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Bug 3237 - Android: When physical keyboards get opened with SDL_JoystickOpen, it breaks arrow key events
Summary: Android: When physical keyboards get opened with SDL_JoystickOpen, it breaks ...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: SDL
Classification: Unclassified
Component: joystick (show other bugs)
Version: 2.0.4
Hardware: All Android (All)
: P2 normal
Assignee: ny00
QA Contact: Sam Lantinga
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2016-01-12 15:06 UTC by Anthony @ POW Games
Modified: 2016-10-18 05:10 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Anthony @ POW Games 2016-01-12 15:06:13 UTC 
This is a major problem for me because arrow keys are used on Android TV remotes to navigate menus.

Here's what happens: Android lists many non-joystick devices under SDL_NumJoysticks(), including physical keyboards. It's not possible to distinguish between real game controllers and soft keyboards and physical keyboards, so they all get opened with SDL_JoystickOpen(). Once a physical keyboard gets opened, the arrow key events (SDLK_UP, SDLK_DOWN, etc) stop coming from that keyboard. Instead, I get SDL_JOYBUTTONDOWN and SDL_JOYBUTTONUP events with button index numbers ranging from 11 to 14. So effectively, keyboard arrows get converted into joystick fire buttons. I could hack this behaviour and treat joystick button 11 as UP and 12 as DOWN, but I have USB game controllers with buttons of the same index. 

This happens with ANY physical keyboard USB, or bluetooth. I have a collection of 6 USB game controllers including an XBOX one. Only the XBOX one is (SDL_IsGameController()), and that doesn't work on any of my Android devices, so I can't even use SDL_IsGameController() to filter out the fake keyboard game controllers.

If I mess around with SDLActivity.java's "public boolean onKey(View  v, int keyCode, KeyEvent event)", I can half fix it, but I don't really know what I'm doing there...
Comment 1 Anthony @ POW Games 2016-01-12 15:29:21 UTC 
In SDLActivity.java I propose adding:

&& (joystickDevice.getSources() & InputDevice.SOURCE_KEYBOARD) == 0

to the condition in pollInputDevices() that decides to add the joystick.

This filters out keyboards. I see no reason why a keyboard needs to be added as a joystick on the Android platform. It causes a lot of problems when trying to use real USB joysticks and it breaks the events from keyboards.
Comment 2 Sam Lantinga 2016-09-29 23:54:35 UTC 
Can you check whether the latest version in Mercurial fixes your issue?
http://www.libsdl.org/tmp/SDL-2.0.zip

Thanks!
Comment 3 Sylvain 2016-10-07 07:49:35 UTC 
This bug talks somehow about this issue: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3444
Comment 4 Sylvain 2016-10-17 20:35:22 UTC 
> I could hack this behaviour and treat joystick button 11 as UP and 12 as DOWN, 
> but I have USB game controllers with buttons of the same index. 

11, 12, 13, 14 are meant to be:

SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_DPAD_UP,
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_DPAD_DOWN,
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_DPAD_LEFT,
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_DPAD_RIGHT,
Comment 5 Sam Lantinga 2016-10-18 05:10:36 UTC 
Fixed, thanks!
https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/rev/a5bc0d82dca4