Accept trackball as joystick [in Linux]

Hi,

Recently I’ve been working on a project (only in Linux so far) that uses a
trackball for camera orbit + mouse for picking. To get the trackball to
show up in the SDL joystick enumeration I have to skip the ‘EV_IsJoystick’
test in my local joystick/linux/SDL_sysjoystick.c because it is
sepecifically designed to filter out joysticks and mice on the kernel
’event’ interface.

I’d like to see a way to get at input devices that aren’t strictly
joysticky in SDL. The easiest way would be to just skip the EV_IsJoystick
test (for Linux at least) and let the app/user decide what joysticks are
appropriate. A case could be made that the mouse should even show up on
the joystick interface so a game could have generic joystick-event based
control code.

Thoughts?

thanks, Richard Moats

Hi,

Recently I’ve been working on a project (only in Linux so far) that uses a
trackball for camera orbit + mouse for picking. To get the trackball to
show up in the SDL joystick enumeration I have to skip the ‘EV_IsJoystick’
test in my local joystick/linux/SDL_sysjoystick.c because it is
sepecifically designed to filter out joysticks and mice on the kernel
’event’ interface.

I’d like to see a way to get at input devices that aren’t strictly
joysticky in SDL. The easiest way would be to just skip the EV_IsJoystick
test (for Linux at least) and let the app/user decide what joysticks are
appropriate. A case could be made that the mouse should even show up on
the joystick interface so a game could have generic joystick-event based
control code.

Actually the test is supposed to show everything except mice and keyboards.
Can you identify exactly what’s causing the test to skip it?

See ya,
-Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment