I found this noteworthy during work this week so I thought I might pass along the information.  Working in games and rapidly prototyping them on a PC using Flash has always brought up the difficulty of user input, which is mostly left to the keyboard and mouse.  As a game designer, it’s really necessary sometimes to use a joystick for input when testing certain types of games.

Not too long ago, Microsoft has added support for plugging in an Xbox 360 controller into your windows enabled PC.  With a few mouse clicks, the drivers are automatically downloaded and installed.  Viola, a gamepad that works on your PC as well as your console.  But what about using it for Flash to control flash enabled games?  This has always been a problem and still continues to be a pain.  However, some smart joe has cooked up some code that allows you to use your 360 controller to it’s fullest potential in the Flash IDE.  Behold, I give you Simon Joslin’s 360 gamepad server!  This gem of software development allows for full control of all parts of the joystick in either the Flash IDE or in AS3.  He even included a sample .fla file in order to show you the commands to call in your flash scripts and to test that his work actually works!  It requires three simple things and a C# app that runs in the background.  Not too shabby.  Here’s to Simon for his work, and we are all anxiously awaiting support for using this gem while running standalone .swf’s!  That can’t come soon enough.

And if that doesn’t float your boat, there’s always the great fall back JoytoKey that I”ve been using for a long time now.  Program your flash app as usual with keystrokes from the keyboard…run this simple exe file called JoyToKey and map all those keys to the buttons and viola, you have your joystick working properly (for the most part) in flash!