Thursday, January 17, 2008

Logitech G15 support

One of the things I love about my job is having a bit of freedom to work on my own pet projects from time to time. As long as I run the feature/idea past our technical director or producer and no one has a problem with it, I try to make time to work on things that I'd like to see in the game.

My latest pet project is something I've been wanting to do for over a year, and thats add support for the Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboards. If you haven't seen the G15, its a very nice back-lit keyboard with programmable macro buttons. But the coolest thing about it is a popup LCD panel at the top of the keyboard. Logitech has an API that applications can use to interface with the LCD screen and display custom data.

The possibilities for gaming are endless, and many other games have had support for the G15 for a very long time. In that respect, EQ2 has fallen behind. Granted it's not a huge feature, but there are enough users out there with the G15 that people have been asking for this for quite awhile.

I could have had this feature done a long time ago except that I tend to sometimes over-complicate things. In the past couple of days I decided this is something I really wanted to finish. I re-evaluated my plans and came up with an implementation that is much simpler. So I stayed at work until about 10:30 tonight working on it, and basically have it done now.

The nice thing about the implementation is that UI modders can decide what data they want to put on the LCD. Using our existing UI files, modders and players can create as many pages of data as they want and have them displayed on the LCD. Anything that we refer to as "DynamicData" can be displayed. This can be data like your character's name, class, stats, etc.

I'm excited about this feature finally being done, and I think the community will really enjoy it. Hopefully you'll see it go live in about a month.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stumbled upon thus while browsing EQ2-Daily.com.

Sounds great! Both me and the Mrs have G15 (me the old version and she the new) and we (ok... *I*) have ranted about no display support for maonths.

I'd really like a link to some information about what funcionality the display support that will ship with the LU.

I also want to know if the problems we see when creating macros to the G15 macro keas have been adressed in any way.

Thanks, Greg!

Greg Spence said...

Hey there! I'm sure you guys will love the G15 support, it turned out really nice. There are 5 pages that come with the default UI.
Title page
Stats page that shows ping, framerate, etc
Experience page that shows adventure, tradeskill and achievement experience.
Mini-Persona page that shows stats, health, power, etc.
Group page that shows the health and power of all group members.

Besides these default pages, the G15 display can be modified to show any dynamic data thats available to the client already.

As far as the problem you're having with the G15 macro keys, can you be more specific? This would probably be a G15 issue and not an EQ2 issue since the G15 software is supposed to be emulating keystrokes. We don't officially support any type of external macro software or hardware.

Anonymous said...

Nice! Some of those pages could actually replace the info normally on screen! More graphics goodness for me! Wheee!

The macros I cant get to work at all are stuff like(key sends this):

/say Where's me ale?

...and basically anything that sends several key presses. I have a hunch that the problem arises from how the Logitech software sends the string of keys (or how EQ2 reads it depending on how you look at it). Of course it is no biggie. Stuff like single presses work OK. But I can not macro stuff like casting a specific spell by using the /useability... function.

Oh... thanks for the quick reply. I actually was not expecting anything at all since the original post was from last month. Kudos!

Anonymous said...

This feature rocks! Thanks for taking the initiative to do this!

Anonymous said...

Big thanks from the Developer Relations team at Logitech, Greg!

Anonymous said...

While the update doesn't have the same level of impact for me since I have a ui with much of the info available, I wanted to say Thank you none the less. Its a great tool if your UI of choice doesn't provide all the info elsewhere, and now I tend to run the performance screen on my G15 so I can look down and see where/why/if I am having a performance issue. I dont like having that window open in game, so now I have access if I want it without distraction. Thank you very much for the personal effort.