Returning to Mac OsX

 01/23/2019

Month 3, Week 3

Author: Devin Wright

 At this time, I have finally gotten the  IOHIDManager to work so that I can detect connected controllers and receive input. The big piece I was missing to get it working was that I had to launch a separate thread that had to both create and init the IOHIDManagerRef, and then call CFRunLoopRun() which blocks the current thread and uses it to process the messages for the IOHIDManager.  I also did all of this within a class which seemed to be a necessary step as I had another demo beforehand that was implemented in a similar fashion but did not use classes, however, I am not 100% certain of this.  The working demo was also created as a command line tool (Macs version of a console app) rather than a Cocoa App which may have had an impact as well but this is untested. 

Now that I can detect the controllers I have to find out how to properly read input events from the controllers.  As of right now, I know how to register to receive the events from the controllers, however, I do not have a way to tell what button is sending the event. Also, currently I am not receiving axis events from the PS4 controller.  So, I am looking to see if I can get the information from the IOHIDElement received in the input event function. Otherwise, I may have to look into reading the output reports from the controller, the problem with that is they will most likely be unique for both the PS4 and Xbox controllers making a general implementation more difficult.