Detect when a controller is connected/disconnected?

[BioAbnerUAD]

Is there a way to detect when a controller is connected/disconnected? If not, are there any ideas on how I could implement a connected/disconnected event?

[Socke81]

I think this project is dead. But I'm playing around with the console demo right now. I think you can create a new InputManger in the background (own thread) every x seconds and check if the list of joysticks matches the list of the old manger. If not, a new joystick has been added or removed.

[pjcast]

I would say - doing this in a thread/spinning up various instances of the manager would not be ideal. When I created OIS way back (haven't done any work on it in many years myself), I envisioned disconnect/reconnect support in the lib (e.g. for console's, less common for PC back then) -

It should be possible to add a new event type, and periodically scan for new devices, and detect reconnects inside the manager itself. Some bit of OS specific logic needed perhaps in some parts. I may look into this one day - if you have time now, would be a great addition.

[Socke81]

I would also destroy the instance again if nothing has changed and if something has changed overwrite the old one with the new one. Is also not very clean. I looked at the code and there are many places where lists and variables are filled when the manager is initialized. It's not just a new event. Implementing that is a lot of work. Probably that's why the function doesn't exist.

[pjcast]

The main issue, and why it was never fully realized, is none of the APIs are great (directinput, xinput) for handling this. They are not geared towards this so much. I may tackle it though, definitely wanting to get back into C++ a bit more, been doing C# almost exclusively for years now.

I may take a stab at the Linux side - they are just standard HID devices in udev.

[Socke81]

The detection of connected/disconnected works under Windows with SDL2 without problems. But unfortunately I have other problems with SDL2 and can't use it on Linux and OSX for some reasons. I put this workaround on a keyboard key in the console demo and it worked just fine. But I only tested this workaround on Windows. But doing that every second actually sounds horrible. I'd have to take a look at how SDL2 does it.