Now, which feature has been considered missing since version 0.8.2?
Well, it may have some bugs and limitations, but a few snippets follow:
Basically, the DOSBox-style input mapping originally introduced in v0.8.2 (that's June of 2013!) can now be configured via the launcher UI, as an alternative to manually editing a textual file.
Oh, and yeah, the keys (and other widgets) in the launcher and mapper UIs are as large as they currently are on purpose. I know it may be desired to have more elements on the display, but I can assure you there is at least one good reason for the current approach.
Known issue
- Troubles may arise if a single emulated event is mapped to two distinct
host events or more. This is the case, for instance, if physical key Left Ctrl
and a joystick button both trigger the emulation of Left Ctrl key press
in-game. Chances are the troubles are less significant if these are just
digital on/off switches which are in use (say non-analog keyboard keys and
joystick buttons), but once different host events are involved in some ways
(such as joystick axis motion or mouse motion) it may seem like certain buttons
or keys simply do no function at all, even if it's not the expected behavior.
*** See the first post in this thread to find download links for the last release.
Changelog
April 29th 2014 (v0.9.4):
- The launcher UI can be displayed in a fullscreen window again, by specifying
the command line argument -showfulllauncher (instead of -showlauncher).
Note that in the SDL 1.2 case it's just a small(er) sub-window in a fullscreen
window for now (assuming the fullscreen dimensions are greater than 640x480).
- One piece missing since v0.8.2 should finally be available:
A UI for input mapping. It is now possible to add/remove/edit mapper bindings
from the Chocolate Keen app itself (via the launcher). With that, there is no
need to fiddle with a file like chocolate-keen-mapper-sdl2_0.map manually.
- mapper_doc/how_to_use.txt has been updated to reflect this addition.
- As some words of a warning, this BREAKS compatibility with older mapper
files having too many bindings involving the exact same host side event.
Realistically, though, that hasn't really been usable from the very beginning
(think about a press on the "1" key leading to emulated presses on all keys
of a keyboard).
- Furthermore, there are very great chances that various mapper-related bugs
are hidden, here and there.
- In fact, a few such bugs dating back to v0.8.2 have been found and fixed.
For one, after writing the mapper state to a file, the file wasn't guaranteed
to be closed as expected. In addition, bindings for the mapper saving handler
(Ctrl+F8 by default) weren't getting properly loaded from the mapper file.
- As a consequence of the addition of the mapper UI, though,
this saving handler has been removed.
- Misc. (minor) UI adaptations and README file edits have been done.