgot to mention i've got an Logitech Force 3D at hand...


 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
I've got a Saitek Cyborg 3d Rumble still.  I have a Force Feeback Pro but it's gameport only, and even with a 3dpvert the FF doesn't work.
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"You may not sell or otherwise commercially exploit the source or things you created based on the source." -- Excerpt from FSO license, for reference

Nuclear1:  Jesus Christ zack you're a little too hamyurger for HLP right now...
iamzack:  i dont have hamynerge i just want ptatoc hips D:
redsniper:  Platonic hips?!
iamzack:  lays

 

Offline taylor

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
It states however in the licensing ruls thatone needs to Show the Logo and the credits someplace reveringt to the use of the Lib.
I didn't see anything about having to show a logo or anything.  A credit/copyright, yes, but we already have that for several other libs we use in the credits screen in-game so that wouldn't be an issue.


But, I really don't like the idea of using iAuxINP.  I duplicates a lot of functionality that SDL already provides, but not nearly enough to replace it, and I really have to worry about negative effects due to the interaction of the two.  It would probably just be better in the long run for us for somebody to simply backport the Haptic API from SDL 1.3 to SDL 1.2 and then provide a custom lib for the people that really want FF support.  And I seem to remember a backport already existing somewhere, for WebOS I think, so it should be possible to do.  And then we would be one step closer to being ready for the next major SDL version as well.

 

Offline Echelon9

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
And then we would be one step closer to being ready for the next major SDL version as well.
taylor, do you have a list of what might be blocking us moving to the next SDL? I've never followed the SDL releases closely, so I'm not across the possible issues, and not sure what I should be working on.

 

Offline taylor

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Re: Does Force Feedback work under OS X?
taylor, do you have a list of what might be blocking us moving to the next SDL? I've never followed the SDL releases closely, so I'm not across the possible issues, and not sure what I should be working on.
About the only thing blocking us from using the next SDL is: the next SDL. ;)

Seriously, it's a moving target.  I'm using it for another project and have had to rewrite some things several times because the API likes to change.  And recently the multi-input API (multiple keyboards/mice/joysticks/etc.) was ripped out, they went back to a simple API, and are going to redesign the multi-input API from scratch before adding it back.  So now I've got to rewrite all of my input for this other project to keep up with SDL 1.3 development, temporarily losing the multi-input support that I require, and then rewrite it all again to add multi-input back.  :(

But really, when it stabilizes I will be the first (and possibly only :sigh:) person to volunteer to port FSO over to the new SDL.  I just really like it a lot better than SDL 1.2.  And it would only take a single weekend to port FSO over as well, and that's if you try to take advantage of some of the new features.  We don't use that much of SDL (no sound, no threads, no graphics) that it would be at all difficult for us to move over to the new SDL when the time comes.