Jan Bujak
I wrote a new driver for my gamepad on Linux. I'd like SDL to support it out-of-box, as currently it just treats it as a generic joystick instead of a gamepad. From what I can see the only way to do that is to either 1) pick one of the already supported controllers' PID, VID and button layouts and have my driver send that (effectively lying that it's something else), or 2) submit a preconfigured, hardcoded mapping to SDL.
Both of those, in my opinion, are silly when we already have the Linux Gamepad Specification which standarizes this:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.15/input/gamepad.html
Unfortunately SDL doesn't make use of it currently. So I've took it upon myself to add it; patch is in the attachments.
Basically what the patch does is that if SDL finds no built-it controller mappings for a given joystick it then asks the joystick backend to autodetect it, and that uses the relevant evdev bits to figure out which button/axis is which. (See the specs for more details.)
With this patch applied my own driver for my controller works out-of-box with SDL with no extra configuration and is correctly recognized as a gamepad; this is also going to be the case for any other driver which follows the Linux Gamepad Specification.
Added the functions SDL_JoystickFromPlayerIndex(), SDL_JoystickSetPlayerIndex(), SDL_GameControllerFromPlayerIndex(), and SDL_GameControllerSetPlayerIndex()
Also implemented SDL_JoystickGetDevicePlayerIndex() on iOS and tvOS, and added support for reading the new menu button state available in iOS and tvOS 13.
The code is now reliant on SDL_PrivateJoystickAdded() and SDL_PrivateJoystickRemoved() being called correctly when devices are added or removed on Windows
The Apple TV remote is currently exposed as a joystick with its touch surface treated as two axes. Key presses are also generated when its buttons and touch surface are used.
A new hint has been added to help deal with deciding whether to background the app when the remote's menu button is pressed: SDL_HINT_APPLE_TV_CONTROLLER_UI_EVENTS.
The internal function SDL_EGL_LoadLibrary() did not delete and remove a mostly
uninitialized data structure if loading the library first failed. A later try to
use EGL then skipped initialization and assumed it was previously successful
because the data structure now already existed. This led to at least one crash
in the internal function SDL_EGL_ChooseConfig() because a NULL pointer was
dereferenced to make a call to eglBindAPI().
Sam Lantinga
Ryan C. Gordon
Alex Szpakowski
Philipp Wiesemann