PC Games

Orb
Lasagne Monsters
Three Guys Apocalypse
Water Closet
Blob Wars : Attrition
The Legend of Edgar
TBFTSS: The Pandoran War
Three Guys
Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer
Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid
Project: Starfighter
TANX Squadron

Tutorials

2D shoot 'em up
2D top-down shooter
2D platform game
Sprite atlas tutorial
Working with TTF fonts
2D adventure game
Widget tutorial
2D shoot 'em up sequel
2D run and gun
Roguelike
Medals (Achievements)
2D turn-based strategy game
2D isometric game
2D map editor
2D mission-based shoot 'em up
2D Santa game
2D split screen game
SDL 1 tutorials (outdated)

Latest Updates

SDL2 Versus game tutorial
Wed, 20th March 2024

Download keys for SDL2 tutorials on itch.io
Sat, 16th March 2024

The Legend of Edgar 1.37
Mon, 1st January 2024

SDL2 Santa game tutorial 🎅
Thu, 23rd November 2023

SDL2 Shooter 3 tutorial
Wed, 15th February 2023

All Updates »

Tags

android (3)
battle-for-the-solar-system (10)
blob-wars (10)
brexit (1)
code (6)
edgar (9)
games (43)
lasagne-monsters (1)
making-of (5)
match3 (1)
numberblocksonline (1)
orb (2)
site (1)
tanx (4)
three-guys (3)
three-guys-apocalypse (3)
tutorials (17)
water-closet (4)

Books


H1NZ

Arriving on the back of a meteorite, an alien pathogen has spread rapidly around the world, infecting all living humans and animals, and killing off all insect life. Only a handful are immune, and these survivors cling desperately to life, searching for food, fresh water, and a means of escape, find rescue, and discover a way to rebuild.

Click here to learn more and read an extract!

Basic Tutorials

Basic Game Tutorial #11 - Joystick movement

Introduction

This tutorial will demonstrate how to use the joystick to move an image around the screen.

Compile and run tutorial17. You can control the ship by using the joystick's joypad or analog stick. Pressing the fire button will fire a bullet.

An in-depth look

The structure for the joystick is an SDL_Joystick and holds all the information related to the joystick. It is stored in the Game struct:

typedef struct Game
{
	SDL_Joystick *joystick;
	SDL_Surface *screen;
} Game;
In defs.h we add the following definition:
#define DEAD_ZONE 3200
This controls the joystick's analog control sensitivity, this will be discussed later.

Before using a joystick in SDL it must be opened. This is performed in the SDL_Init function in init.c

if (SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO|SDL_INIT_JOYSTICK) < 0)
The number of joysticks detected by SDL can be queried by the function SDL_NumJoysticks

joystickCount = SDL_NumJoysticks();
Since this tutorial deals with using the joystick for movement, we will exit the program if no joysticks were detected. A game that allows joystick or keyboard input would want to handle this event differently.

Now that we have detected a joystick, we need to open it and store the reference to the joystick. This is done with the following.

game.joystick = SDL_JoystickOpen(0);
This will open the first joystick detected by SDL. If you have multiple joysticks attached to the system then we can open them instead by specifying the index number. As always, the index number starts at 0 and must be less than SDL_NumJoysticks. Specifying a negative number or a number greater than SDL_NumJoysticks will cause a segfault. A joystick opened by SDL must be closed when the program exits to free the resources. The following lines
buttonCount = SDL_JoystickNumButtons(game.joystick);

printf("Joystick has %d buttons\n", buttonCount);

printf("Joystick has %d axes\n", SDL_JoystickNumAxes(game.joystick));

Are simply for information. In your game you might wish to raise an error if, say, the number of detected buttons is less than the number that your game requires. The only other addition to init.c is the closing of the joystick in the cleanup function.

/* Close the joystick */

if (game.joystick != NULL)
{
	SDL_JoystickClose(game.joystick);
}
This will close the joystick and free the resources allocated to it.

In input.c we add in some extra code to detect the events produced from the joystick

case SDL_JOYBUTTONDOWN:
	switch (event.jbutton.button)
	{
		case 0:
			input.fire = 1;
		break;
	}
	break;

case SDL_JOYBUTTONUP:
	switch (event.jbutton.button)
	{
		case 0:
			input.fire = 0;
		break;
	}
	break;
These two case statements deal with the first joystick button being pressed and released. This raises an important point: There is no way to know what button is the first one. On a PS2 joypad it is the Triangle button, but on other joysticks it might be different, so you will have to try all the buttons until the ship fires a shot. Don't worry though, the button doesn't change every time you start the program! The next code snippet deals with moving the ship.
case SDL_JOYAXISMOTION:
	/* Horizontal movement */

	if (event.jaxis.axis == 0)
	{
		if (event.jaxis.value < -DEAD_ZONE)
		{
			input.left = 1;
		}

		else if (event.jaxis.value > DEAD_ZONE)
		{
			input.right = 1;
		}

		else
		{
			input.left = 0;
			input.right = 0;
		}
	}

	/* Vertical movement */

	if (event.jaxis.axis == 1)
	{
		if (event.jaxis.value < -DEAD_ZONE)
		{
			input.up = 1;
		}

		else if (event.jaxis.value > DEAD_ZONE)
		{
			input.down = 1;
		}

		else
		{
			input.up = 0;
			input.down = 0;
		}
	}
	break;
SDL_JOYAXISMOTION is the event produced when the directional buttons on the joystick are pressed. When this happens, we need to check which axis was moved, either the horizontal or vertical. We do this by checking the event.jaxis.axis value. 0 signifies a horizontal movement and 1 signifies a vertical movement. The next part is important when reading input from analog joysticks:
if (event.jaxis.value < -DEAD_ZONE)
{
	input.left = 1;
}
The value generated from event.jaxis.value is between -32767 and 32767, with 0 as no movement. Some analog joysticks can be slightly sensitive or simply damaged and will always generate a small movement event, which the input code would pick up. The best solution is to ignore these small values to stop the ship from moving when the player doesn't want it to. The variable DEAD_ZONE, tells the code to not process movement that is below its value. This is currently set to 3200 and is stored in defs.h. This value is fairly reasonable but if you are still experiencing movement when the joystick is idle you should increase this value and recompile. A fully fledged game would allow this value to be configurable by the player.

Conclusion

Adding joystick support is quite simple, but as you can see, the joystick buttons may not be mapped in a desirable fashion. In the next tutorial, we will look at adding support for configuring controls.

Downloads

Source Code

Mobile site