Re: [AD] The huge Windows force feedback patch.

[<trent@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for doing that. Before I can say anything else I need to read the
full patch and test it out some more, which might be a while. As long as the
joysticks work the same as before, ie in the most common case where the user
has 1 joystick, and the game is recompiled with this patch, the button
mappings are all the same, then it should be fine. However, your updates to
ex_joystick_events although they look better don't suit every joystick, do
they?

Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: beoran@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:beoran@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: August 10, 2014 7:31 PM
To: Allegro Development
Subject: Re: [AD] The huge Windows force feedback patch.

Dear Trent,

I understand your concern, so I spend most of the day looking for a
solution.

I looked into a better way to filter the XInput devices from DirectInput and
with some inspiration from SDL and a lot of testing, I was able to make it
work both on MinGW and on MSys2.

This better way requires only user32.dll and windows.h, no special headers,
and compiles fine on MinGW. Only requirement is that you use Windows XP. For
some reason the DirectInput driver still supported Windows 95, but I had to
upgrade to use GetRawDeviceList() on which the filtering method is based. I
don't think that that is any problem, since Allegro 5 doesn't support
windows 95 for other things such as audio anymore anyway.

With this better filtering method there should be no "gotchas" left with
compiling and using Allegro on MinGW with this patch, and the rest of
Allegro should keep working as it was.

Finally, months of hard work went into this patch and while there might be
some bugs left in it, he best way to get these fixed is by getting people to
test it more widely.

Kind Regards,

B.

On 8/10/14, Trent Gamblin <trent@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If the patch has this many gotchas I won't be applying it. The entire 
> rest of Allegro works perfectly with MinGW, there's no sense in IMO 
> destroying that for haptics, so find.better ways to do these things.
>
> ---- beoran@xxxxxxxxxx wrote ----
>
>>OK, I pushed some more commits to the same pull request.
>>
>>What they do is
>>1) fix ex_joystick_events
>>2) Detect sal.h and include it only if found1.
>>3) Detect wbemidl.h for use by the filtering snippet. If ound, enable 
>>the snippet, if not disable it. For various reasons, mingw can't 
>>compile the filtering stippet (I said it was horrible), but
>>msys2/mingw64 can. That's why I was forced to conditionally compile it 
>>like this.
>>4) Some various minor bugs.
>>
>>https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/pull/8.patch
>>
>>Kind Regards,
>>
>>B.
>>
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