Background:
My wife and I work with a group of kids and have to come up with different activities each week to entertain them. One of the concepts we've been playing with is the idea of a Gameshow where teams compete against each other to answer trivia questions on a given topic. I decided to create a game show application that allows me to use my laptop to control the action. I built a winform that serves as the control panel on my laptop and a seperate form that displays on a secondary monitor (projector) as the players view. The game has up to 4 teams competing and features a head-to-head aspect where the first team to ring in gets to attempt to answer the question.
Problem:
I needed to find a way for the teams to ring in. I looked for input devices that would fit the bill and found a few usb game show style controllers out there, but they were far too expensive for our meager budget on this. I could have the kids stand around the laptop and hit a designated key to identify them, but the thought of a bunch of kids pounding on my laptop keyboard made me cringe. So after some additional consideration, I thought I would try some simple usb gamepads. What I've found though is that the gamepads do not raise events. You have to poll the gamepads at a given interval and determine the current state. I found that this would work for what I wanted to do but after reading some articles I realized that it was going to be more work than I had time to put into it at this point. I needed to find a better way.
Solution:
After a little more research I found a small app that runs as a utility that fits my needs perfectly. The app is called Total Game Control. It does the work of monitoring the state of the gamepads and converting those into (in my case) keyboard events in the system. I went ahead and created my app to handle keypress events as it did when I was prototyping it and everything is working perfectly.
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posted @ Friday, November 09, 2007 5:47 AM