[Old News] Project end 2023-12-31 #3080
Replies: 15 comments 8 replies
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Thank you for all your efforts and for this amazing project :) Do you intend to add bugfixes when needed or will you completely step out of the project and give the maintenance rights to someone else? |
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Thank you for all this work and this fantastic tool! |
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This is such a great tool and it was one of my must-haves back when I used to work with windows. Thank you so much for putting effort into making and maintaining it! |
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I am not sure who would want to take over and fork this project; would need to be re-branded for sure. DS4Windows is pretty much a tainted brand thanks to the tahxic Call of Duty crowd. This program has been flagged as a cheating program for close to two years now mostly for features (macro and special action related) that existed before I even forked the code in early 2017. Dunking on that group is not as fun as it used to be; probably shadow banned in most places anyway. I will continue tweaking my DS4MapperTest and SteamControllerTest programs regardless but it will be for fun with no established milestones. I don't see the two code bases being merged nor a 1.0 release being made. Not much reason to put too much effort into it when it is not clear if it would be stuck with a busted controller emulation driver that I am not allowed to help fix. Still have to implement workarounds in DS4Windows for issues existing since the InputMapper 1.7 days (around 2017?). Besides, I am getting too old for this. |
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Thank you for your work sir! blessings! |
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CircumSpector Team can keep DS4Windows under maintenance if you are interesting. Before you de-archived the project that was our plan anyway |
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Between this and the simultaneous retirement of ViGEMBus (copyright claim by German engineering company ViGEM gmbh), this is really not good news for PC gamers. Input Mapper is not good enough, Steam Input just doesn't cut it and I don't play exclusively on Steam. So long Ryochan, and thanks for all those years of dedication. |
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Thanks for the hard work! For those who want an alternative, I'm using reWASD, as it supports the extra buttons on my Flydigi Vader 2 PRO, and so far is working great! It's paid, but it's not expensive. |
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Damn. Completely understandable though. DS4Windows has been considered a cheating program more and more these days and it's sad that that's the general perception when in reality it provides a LOT of utility, especially when you compare it to Steam's own, barebones controller settings. I've been told to "stop cheating and get gud at the game" when 3P programs, such as DS4Windows or reWASD, are blocked off in an official manner, but the reality of it is I'm using these programs for utility like adjusting deadzones when games themselves have such poor deadzone settings, but unfortunately the masses don't seem to understand it. Thank you for your work! Hopefully someone swoops in and continues the legacy of DS4Windows even if it's under a different name. |
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Some of my suspicions got confirmed today. The new gamepad emulation driver that replaces ViGEmBus called VirtualPad is closed source and proprietary. Ended up paying for the Virtual DualSense DLC for DSX to get access to the DSX v. 3 beta in order to try both out. VirtualPad is definitely a downgrade compared to ViGEmBus. I already encountered some big problems especially with how resource heavy the driver is. It is also very laggy which is likely the biggest reason DSX v. 3 controller emulation is worse than with version 2. At least when something similar happened with ViGEmBus, I was able to contribute fixes to get performance more in line to my standards. That is not possible now and I would have hoped he would not have run into the same lag problems yet again. Been at this for years with several of his projects. I need to try out the infamous RetroArch infinite rumble problem and see if it occurs with the VirtualPad driver; DS4Windows had to use a customized ViGEmClient library to work around the problem with ViGEmBus. Looks like I am getting out at a good time. Pretty much just waiting for Microsoft to finalize .NET 8 and then the last major work for DS4Windows can be finished. I still need to port over some of the other bundled tools to the current .NET 8 Release Candidate. DS4Windows has already been ported over in a branch ( |
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One positive note is that it looks like the rumble is not infinite with VirtualPad when performing the RetroArch test; been ramming Link's head against a fence for several minutes now. The rumble seems to be a bit out of sync with what is happening in game though. There are a couple of different routes that could have been taken at the driver level to work around the issues with the old notification system the ViGEmBus driver used. |
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On a related note, I finally tried tweaking ViGEmBus to work around the known infinite rumble issue. I disabled the notification queue used in the custom library bundled with DS4Windows and confirmed that the last version of ViGEmBus was still susceptible to the problem. After looking at the code and getting WPP Tracing working, I was able to find the real problem and add a quick patch to confirm that the problem could have been fixed ages ago. I did the Link head bash for over 10 minutes and never ran into the problem; the unpatched version would start with the infinite rumble problem in about 1 minute. The root problem is a cross threading issue. Although WDF can handle queue synchronization when using its functions, the problem is due to data handling that is tied between two separate queues. At this rate, I am just going to leave it at that. The problem might still exist in VirtualPad but the client thread routine would be so slow that there would be far less of a chance for any synchronization issue to pop up; the notification system still exists in VirtualPad. I do not want to give him any solution if the problem does still exist. |
