Playing with gamepad counts as AFK on Windows 7

[Liosan]

Hi folks,

First I'd like to say how much I appreciate AW. We use it for tracking game time in our family, and it works much better than commercial solutions that I've tried out.

The main problem I'm seeing right now is playing on pads. When there is no keyboard or mouse activity, AW stops tracking time. This is, to some degree, expected. The problem is playing with gamepads. They are not detected as valid input, so AW kicks into AFK mode.

Windows 10 and Windows 7 both have this behaviour.

With some guidance, I could probably contribute a patch. Anybody willing to walk me through the basics of setting up a dev environment and contributing?

[ErikBjare]

Weird, the use of gamepads is tracked correctly for me on Windows (just double checked), although I do have a bit of a special setup.

Are you running the latest version of ActivityWatch? (v0.9.2)

[Liosan]

Hey @ErikBjare, possibly not the latest. I'll do some more debugging and get back to you.

The game in question is Spelunky. I'll double check if the issue occurs on different games.

[ErikBjare]

@Liosan I don't think the game itself should matter (but it's possible).

Updating ActivityWatch may or may not help, we merged ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-afk#14 back in 2017 which I thought would handle it. So if you have a somewhat recent version of ActivityWatch it might not make a big difference, but it would be appreciated if you could check the latest version anyway, just to be sure.

What gamepad do you use?

[ErikBjare]

With some guidance, I could probably contribute a patch. Anybody willing to walk me through the basics of setting up a dev environment and contributing?

Regarding this, you should only need to modify https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-afk to fix the behavior. No need to build the entirety of ActivityWatch (which is a lot more involved, but there are instructions here: https://docs.activitywatch.net/en/latest/installing-from-source.html).

[Liosan]

OK, I've managed to narrow down the issue. It seems to occur only on Windows 7. Windows 10 works fine.

Game doesn't matter. Type of pad doesn't matter. AW version is 0.9.2 on all machines.

So, this seems to be an edge case.

[ErikBjare]

Ah, that explains things. Although I'm surprised to hear ActivityWatch runs on Windows 7 at all (see for example: #374).

It's very unlikely that someone will work on resolving this, especially since we've made the decision to not to put effort into supporting Windows 7 (which is EOL anyway).

[Liosan]

Understandable. Feel free to drop the issue :)

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.