[General Battuta]

Racing games get full press showings on the stage at E3, they're not a dead genre.

[Det. Bullock]

Racing games get full press showings on the stage at E3, they're not a dead genre.

Even those that don't do have wheel support though, frigging Strike Suit Zero had some basic joystick support but a triple A game studio couldn't spare an intern to see if at least their sponsored devices worked?

Also, xbone gamepads nowadays often cost more than a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro which is ****ing ridiculous, but people who have sticks are the ones that spend lot of money now?

PS: also Dinput seem to be buggy in general with the game, Dual Shock 4 users reported problems with some of the buttons that disappear when using Steam's Xinput emulation.

[General Battuta]

I'm not surprised the game has peripheral issues, they apparently spent nearly a year of development getting the VR **** working (thus why it spent so long in release date limbo). You gotta triage out features that aren't as critical for launch.

Aren't xbone controllers like $50? That's not a lot. M+KB works great in FreeSpace and Elite, it's how I've always flown.

[Phantom Hoover]

Again, Bandai deserve absolutely no sympathy or defence for not supporting hardware that they sponsored, or said that they’d officially support. If they don’t have the decency to tell HOTAS users that they’re not supported then they deserve to be review-bombed. You have a good point generally but you’re a fool to throw out solidarity with other consumers over it.

[General Battuta]

Like I said, having officially supported/sponsored peripherals was a mistake, and they shouldn't have done it. Focus on making a good gamepad game, it's what your mass audience is going to use.

[FrikgFeek]

Assault Horizon had no issue with joysticks. Like any reasonable PC port any dinput device would work just fine if you rebind the buttons. Nobody's asking for a gamepad-like preset experience with joysticks but having dinput support and key rebinding is the bare minimum.
It's not like your software will see a dinput gamepad any differently from a dinput joystick, they both look basically the same in the game's eyes. If you're not supporting dinput you're not supporting a lot of PC gamepad setups including any playstation controller. If you do support dinput and allow for key rebinding then any joystick can be made to work just fine.
For example I can boot up Nier: Automata right now, rebind the keys, and play it with my racing wheel. This obviously doesn't mean that a 3rd person action RPG has racing wheel support. The game doesn't really know or care what kind of device you're using, and that's true for pretty much any game that supports dinput.

[The E]

DirectInput is dead, though. XInput is the current API, and that only supports the XBox Controller's feature set. For a lot of games, especially older ones or those built on custom engine, supporting both apis or just DInput is not a big deal.

The thing is, AC7 is built on Unreal 4. Unreal 4 does not natively support DInput. Draw your own conclusions from that.

[FrikgFeek]

Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.

[Det. Bullock]

Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.

At the moment 360ce doesn't seem to work either at least for me.

[The E]

Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.

Yes, it's really easy .... ironically, much easier for RB to do than it is for Project Aces, who have to have the budget to do extensive porting work (which it seems they didn't do or have). It seems to me that, where Project Wingman is built on PC first and foremost, AC7 was built on console first (what a shock), with the PC port being a thing PA kinda got for free just by using UE4.
I'm guessing, and I stress that this is just a guess, PA believed that the branded HOTAS they sold would work well because that's basically the same HOTAS they sold for ACAH (aka whatever the current version of the Thrustmaster HOTAS X is) and because they had coded support for it into the console versions -- and it seems that there are people out there for whom that set actually works on PC.

The PC is always a nightmare in terms of support. The possible configuration space is insane, users do all sorts of weird ****, Microsoft can **** up out of the blue in some obscure way, hardware manufacturers make all sorts of stupid decisions.

[FrikgFeek]

Sure, perfect PC support with optimal performance and no bugs on any hardware is impossible and even getting close is nightmarishly difficult. But the bare minimums really aren't that hard and yet ports manage to **** it up(and require fixing by 3rd party modders) all the time.
The bare minimums being:

Arbitrary resolution support
Arbitrary framerate support, with some leniency after 120-144, if your engine breaks past this it's probably fine
Arbitrary control input support(this includes full control rebinding)

If you can't even hit those three then you should really reconsider what you're doing and invest the bare minimum into your PC port so it's not DOA. Most of the time modders can fix these in a few hours of work, professionals should be able to do it in a week(because they have higher standards to hit). Mouse driven menus, detailed graphics options, benchmarking tools, etc. are all nice but nowhere near as necessary as the "bare minimums".

And I don't think PA is quite so stupid that they just "missed" this accidentally. This had to be a "known shippable", there's no way your testers could possibly miss officially "supported" hardware not working or the 2nd most popular PC gamepad on steam being broken(the DS4).

[The E]

The bare minimums being:

Arbitrary resolution support
Arbitrary framerate support, with some leniency after 120-144, if your engine breaks past this it's probably fine
Arbitrary control input support(this includes full control rebinding)

Nah.

[FrikgFeek]

Nah.

Well I guess you got me there, PC gamers should just lower their standards because the things PC ports(even "lazy" ones) have been doing for the past few decades are now suddenly too hard.

[The E]

Nah.

Well I guess you got me there, PC gamers should just lower their standards because the things PC ports(even "lazy" ones) have been doing for the past few decades are now suddenly too hard.

