Support web

[danPyk]

Are there any chances, that there will be implementation for web?

[markvideon]

Depends on whether there is someone (or someones) prepared to contribute a web version.

One consideration is that gamepad APIs for web do not support advanced controller features such as manipulating lights. A decision would have to be made to carve out specific interfaces for each platform or to "no-op" on web.

[markvideon]

I have taken a look at this, and I have something that should, in principle, (i.e. is supposed to) work. In my tests so far I'm seeing inconsistent behaviour across different browsers on the same platform. e.g. events & devices not being recognised by Firefox on macOS under any circumstance.

There are other kinds of gotchas even among browsers that do behave as expected, e.g. a scenario I observed where the browser does not immediately respond to device input. I was able to reliably force Google Chrome on macOS to recognise my device immediately once I had pressed a single button with the Developer Console open. Complicating things further, I suspect that there is some variance in behaviour between input devices.

I think if we were to ship a web implementation, we would need good coverage of various limitations on a per-platform and per-browser basis.

[markvideon]

In addition to the practical observations above, a look at https://github.com/w3c/gamepad/ suggests the W3C Gamepad API is still a work in progress with changes being discussed that would have material effects on the implementation of gamepads_web.

E.g.

• Make gamepads accessible by web worker w3c/gamepad#37. Useful if we are polling devices for input and keeping the platform interface as it stands currently, we would probably like to poll on the user's behalf in another thread.
• Add gamepad input events w3c/gamepad#152. Useful because it would mean we don't have to poll at all and because of Dart-JS interop we could probably keep relating to the implementation in Dart-space.