Joy-Cons/Switch Pro Controller improvements

[FlameMan]

Hello,

Recently I was playing with Joy-Con Toolkit and I have found there few nice ideas which can be implemented in the future in reWASD. I am discovering how fresh feels playing games with separated controllers with two different gyros. Current reWASD support is great, but we can improve it a bit.

• IR camera support for reloading gesture (like on below video). It has been introduced in Switch's Resident Evil Revelations 1 & 2. It can be something like if we are covering majority of joy-con's camera with our body (touching other hand or just doing this with finger) it will activate rewasd action.
  
  
• NFC-reader support. On Switch is used mainly for Amiibo or Skylanders. I have many NFC tag used for home automation and I think it would be nice to be able use NFC tags for activation combos too. Right joy-con and Switch Pro Controller have NFC readers. My use cases:
  • Activating cheats - I don't find useful to assigning cheats combos to button activators, but having them in NFC reader? Sounds great. One NFC tag for god mode on/off, other one for noclip, other for health/mana/ammo. Kids can enjoy games without pain.
  • Changing settings - NFC tag can change camera settings, difficulty, manual/auto transmission etc.
  • Combos - lazy people can automate fatalities in Mortal Kombat, especially that they depends on selected character and they are not universal. Having different gamepad config for this is too much work. NFC activator seems right.
  • Automations - some people are using rewasd for exp/gold farming or to automate game actions. Such NFC tag combo seems good for such ideas.
• HD Rumble support in combo creator. Vibrations on Switch controllers can be very different. It's even possible to play mario theme via them. Maybe it's good idea to create few different presets (like we have with DualSense) and we can assign them to different actions. Something like pressing handbrake button can enable different vibration, pressing shooting button can work like machine gun vibration. Different for jumping, aiming, pressing gear up or gear down. Maybe different vibration for Xbox One controller games, when normal vibration is activated, and different when is activated Impulse Trigger Vibration? Seems that it's still possible to improve this feature.
  
  
• OPTIONAL: changing controller color: Joy-Con Toolkit allows for this. I'm not sure if it's useful for rewasd users, but maybe it's cool feature. Especially that such change is detected by Switch emulators and even real Switch. But in theory, it can spoil gamepad, so I am not sure about it.

IR and NFC support would be a really nice improvement. And maybe it will be not so difficult to implement as there is already open-sourced toolkit which supports these features.

[1ncorrect]

Hi!

I would like to get a little more information about the operation of this IR camera. Have you connected it to a PC? It is important to understand all the subtleties of the implementation of this idea.

It is also not entirely clear regarding the colors of the controllers. What exactly did you mean?

HD rumble and NFC implementation ideas are really good.
We will think about their implementation, but I'm afraid that I can't give you even an approximate time frame.
Thanks for your suggestions!

[FlameMan]

Yeah, I have connected right joy-con to my PC and IR camera via Joy-Con Toolkit app was working fine. In high resolutions it's lagging, but tbh nobody will use it to record videos. Rather to recognize gestures or covering lens with finger/hand. Here is the screenshot how it looks in action:



Changing colors was nicely explained on your subreddit: much needed feature : rewasd (reddit.com)
"joy-cons have an identifier that classify them as which colored they've been manifactured, it would be cool if rewasd could read it and show it in the key customization tab, and maybe even change it!". Joy-Con Toolkit allows to change hardware color value for body, buttons and grips color. Switch emulators (and Switch console) can later read this value to show these colors in games. Eg. if you put black silicone cover on your red joy-con, game still shows red controller in emulator/console. Overwritting this controller's color value in Joy-Con Toolkit to black will let people see controller in proper, black color. It's cool feature, maybe even can be useful to read joy-con color in reWASD interface.

[reWASDer]

Got it, thank you for the explanation!

That sounds pretty interesting. Will take a closer look with a team.