Devlog 2

Finally finished the first and most cruicial part of the mod! The first step to this mod was to let Lethal Company’s input system receive bindings from the G25. Now this in theory should have been a fast and easy implementation. Here’s how it turned into a 4 hour journey:

Writing base code

I started off by writing the essential parts of the mod. This mod uses BenInEx and HarmonyLib to patch my custom code into Lethal Company, so I made the public BasicUnityPlugin class that applies all patches in the .GetExecutingAssembly(). This means that it’ll look at all the code in the built .dll and patch automatically instead of me specifying what classes I want to patch.

The AddWheelBindings class

This is the center of attention when it comes to the input patching. This class needs to do 3 things:

• Find the localPlayerController
• Get all InputActionAssets that affect the localPlayerController
• Add new bindings to the ActionAsset’s InputAction that needs it

By fiddling around with the input system in another project, I found the name of the wheel to be <HID::G25 Racing Wheel>. Knowing the device name, I was ready to start patching the new inputs into the input assets.

The class that we will be patching is the StartOfRound class as it handles a lot of the local player and game logic. First I found the local player through StartOfRound.Instance?.localPlayerController;, then found the player’s playerActions asset and assigned a var to that. Then I made a function that takes the InputActionAsset, finds the actions we want, such as the ‘move’ action, and applies a new binding to that action. For example, we can grab the ‘interact’ action with InputAction interact = actions.FindAction("Interact"); and give it a new binding specifically for the G25: jump.AddBinding("<HID::G25 Racing Wheel>/button7").WithInteraction("press");

Weirdness

Once I finished adding all the bindings to the right actions along with some null checks, I build the .dll and got to testing. Right off the bat nothing worked, but a quick change to what method we needed to patch… kind of fixed things?

Something weird was going on: the bindings I’d made to the look action were working, but none of the other were.

3 hour long story short, Zeekerss made his PlayerControllerB read from two different instances of one InputActionAsset, so the bindings and actions across the two were the same but each one was being referanced in different spots.

The camera worked right away because the line that read the camera’s input was:playerActions.Movement.Look.ReadValue<Vector2>() as opposed to all other controls read as such: InputSystem.actions.FindAction("Move").ReadValue<Vector2>();.

The InputActionAsset I was patching was the one created in the player’s Awake() method, playerActions, and not the second global one.The only reason I found for Zeekerss to make two is that the mouse was being read by the first because the look input is not one that can be rebound in the settings menu. All the controls pulled from the second asset are controls that can be rebound in settings, meaning that the second one was the player’s local input settings when the first was the default.

Fix

All that needed to be done for the G25 controls to be read for all the actions was to also patch InputSystem.actions’s asset. It took about 3 1/2 hours to figure this  out, but at least it works now!

Next up:

Going forward we need to:

• Test the current system on the cruiser
• See what needs changes to feel more realistic

Cheers!
Liam