Using a controller...

I was at Best Buy last night and saw a PS2 style controller for pc for $25 that can be used for pc or the ps2 (which I still have) so thought I'd buy it and try it with CoX.

It only has 8 buttons total (not including stop, start and clicking the thumbsticks) so my thought was that I would use one of the shoulder buttons as a "shift key" so the four face buttons would be 1-4 on my action bar and 3 of the shoulder buttons would be 5-7. Using the "shift button" would give me 14 functions to use on my controller which would be plenty in terms of using actions (toggles etc I would just click with my mouse).

Anyway, when I tried to alter my keymapping I was disheartened to find that I couldn't enter button combinations, so there goes my shift idea... anyone know of a way around this?

Edit: For anyone that's wondering why in the world I'd want to use a controller, I do a fair amount of soloing on my tank as I'm approaching 50 and wanting to accumulate more influence and my "monitor" is a 32" flat screen tv so I'd love to essentially play it like it's a console game when doing that.


Edit: Just now realized that most are going to see this title and assume it pertains to the AT... really wish I'd have thought that through lol

Google up Joy2Key. It lets you map your gamepad keys to keyboard keys. Which would let you just map the gamepad buttons to the normal keyboard keys.

cool thanks all! I'll have to look into that when I get home.

So I downloaded joy2key last night. Per the readme I opened up notepad and tried it in there and sure enough when I hit whatever buttons it was like I was hitting them on my keyboard.

However... when I fired up CoH... nothing worked. Anyone have any ideas on why this might be?

If you've ever played Ratchet and Clank, the way you select weapons in that is to hold the trangle button down and an octagonal menu pops up [and time stops, which would be nice in COH] and you choose one of the 8 based on pressing Up, UpRight, Right, or etc, then release the triangle button.

I'm sure you could put this on the shoulder keys, though I'd probably map them for straife like in most console 1st/3rd person games.

Also, there are some fairly rare controllers that have a querty keypad attached. There is an addon for old Xbox controllers, but I'm not sure about the current ones.

I have a $7 converter to plug a real PS2 controller into the PC, but have only used it to play GBA games with. There are also converters to use a N64 Controller, which some feel is the best controller ever made, but those people are so, so wrong.

Best controller ever made is the Logitec wireless PS2 controller.

I don't think it's a problem with the controller. It works with joy2key when using notepad and if when I change the functions directly in the keymapping options it works that way... I think it's an issue of CoH recognizing joy2key.

Is it possible that since it's a 3rd party program it won't allow it to work maybe thining it's a bot or something?

Hmm, I've a logitech keyboard and it's macro program works fine.

I have the converter for the N64 controller and it IS the greatest controller ever.

Ha.
And I thought he meant using a Controller...as in a hero.

Doh!

BAH! stupid double post.

A WIRED XBox360 Controller can be mapped via the options/keymapping tab in the game options. It's what I have been using to play city of heroes for 2 years. Before that I used various controllers (USB) which worked out of the box. You just needed to do the mapping via options.

If you have a pc/ps2 controller it should work also. You don't need Joy2Key. You just need map which tray slot to which key.

Then you place the powers in your trays.

Ex: Tray slot 2 on my Fire Control ATs is always the first control power. I map tray slot 2 to whatever button my x button on my Xbox 360 controller is. How to do this is to open the keymapping tab, click on the Tray slot one text, then click the x button. The assignment should immediately show. (In the case of the XBox 360 it will show what the actual number of the button is, not x, y, LR and all that).

Once you've gotten all your buttons, key assignments and trays set up, save the bind setup.

Now everytime you start a character use /bind_load.

It should auto map your buttons for the character. You just need to figure out which power you want to each tray by placing the powers in each corresponding tray slot.

I'm doing this all by memory (at work right now), but it's how it should work.

EDIT: If I made that too confusing let me know.

Thanks Aura, I know how to set it up in game... I was hoping to use joy2key so as to not change my current settings as I will not always use a controller... this would only be for when solo farming, I suppose I could easily change it back and forth as needed... was just hoping to avoid that if necessary.

You can easily save and load different bind settings with /bindsavefile and /bindloadfile.

Set up your stuff how you like for keyboard usage, and save them...
/bindsavefile keyboard

Set up your stuff how you like for controller usage, and save them...
/bindsavefile controller

Then you can switch between bind sets very easily by typing...
/bindloadfile keyboard
/bindloadfile controller
...depending on which one you want to use.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Which game pad/controller did you get?

I think that the LogiTech Dual-Action controller is the way to go. It has two sticks, 4 shoulder buttons, d-pad, button pad, 2-face button, and a mode switching button. (12 buttons and the d-pad which I split into 2 buttons left-right, because the d-pad can be a bit over sensitve and prone to trigger a l-up, l-down, r-up, r-down instead of just a l, r, up, or down).
I've been using a LogiTech Dual-Action controller for over 4 years now for CoH. It works great. It is pretty much a PS2 controller - with out the rumble feature.
I greatly suggest getting it. You can program it outside of the game, and, by accessing the Profiler once CoH is running, the functions that you program it for outside the game are the ones that you will be using while you are running CoH.

I play about 90% with the game pad. I just use the keyboard and mouse to chat, trigger mouse-click powers in my 3 alternate trays, target cursor target-able powers (ice slick, etc.), activate insps, yell F7, or type up macros.
I mostly lay-out my trays in game the same way for each character so I can jump to any of my 140 characters and just start playing. Most of the time, I have a tray flip built into my two main trays so I can toggle them back and forth - which turns one tray of 10 actions into two trays of 18 which I really use as 16 because I use the sticks to control one travel power each and they tend to be set the same way in both trays. To wind it all out, I use one of the face buttons for auto-run and the other as a left mouse button and the two top shoulder buttons as a nearest-target and next-target.

I've posted my configurations several times, but I don't know if I've posted them since the forum merger.

I got a Logitech PS2-style controller that comes with software to work specifically with City of Heroes (among other games) and I mapped L2 and R2 to switch between power trays- with the buttons mapped to specific numbers, I can effectively switch control modes at will to access all my powers as I need them.

Not sure how good this system really works, but it's pretty fun so far.