After I’ve heard the theme of the LD31, I’d immediately thought about making a multiplayer local game. I’m surprise to not find any bomber man like, in all games I have tested (If someone find one, please send me it!) Plus, as far as I knew, Unity3D had no problem to manage gamepads. So all of this, sounded like a very good idea.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=37446

During the development I always tested my game with my two gamepads :

• MadCatz F.P.S PRO for Xbox 360
• MadCatz Street Fighter 4 for Xbox 360

And I’ve got no problem until some hours before submit the game in compo. I took gamepads from friends and plug four to my computer, and I discovered really annoying bugs. Specially when I plug/unplug gamepads.

• Some gamepad controlled two characters.
• Some gamepad controlled no character.

After writing some logs. When I plug four controllers to my computer, Unity3D thinks there is 6 controllers. And start to have this strange behaviors.

After some search I read this interesting blog post :

http://www.gallantgames.com/posts/27/details-on-the-xbox-360-controller-bug-in-unity and I also found this plugin on GitHub : https://github.com/JISyed/Unity-XboxCtrlrInput

It’s work really well and the rewrite of my code was not very long. But after some comments on my entry post, I could notice there still some bugs.

1. The webplayer version continue to bug, I think it’s because the plugin use two dlls, and if one got native code, it will be not include with the webplayer build.
2. It doesn’t give the name of the gamepad so I cannot use my Sf4 controllers (no joystick).
3. Logitech gamepads don’t work, I thinks it’s because the plugin is really oriented for Xbox 360 gamepads.

I’m still happy to  develop this game, even if without this problem I could add more features of course.

But because I want to continue developing multiplayer local games. I’m looking for some good wisdom :

Do you use 4 controllers with Unity3D 4.6 ?

Do you have equivalent problem ?

Also, do you know some Unity3D titles in local multiplayer, (with four players)  ?

Thanks for reading !

Damien;

Ps : Last pro tip  for myself. Next time, don’t forget to also manage the keyboard.