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I'm not ready to say goodbye 😢. I still use a DualShock 4 and I refuse to switch over to the DualSense or even an Xbox controller. Both products are horrible on their own (DualSense feels like a downgrade to the DualShock 4 imho; The Xbox One/Series controllers are completely inferior to the X360 controller), but using them on PC with awful controller support to begin with just makes using a controller in general an unpleasant experience. Which is why I truly thank you for the work you've done all these years ❤️. Will DS4Windows still be useable at all if we still have it downloaded, or are you taking everything down completely? |
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This repository will be put in read-only archive mode. It is mainly just to keep issues from getting posted for a project that is not maintained anymore. The source code and release files will still be available to download. Not sure how long ViGEmBus will continue to work though. |
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It is funny how much DS4Windows code was straight up lifted and used in DSX. More so with version 2.5 than version 3 but some complete classes still remain in the assembly for version 3. Maybe that is another reason version 3 is much slower by comparison. Attempting to piggyback off my work less but making his program worse in the process. I didn't even get a shout-out. Again, more of a reason to no longer license code under MIT or BSD style licenses. Way too lenient. |
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Now that I am thinking about it, there is no real restriction that stops me from changing the license for the DS4Windows source code under the GPL going forward. The MIT license was kept when I forked DS4Windows as I did not want to re-license code that I mostly did not write (at that time) and I wanted to play nice. Seems like nobody else wants to play by those rules. Too bad there is close to no future code that will be written by me in this project. Someone can just say they took the code from the version before the project was re-licensed. |
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Finally validated some of my older findings when it comes to MVVM development. I get criticized for not using the INotifyPropertyChanged interface for my ViewModel classes. While first moving to WPF, I tried and dismissed using INotifyPropertyChanged as being slow and adding unnecessary bloat. Tried it out again today with a small sample program and my old findings still stand with .NET 6. Making use of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface is enough to add significant slowdown to runtime performance. DS4Windows uses the other form of event hooking for bindings which relies on [PropertyName]Changed EventHandler event instances to be used. Example Granted, each observable property will then need its own event associated with it in order for XAML property binding to work as intended. It is not much different than defining signals in Qt C++ code. Getting criticized unfairly just because I do not use the latest libraries that promise to reduce lines of code but that make application performance suffer. Using MVVM Toolkit would be nice but it suffers from the same problem as it relies on INotifyPropertyChanged. INotifyPropertyChanged is a soydev helper IMO. Semi-related Luke Smith video; probably better examples for this. A Demonstration Modern Web Bloat |
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Wait. The license DRM used in VIrtualPad does not work as intended? I'm shocked /s DSX 3.0 problem with VirtualPad driver
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Added a workaround for a long standing issue with ViGEmBus. That is two major driver fixes for me since ViGEmBus went EOL. I want to bet VirtualPad suffers from that problem as well. Too bad I was not allowed to help before. |
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Quick test with the DSX implementation using VirtualPad. The first time it worked and resumed fine. The second time around, two virtual Xbox 360 controllers were created and they were both dead. So it looks like the problem persists with the new driver. I cannot test it any other way due to the API restrictions built into the driver. |
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Not really anything left to do. Almost ready to just push the update and get this over with. |
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No, No, No, you can't go! What in the world are we going to use without DS4? I'm only half kidding, I'm at a loss that you're leaving and really not sure what to use. |
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Looks like it is now confirmed the rumble bug still exists in VirtualPad and DSX v. 3. Been an issue with ViGEmBus since around 2017 with InputMapper v. 1.7 but gaslighting is a better method of addressing the problem rather than fixing it. My statement beforehand is likely enough to lead brony in the right direction of fixing said problem. Not going to give him the solution for free like in the past. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1812620/eventcomments/4033600999080324860/#c4033601726322454802
I did not even like giving the solution to the resume problem with ViGEmBus that plagued this project for years. Unfortunately, I distributed the workaround so I had to be somewhat transparent so he got that one for free; the VirtualPad driver had that same problem at the time but not sure about now. |
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I have mentioned it in passing on here and on X / Twitter before but I feel like I should mention it somewhere more concrete. The current plan is that I plan to stop development of DS4Windows at the end of this year. I have pretty much done everything I wanted to do when it comes to this project. My original idea was to get a different mapper out there in a more complete state to mostly replace DS4Windows but that is likely not going to happen. There does not seem to be a path forward when it comes to either project as it is.
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