Let's take this in order:
- Arbitrary resolution support: Nope. You can cover the vast majority of the market by just offering 1080p, 1440p and 4k.
- Arbitrary framerate support: Nope. 60 hz will, again, cover most of the market. If you cover 120 hz as well, you have all but the most high-spec systems covered.
- Arbitrary control input: Nope. Mouse, Keyboard, Xbox pad. Covers most of the market; Key rebinding being mostly optional in cases where you're designing your game around the pad.

These things aren't necessary by any means. They're good to have, sure, but their absence does not make a port bad, at least IMHO. A good game can survive without them (see: Dark Souls).

[General Battuta]

The Assault Horizon port came out something like a year after the console version, right?

[FrikgFeek]

The Dark Souls PC port is ****ing awful and basically unplayable without Durante's DSFix. It's locked to 30 FPS ffs. Being able to cover the "majority of the market" is nice and all but going beyond that is not exactly difficult.
Letting users set whatever resolution their PC claims to support is simple, you have to go out of your way to specifically restrict resolutions to the three sets that are the most common.

Having an unlocked framerate option is also not hard, especially if you're working with an engine that doesn't randomly break past a certain framerate(like UE4 or almost any modern engine).

Having physics or even game speed reliant on framerate is just bad practice, not only because you can't support HFR monitors but anyone with slightly weaker hardware will have physics issues when their framerate starts dropping.
As for arbitrary control input I'll just leave this here


Only 64% of PC gamepad users(on Steam) are using Xbox pads, if you think leaving 36% of your market is "good enough" then I can't disagree harder. The percentage of PC Nvidia GPU users is actually higher than PC xbox pad users yet I'm pretty sure you wouldn't argue that making your game only run on Nvidia GPUs(not even booting up on AMD) is "fine" because it covers the majority of the market.

[FrikgFeek]

Also for AC7 specifically I wouldn't call the reception on steam "review bombing". Steam only offers 2 options for reviews "recommend" and "do not recommend" or "positive and negative" if you want to simplify them. If you buy a PC game only to find out that the developers have decided to throw you under the bus because your setup isn't mainstream enough then it's entirely fine to push that "do not recommend" button.
You have to own the game to leave a review so review bombing by people who refuse to buy the game because of some feature(like including Denuvo or not supporting X) is impossible on steam, you'll usually find these kinds of bombs on metacritic.

[The E]

The Dark Souls PC port is ****ing awful and basically unplayable without Durante's DSFix. It's locked to 30 FPS ffs. Being able to cover the "majority of the market" is nice and all but going beyond that is not exactly difficult.

Not difficult, perhaps (I wouldn't be too sure about that), but whether or not the expense of investing engineering time into adding these features can be justified is based on factors that have nothing to do with the engineering difficulty.

Letting users set whatever resolution their PC claims to support is simple, you have to go out of your way to specifically restrict resolutions to the three sets that are the most common.

Having an unlocked framerate option is also not hard, especially if you're working with an engine that doesn't randomly break past a certain framerate(like UE4 or almost any modern engine).

Both of those include testing and design overhead (does the UI work at arbitrary resolutions? Does the entire dev team understand which timers to use and which ones to stay away from?). These things aren't hard ... except when your target is 1080p @ 30fps on a console, and you know that you're going to hard lock the game from going beyond that limit on the primary platform. Under those circumstances, things may slip through.

Having physics or even game speed reliant on framerate is just bad practice, not only because you can't support HFR monitors but anyone with slightly weaker hardware will have physics issues when their framerate starts dropping.
As for arbitrary control input I'll just leave this here

Only 64% of PC gamepad users(on Steam) are using Xbox pads, if you think leaving 36% of your market is "good enough" then I can't disagree harder. The percentage of PC Nvidia GPU users is actually higher than PC xbox pad users yet I'm pretty sure you wouldn't argue that making your game only run on Nvidia GPUs(not even booting up on AMD) is "fine" because it covers the majority of the market.

You know what I see when I look at that chart?

100% of all pads used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.

[FrikgFeek]

100% of all controllers used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.

Except for that time when Dark Souls 2 players got  softbanned for using x360ce or DSFix because it was detected as an external hook. oopsies daisies.
And even when that doesn't happen only 64%(maybe 68% if you optimistically assume the vast majority of "PC gamepads" use xinput) of users actually get to use their gamepads "as intended", the rest have to hack it and in some cases end up with weird control layouts that can only be changed by changing the settings in x360ce or steam's generic controller support which also breaks menu navigation.

If you as a developer decide that supporting those basic features is "not worth it" then you shouldn't be surprised when players decide your game isn't worth it and leave bad reviews.

[The E]

100% of all controllers used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.

Except for that time when Dark Souls 2 players got  softbanned for using x360ce or DSFix because it was detected as an external hook. oopsies daisies.

I am not sure what the vagaries of cheat protection in games has to do with this discussion at all.

And even when that doesn't happen only 64%(maybe 68% if you optimistically assume the vast majority of "PC gamepads" use xinput) of users actually get to use their gamepads "as intended", the rest have to hack it and in some cases end up with weird control layouts that can only be changed by changing the settings in x360ce or steam's generic controller support which also breaks menu navigation.

All xbox pads are xinput. All generic pads you can buy are xinput. The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games. DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput. The Steam Controller is an XInput device in games that do not support it directly.
That's 95% of that chart covered.

You did see that HOTAS setups do not appear in the chart at all, did you?