Responding to Player Inputs - Game Development with SlimDX - page 36

Using joysticks with DirectInput
Now, let's shift gears and take a look at using joysticks . In this topic, we will use the
term joystick to refer to any game controller. First, we will look at how to use joysticks
with DirectInput.
Enumerating devices
You've probably seen some games that let you choose which game controller you
want to use if you have more than one attached to your PC. In this section, we are go-
ing to look at how to get the list of available devices. With SlimDX, it is actually quite
easy.
The DirectInput object (remember that we stored it in our m_DirectInput mem-
ber variable) has a method named GetDevices() . To get a list of the available con-
trollers, we would call that method like this:
m_DirectInput.GetDevices(DeviceClass.GameController,
DeviceEnumerationFlags.AttachedOnly);
To try this out, let's add a new method to our UserInput.cs class. This method will
simply write some debug output about the available devices. Here is the code:
public void GetJoysticks()
{
IList<DeviceInstance> deviceList =
m_DirectInput.GetDevices(DeviceClass.GameController,
DeviceEnumerationFlags.AttachedOnly);
if (deviceList.Count < 1)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("NO GAME
CONTROLLERS WERE FOUND!");
}
else
{
foreach (DeviceInstance device in deviceList)