Devlog 1

Recently, and as summer’s been coming around, I’ve been playing more and more lethal company with the bros. Now I wouldn’t say we’re sweats or anything, but we’re pretty good and can get to 3000+ quotas without many resets. On thing that’s made that possible is the wonderful Company Cruiser! For anyone who’s driven the Company Cruiser before, you already know ho hellish it can be. The gear changes, janky steering and funny physics make it truly an experience to manage.

I’ve been driving this thing for a while now and would like to think that I’m quite proficient, but looking around my room got me thinking:
What if I could use my Logitech steering wheel to drive the cruiser? Now of course the base game has no support for it and the input system used to drive the Cruiser is 1-0 based and not Vector based (W key accelerates at max when a pedal would be an axis), but having modded lethal before I was sure It’d be feasible. So I got cracking.

Configuring the Wheel

The Logitech G25 is a legacy wheel and is not supported in newer Logitech software. After much fiddling I figured out I needed to use a very old version of Logitech Gaming Software to get it to register properly on my computer.   

Bringing it into Unity

To start I needed to learn how the wheel interacts in and gets registered by Unity, specifically Unity 2022.3.9f, the version Zeekerss used to build LC. I began by making a unity project in that version with the URP Template, as it already had a preconfigured controller using the new Input System. I also downloaded a unity project by Juandarn called SpaceVR that used the Logitech G25 to figure out how it configured the wheel in it’s input system. Here’s what I learnt:

• The G25 is interpreted as a joystick with the wheel being Left and Right (X), Accelerator being Y+, and the Brake being Y-.
• All the buttons are regular.
• The Dpad is also a joystick.
• Z axis is the accelerator pedal but inverted (???)
• RZ axis is the brake pedal but inverted (also ???)
• Trigger is just button 1
• Slider is inverted Clutch pedal

Looking at Lethal Company’s input system

As the goal is to be able to drive the CC with the G25, it was also time to start looking at how Zeekerss configured the Input system for LC. I did this by using an asset ripper to reverse engineer Zeekerss LC build and turn it back into a Unity Project. So now that I have LC’s source code, it turns out it’s pretty simple and all the controls under one Action Map, so in the end I’ll need to add the G25’s axis configurations to the Actions themselves. I don’t think it’ll be too hard but for that I’ll need to start on some research related to interacting with a player’s input system through an LC mod patch.

Next up:

• Programming basic mod for Lethal that adds the wheel’s axis to the base game’s player input actions.
• Looking into how the Company Cruiser interprets player inputs to see what needs to be reprogrammed.

This will be quite the fun mod and journey, post a comment if you have any ideas or suggestions!
Cheers,
Liam