FireShock: rumble through Force-Feedback
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Hellas!
And now for something completely different. No infrastructure-related news for once, there’s noteworthy progress going on in the development dungeon! The new generation of the FireShock USB driver for PS3 controllers is under development for quite a few months now but let me tell you: the secrecy is worth it
Anyway, one of the more annoying tasks I stumbled upon was the vibration capabilities of the DualShock 3 (a.k.a. rumble) because by default there was no standardized way to expose the two rumble motors to user-land games via a common API. But DirectInput had an answer – sort of – known as force feedback, a stone-old technique mainly used in flight sims and racing games to provide, well, feedback to the player about forces happening in-game like a jumping suspension when driving off-road or a jumpy joystick when controlling the rudder of a plane. But how does that fit into here?
Well, what about exposing the rumble capabilities as all sorts of force feedback effects? That way my beloved PCSX2 platform could utilize the DS3 rumble without any modifications required whatsoever! Now doesn’t that sound like an investment worth investigating? Well, it was a hell of a ride (mostly because, yet again, undocumented territory) but I can finally show progress in the form of… driver logs. Yay.
Hopefully I soon can experience the rumble in my hand as well, translated into actual rumble requests sent to the device
See ya!
