ETQW and Joystick
Posted by ushimitsudoki on March 23, 2008
Just a quick note on this one! I wanted to try using a joystick in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The joystick in question is a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro – a USB model with several axes and buttons.
Plugging the joystick in, it immediately appeared as /dev/input/js0. I vaguely remember having to “calibrate” a joystick, so I installed the jscalibrator package. Turns out this was a mistake.
Although jscalibrator appeared to work fine, it caused each axis to read from something like 0-255 (last number varied). In game, this translated to never moving in one direction, and only a slight amount in the other. In another words, the game expected some values like -100 – 0 – 100, where zero is “center”, and NOT “0 – 128 – 255″, where zero is “all the way in one direction”.
I resolved the matter by removing jscalibrator and the files it created (~/.joystick, I think). I then install the joystick package, which contained jstest. When I ran jstest /dev/input/js0, each axis now read something like (-32767 to 32767), and things worked just fine in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars!
Maybe this will be helpful to someone out there!
M3 said
Thank you! I’ve been thinking of getting this game, and wanted to know if it supported a joystick, before I bought it. It is good to know that it does, unlike Frontlines-Fuel of War….which I just bought, and DON’T recommend!!! Too glitchy. Could be great, but it’s like it was released 6 months early. Anyway, thanks!