Hi,

First time poster here.

To begin with, I'm a programmer, not a gamer. (Simple difference in genre there?) I'm nearing completion on a EvDev wrapper shared library and a set of Gambas code files to make reading gamepads super simple in Gambas. I want the terminology I use to be gamer compatible/acceptable, so please correct any misuses I may commit.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Gambas is a dialect of BASIC language and IDE that is currently Linux specific. Very similar to VisualBasic, but a huge improvement. Since I am not a gamer, I am not in a position to judge how good of a game development platform it is, but for me and what I want to do, it will do just fine. (PPA: gambas-team/gambas3)

I've put a lot of effort into making the code "gamecontrollerdb.txt" and SDL2 name and file compatible. I've even included lookup arrays for SDL2 values. What I haven't found an answer to is where is the standard place for these configuration files to go. The only references I have found is "drop them in your game's asset (or executable) folder. This doesn't seem to be a very good approach to me.

This is how I decided to go:

ControllerDb File Search Order:
~/.local/share/GamePadDB/gamecontrollerdb_local.txt
~/.local/share/GamePadDB/gamecontrollerdb.txt
/usr/local/share/GamePadDB/gamecontrollerdb_local.txt
/usr/local/share/GamePadDB/gamecontrollerdb.txt

Files are searched in the order shown until a match is found on the GUID. The last definition in a file for a repeated GUID is used.

The first gamepad program I have allows you to define these configuration files by pressing the buttons on your gamepad and a few mouse clicks. It writes one line of results to the first file listed, so it will be found quickly by the first program running. (Yes, I know there are other programs with this functionality, but they don't demonstrate the use of my code.)

I'm also building in the ability to define custom "joystick response curves" on a per axis or per gamepad for a user/application basis. The files for those definitions will also be stored in these directories. So far, for the three different gamepads and the joystick I have, all the axis EvDev ranges are 0 to 255 with a flat value of 15. I am converting this to -32K to 32K to be compatible with the SDL (and other) values.

With all that as an explanation, I have these three questions:

1) Is there a standard directory location I should be using instead?

2) Is there a standard format for response curve definitions?

3) Does anyone know of a gamepad that has an axis return value that is not 0-255?

Thanks,

Ced