[Feature Request] Add gamepad support to UI

[Buri]

Currently, Lutris has no support for gamepad input. This makes it very difficult to use on handheld devices like Aya Neo or Steam Deck.

This would probably mean adding support for controller intself, adding appropriate controller inputs (in case of support for different controller models), create system for navigation in UI and support for on-screen keyboard.

[DavidoTek]

Could probably be done with the inputs library.
Did something similar with ProtonUp-Qt where I emulated keyboard input, though Lutris is using GTK instead of Qt. Only problem with inputs is that it is quite outdated and has a few bugs...

+1 Would be quite useful for the Steam Deck too.

EDIT: Navigation could be similar to that of HGL 2.1.0

[strycore]

The plan is to have an UI made with Godot that can be used with a gamepad.
Having gamepad support on the main UI would be useful too, since we're not going to recreate the whole lutris UI in Godot (at least not for the foreseeable future)

At some point, I'd also like to pick up on the development of SC Controller and try to integrate it with Lutris. That would allow to have controller support for all games, not only Steam ones.

[strycore]

So far I haven't looked into the options for communicating between Godot and Lutris but we have a bunch of options... DBus, sockets, a HTTP service...

We'll have to do some heavy lifting on the client part to adapt for another UI, that will likely be the point where we release Lutris 0.6

[Buri]

something I've noted in your mockup is that it tries to replicate some aspects of our current UI, like loading the full game list and displaying it in a scrolling window. One of the benefits of using Godot is that we can move away from this kind of paradigm and build a much more responsive UI

My idea was to load X games needed for first screen/two screens and load rest on demand, but still show the scrollbar so user sees that there is more. We could also go for paging or any other solution, Im open to ideas.

[strycore]

We can load the total number of games so we can still show a scrollbar that looks correct. The important thing is to not load all the images all at once like we do now. We can preload 1 or 2 pages forward and backward and load the rest when triggered by the user.

[Buri]

I looked into network options in Godot - it has native support support for http(s) and websockets. I also tried to create custom bindings for dbus and got demo working without too much trouble. There is pretty easy bindings library for Rust, so we can create native modules easily.

@DavidoTek is also pushing updates on the gui side, so we are progressing nicely with the prototype.

[Buri]

We have new update today. More styling work and I also added sample image loading for game artwork. This unfortunately doesnt work on web for some reason, but works no problem on desktop.

[Buri]

I've added automatic builds, so latest version is always available on: https://buri.github.io/lutris-gamepad-ui/

[awsms]

Any installation/usage instructions? :)

[DavidoTek]

You can either use the web version or clone the repo from here, but there isn't any real functionality as of now, it's more a mockup.

[DavidoTek]

I had a look at the DBus specification. We should agree on a standard way for communicating with the Lutris launcher.

Maybe like this? https://gist.github.com/DavidoTek/41945c60dfe82e93efb4eca0758a1e4b

For HTTP: https://gist.github.com/DavidoTek/76ca38f406edcf1f73c362c0141fa9e9

[Buri]

I think we should first decide wheter we even want to use DBus in the first place. I personally have no experience with it. I have also no idea how much work it would be to integrate to Lutris.
So far we have these options:

• HTTP client/server (native support in godot)
• DBus
• local socket communication
  I was also looking on gRPC, but again, I have no personal experience. This might be good place for maintainers to chip in if they have any preference. @strycore ?

[DavidoTek]

Another option would be to use WebSockets and JSON. Both are supported by Python and Godot and quite simple to work with.
Could look something like this: https://gist.github.com/DavidoTek/ce875d88f06833e83515838c8051cdbb

[ffiarpg]

Might be a dumb idea but any chance of integrating with this project for UI?
https://github.com/retrohub-org/retrohub

[strycore]

Not a dumb idea. I didn't know about Retrohub. I was planning to have better integration with OpenGamepadUI which is based on Godot 4 as well.

[ffiarpg]

Or this project in Godot 4 https://github.com/ShadowBlip/OpenGamepadUI
Which is already developing a lutris plugin.
https://github.com/ShadowBlip/OpenGamepadUI-lutris