What is Action Mapping?

Old applications have done their own mapping of events to particular buttons and axes. A car-racing game for example, might assume that the x-axis on the user's joystick or mouse was the most suitable control for steering the car. This leads to problems when trying to accommodate new or unusual devices, or when the application doesn't knows which installed device was the best fit for the game. So the user typically had to choose a device from a menu or make sure only the preferred device was attached.

Using action mapping, you no longer need to make assumptions about the best use of devices and device objects. Instead, your application binds actions to virtual controls wherever possible. The application will get data from a virtual control called DIAXIS_DRIVINGR_STEER. DirectInput assigns the virtual control to a physical control-that is, a device object. It does so by taking into account the application genre, user preferences, and information from the device manufacturer, and the user's configuration of the device. This also simplifies the input loop by returning data for all devices in a form independent of the particular device. A single action can be mapped to more than one device, and the input loop can respond to the action the same way regardless of which device is being read.

FAQ Menu

 

Advertisement

Free Magazine