Shadow Devices
Shadow devices allows you to duplicate mappings across identical devices effectively reducing the amount of configuration you need to do. For example, you only need to map from an Xbox 360 controller (or other type of input) to a DualShock 4 controller once and add the proper shadow devices to have four players configured identically. Shadow devices can be added on the dashboard per profile and per device configuration. It is important to note that no input or output previews are available as the configuration is only present for the primary devices.
This example will create an input configuration with four Xbox controllers and an output configuration with four output DualShock 4 controllers. It is highly recommended to name each device configuration to keep track of it when configuring the profile later on.
The ordering of the shadow devices are important as they map to each other sequentially. The primary input device map to primary output device as normal without shadow devices. The table below shows the mappings for this example:
| Input device configuration | Output device configuration | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary device | Xbox controller 1 | ViGEm DS4 Controller 1 |
| Shadow 1 | Xbox controller 2 | ViGEm DS4 Controller 2 |
| Shadow 2 | Xbox controller 3 | ViGEm DS4 Controller 3 |
| Shadow 3 | Xbox controller 4 | ViGEm DS4 Controller 4 |
Changing the order of the shadow devices in one of the device configurations will cause each player to map differently. The configuration with the least amount of shadow devices determines how many shadow duplicates are bound, e.g. using the 4 Xbox controllers configuration against a device output without shadow devices will only bind the primary devices.
A profile normally only allows you to add a device once, however, adding shadow device to a configuration allows you to add the device again if you only need to bind the primary device in a different configuration.
Below shows the input and output configuration being used to bind the left stick of the controllers.
Filters are supported for shadow devices, however, it is recommended to not use filters with shadow devices if more than one shadow device configuration is used. The filters for primary devices will continue to operate as expected even if they have shadow devices attached.
A shadow device will only see a filter if itself or another shadow of the same rank activated it. The rank of a shadow device is determined by the ordering of the list in the device configuration. The first shadow device has rank 1 and the second has rank 2 and so on.
This complexity can be avoided by using shadow devices for bindings without filters and then individual bindings using primary devices (without any shadow devices) and filters per device where filters are needed.