Revisiting Bindings and Support for Treadmill devices

[AgentMilkshake1]

Hi all,

(Reposting as a new issue as per request)
{Posting on behalf of many Treadmill device developers)

Myself and other developers have recently started noticing that Treadmill support has been compromised in recent updates.

I've personally not been very active with OpenVR development over the past few months, but I've recently had reports that since the Index headset has launched many games have updated their SteamVR input systems (a requirement to support Valve Index).
As a part of this, game developers are now able to filter actions depending on source (right hand, left hand, any). This means that actions created by game developers are only usable by Treadmill devices in the case that the game developer chooses ANY.

This is a massive step back for Treadmill device developers, as many game developers won't realise the impact their choice at dev level is having at the wider market level. A lot of games previously supported by treadmills are beginning to dwindle in numbers due to this oversight.

We had a brief period where Treadmill devices were becoming quite universal in terms of compatibility, but these recent updates have really damaged the support Treadmill device developers can offer!

What is being done by the OpenVR team to remedy this? Were the team aware that this would be a problem?

[JoeLudwig]

My as-yet-unstarted plan had been to either make bindings from /user/treadmill always show up on both hands. Or maybe let the binding specify which hand to muster with.

How would you like this to work?

[cwlmyjm]

Besides, legacy binding file for Treadmill devices seems not work to these game which has not update with input system on beta 1.6.4. Before this, I have created legacy binding for my driver and the content is similar to vive controller's default, binding the same component to same default action. It work fine on 1.5.16.

[kaplat]

Hello,

I am also a Treadmill device developer and this issue is a big problem for all treadmills.

We thought about a solution and we also think that binding treadmills to both hands is the way to go. This solution is no extra work for game developers and that should be the goal.
Games with legacy controls should still bind to the left or right controller.

Best regards

[AgentMilkshake1]

I think that Treadmills showing up on both hands sounds like an ideal solution. It allows for Treadmills to be mapped to either hand's thumbstick, and in the case that the Treadmill device has button inputs, mapped to either hand's buttons.

This enabled all existing games with thumbstick locomotion options (Onward, Fallout 4 VR, Doom VR, Elder Scrolls VR, Pavlov, any many more) to be supported out the box without any additional work from game developers.

The true agnostic system it should be - All treadmill devices able to map onto whichever thumbstick/button they wish, and for game developers to not even worry about it as it's handled by their default left/right hand input.

[CybershoesVR]

We support this too!
👍

[JoeLudwig]

We talked this over internally and I think what I'm going to go with is two new checkboxes on all threadmill and gamepad bindings:

• Return bindings as part of the left hand
• Return bindings as part of the right hand

So the default behavior doesn't change but anyone can make a binding that causes treadmill/gamepad data to flow to the right hand or left hand.

Thoughts?

[kaplat]

This sounds like a good solution for all treadmill devices.

[JoeLudwig]

These new settings will appear in the 1.7.x beta when that emerges.

[peroht]

Late to the party. Yes our system is also hit by this issue. Hope it can be resolved swiftly.

[joemarshall]

In legacy mode my treadmill driver will no longer turn up as anything in games, no matter what hand I set it to report in the extra settings. Legacy debugging info just shows zeros on every axis.

In legacy mode it shouldn't need the report as hand option either, as the hand is set in the action (e.g. left touchpad = left hand), and there's no reason you can't map actions across multiple hands.

This all worked before the recent changes to the input system and legacy mapping stuff, now no old games work.

Does anyone else have a treadmill driver working with legacy input games, or is it broken for everyone?