I brought an M$ force feedback joystick about a year ago, with the intension of using it with stuff like pd (and the odd game). I haven't really used it a great deal since then, although I am still interested in doing so. I'm running windows, so if I were to implement anything, it would probably be directX flavoured... Might get linux up and running on my machine at some point. I don't have any real programming experience, although I might start dipping my toes in.
The SDK's I've seen for forcefeedback, and the literature on programming it, has always worked in terms of playing back specific "effects", like samples, rather than just generally having direct dynamic control of forces in x and y. I might be missing something... Anyway, I guess in practical terms of pd externals, we're probably going to need quite seperate solutions. I don't know if the way immersion devices communicate is different from microsoft, but clearly windows and mac os are going to be different.
Good to hear of someone who's doing this.
Peter
Well, I have spent a day or so looking in to coding this and found a number of key things:
- someone has snooped the USB messages and made a ForceFeedback library
for linux (yeah!)
- for Windows, I would use the DirectX DirectInput API. I think force
feedback started in DirectX 7.
- As of MacOS X 10.2.3, the driver is included, and the Dec 2002 Dev
tools have ForceFeedback support as a HID device.
The big question remains whether it is possible to control the forces directly. The 'effects' playback is quite easy, but that wouldn't be so useful in a pd context. I am looking into that today.
.hc
On Saturday, Mar 1, 2003, at 07:31 America/New_York, PT147@mdx.ac.uk wrote:
I brought an M$ force feedback joystick about a year ago, with the intension of using it with stuff like pd (and the odd game). I haven't really used it a great deal since then, although I am still interested in doing so. I'm running windows, so if I were to implement anything, it would probably be directX flavoured... Might get linux up and running on my machine at some point. I don't have any real programming experience, although I might start dipping my toes in.
The SDK's I've seen for forcefeedback, and the literature on programming it, has always worked in terms of playing back specific "effects", like samples, rather than just generally having direct dynamic control of forces in x and y. I might be missing something... Anyway, I guess in practical terms of pd externals, we're probably going to need quite seperate solutions. I don't know if the way immersion devices communicate is different from microsoft, but clearly windows and mac os are going to be different.
Good to hear of someone who's doing this.
Peter
PD-list mailing list PD-list@iem.kug.ac.at http://iem.kug.ac.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
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Hans-Christoph Steiner -
PT147＠mdx.ac.uk