AMF
One thing I’ve learned through development on this project is that when something goes weird, it is Always My Fault. While the libraries or even Unity itself occasionally have/has, some quirk or known issue, or even an honest bug, more often than not, it’s something dumb I did, possibly a long time ago. In this case, it was something I didn’t do! And things I did. Here’s where my week went:
I was testing out my Xbox One Season Mode build when I noticed some controller issues. I thought that was very strange indeed as I’ve been using Rewired, a completely badass solution to controllers in Unity. In fact, I had redone some things to be more aligned with how Rewired works recently. This was done more recently than the old Team HQ screen, so I was aware there might be some problems in Season Mode. I decided to check it out with some debug information in Unity.
It was hard to keep track of what was happening, so I listed all the controller information for all 9 player slots. One is reserved for keyboard and mouse controls, the other 8 are where game controllers get assigned. The game is only 6 players at the moment, but those 6 players can use any of 8 controllers plugged in. And for some reason, the player on controller info #2 was getting blown away on the Sports Pages screen as soon as someone moved the cursor. Even stranger, reconnecting it assigned it to slot 7 and strangest of all, it no longer functioned.
The loss of controller info 2 turned out to be because of something dumb I did. My fault! I was literally assigning the cursor controlling player to the 2nd slot on the new Team HQ screen. This might have made more sense the old way I handled controllers, but surprise, that was written on the old Team HQ screen, before I redid the controller info setup this way. If only I made a note of it…
Now I loop through the controller infos, not the joysticks, and I can assign the controlling player for that screen without reassigning the stick. Hooray! This fixed the issue and controller 2 stopped disappearing. But the weird issue of some sticks not working persisted. It seemed as I plugged in more controllers, the bug was more likely to appear. I needed more information.
In debugging and trying to figure out what was wrong, it seemed like this stick didn’t have a map to tell it what buttons were what. I thought this was a disconnect/reconnect issue, but upon experimenting further it didn’t seem to be tied to a specific to a piece of hardware; I could swap USB cables and they would reconnect in an order based on which plug was used.
I wrote code to detect if the map was missing from a controller, and if so to load the default map, but it was no good. I was almost at the point of desperation, the point where I started considering thinking about, maybe emailing the Guavaman for support. My brain told me from years of experience however, that this was probably Always My Fault. I updated Rewired just to be sure.
I even ported back to a Windows build, just in case it was something screwy with the Unity editor in Xbox mode with Rewired, but no, the problem persisted. Finally I plugged in an older, totally different controller, and it didn’t work either. I tried again with no other controllers plugged in, and that old controller was fine. That’s when I figured out that it was a problem only with controller infos 6 and 7. It didn’t matter what was plugged in, those slots were not working.
Well if it’s not obvious by now what the common denominator was, it should have been. I went into the Rewired configuration and double checked to make sure that all these players actually existed, since, yes, the game is only 6 players. But I had remembered correctly; there were 10 players defined. One is reserved for System (not used) and the remaining 9 are described above. They were all there. I clicked through them to be sure, and then found one thing missing… on Player6 and Player7:
All the other players had Default JoystickMaps on them, except players 6 and 7. This is like step 2 of setting up Rewired. Womp womp. On the plus side, I figured it out, and I can fix the Xbox One Season Mode build the same way. On the minus side, there went my week, barking up wrong trees because of something dumb I did, and/or didn’t do. My fault!
Xbox One build testing resumes next week.