Homebrew Question Joycon vibration support in homebrew (Can we do that yet?)

[DaniPoo]

Hi, I have been enjoying RetroArch for quite some time now and mostly the Playstation core.
I just realized that Retroarch on PC does support vibration for controllers, How come the Switch version doesn't.
Is it that this feature has not been implemented in LibNX yet? Or is it just that the developers are hard at work doing things that they feel are more important?

 

[AdamFX990]

I'm pretty sure I wrote some code a while ago that worked. Line 609 onwards shows how to use it:

https://switchbrew.github.io/libnx/hid_8h_source.html

EDIT: I mean, I wrote some code using this part of libnx. Not I wrote this part of libnx! Just in case that wasn't clear

 

[DaniPoo]

I'm pretty sure I wrote some code a while ago that worked. Line 609 onwards shows how to use it:

https://switchbrew.github.io/libnx/hid_8h_source.html
https://switchbrew.github.io/libnx/hid_8h_source.html
EDIT: I mean, I wrote some code using this part of libnx. Not I wrote this part of libnx! Just in case that wasn't clear

Ok, cool, so then I guess it's up to the RetroArch devs to implement it whenever they have time and energy

 

[AdamFX990]

Ok, cool, so then I guess it's up to the RetroArch devs to implement it whenever they have time and energy

I'm quite surprised its not already in tbh. The only thing with the joycons is that they have two motors rather than one. So perhaps they had trouble getting it to feel right.

 

[DaniPoo]

I'm quite surprised its not already in tbh. The only thing with the joycons is that they have two motors rather than one. So perhaps they had trouble getting it to feel right.

Well the dualshock has two motors as well, but they are different, one is more powerful and vibrates at a lower frequenzy and one vibrates at a higher frequenzy. Im sure the switch vibrators could do something decent enough to simulate those two motors? I don't have too much knowlege about the 3D rumble but it seams pretty versetile.

 

[AdamFX990]

Well the dualshock has two motors as well, but they are different, one is more powerful and vibrates at a lower frequenzy and one vibrates at a higher frequenzy. Im sure the switch vibrators could do something decent enough to simulate those two motors? I don't have too much knowlege about the 3D rumble but it seams pretty versetile.

You've got two per joycon with variable amplitude and frequency. In a dualshock, its just two servos with two slightly different sized weights on that occilate. You can't control them independently like you can with a joycon.

Put very simply, each joycon has 4 different variables for controlling the rumble. That's a total of 8 between two joycons. The playstation likely has 1 (amplitude), maybe two but I don't think you can control the frequency.

From a developers point of view, you have a few options. You could translate the rumble from the game and apply it to both the joycons at a set frequency. Or you could try to replicate it a bit more accurately by creating adding code that trys to replicate the dualshock feel by manipulating all the motors independently based on the one or two parameters that a dualshock would expect. I'm sure there's many more ways you could think of to implement it.

All that being said, its probably not a very big task in its simplist form. So I imagine that it'll be implemented in some way pretty soon. It may already be in the latest nightly, who knows?

 

[DaniPoo]

You've got two per joycon with variable amplitude and frequency. In a dualshock, its just two servos with two slightly different sized weights on that occilate. You can't control them independently like you can with a joycon.

Put very simply, each joycon has 4 different variables for controlling the rumble. That's a total of 8 between two joycons. The playstation likely has 1 (amplitude), maybe two but I don't think you can control the frequency.

From a developers point of view, you have a few options. You could translate the rumble from the game and apply it to both the joycons at a set frequency. Or you could try to replicate it a bit more accurately by creating adding code that trys to replicate the dualshock feel by manipulating all the motors independently based on the one or two parameters that a dualshock would expect. I'm sure there's many more ways you could think of to implement it.

All that being said, its probably not a very big task in its simplist form. So I imagine that it'll be implemented in some way pretty soon. It may already be in the latest nightly, who knows?

Hmm, thats pretty interesting. lets hope that a lot of developers will implement this in their projects then.
I like the idea of kinda simulating the two dualshock motors as closely as possible.