AFrame has a lot of cool stuff built-in, like support for controllers like gamepads.
In their documentation they recommend using the component "tracked-controls" which in turn will select the correct device component according to what is available for the browser. This seems not to work at all for me when in desktop mode in aframe v1.0.4
I'm using
- Chrome v81.0.4044.122 (windows)
- xbox gamepad
- aframe v1.0.4 (latest npm package as of writing this)
I can find the gamepad when querying the browser gamepad api directly.
I declare my entity like this: <a-entity mycomponent tracked-controls></a-entity>
I can then see that aframe then transform this to <a-entity mycomponent tracked-controls-webxr></a-entity> as explained in the docs.
In my custom component mycomponent I then want to listen for the gamepad events like so
events: {
"controllerconnected": function () {
log.info("controllerconnected");
},
"buttonchanged": function () {
log.info("buttonchanged");
}
},
But I never manage to get those events.
So I dug into the source code to see when aframe is attaching it's internal gamepad event listeners, and from what I can read it all boils down to a dependency on the variable isWebXRAvailable when in desktop mode AND the presence of component tracked-controls-webxr.
var isWebXRAvailable = module.exports.isWebXRAvailable = !window.debug && navigator.xr !== undefined;
That !window.debug will exclude just about every desktop browser?
So my question is then, are gamepads supposed to be supported in desktop mode at all?
Or have I totally missed to point on how to use this feature, and if so please point me in the right direction :)
