FFXIV Style Crosshotbar in City of Heroes

[SambaMike]

Hey there.

 

I was a big COH player back in the day during live (circa 2005 or so) and I just now rediscovered it. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, I've become much more of a gamepad type of gamer rather than a mouse & keyboard one, mostly due to comfort. I've been spoiled by FFXIV's crosshotbar system, which is the most intuitive MMO controller setup that I've ever used. Using a combination of the the in game /bind commands and joy2key SHIFT functions, I've come up with this monstrosity:

 

 

 

Overall, it doesn't do too bad. Holding the right trigger and pressing one of the face buttons/d-pad will activate the corresponding power in trays 1 or 2. The left trigger does the same for 3 and 4. Holding the left trigger and right trigger together and pressing the face buttons/d-pad will activate the powers in 5 and 6. Right+Left trigger and pressing and holding the corresponding face button/d-pad will activate trays 7 and 8. The face buttons and d-pad without the triggers are mainly set to targeting and jumping. Pressing the right-stick puts the mouse in the center of the screen and clicks. Holding RB and using the d-pad will move the mouse, while RB+A (x on Playstation) will click. I set double-clicking the face buttons to activate powers I have hidden on tray 9 (common stuff such as the hoverboard for travel).

 

I came across some issues, however, that I'm hoping someone more experienced with either Joy2Key or the bind system in general could assist with.

 

1) The lalt, ralt, lctrl, rctrl chord keys don't appear to bind properly. They seem to default to a generic alt or ctrl, regardless of what I do. I've tried binding in game, or directly writing the commands into the keybind.txt fiile then loading it, and both result in the keys becoming generic. I originally had each specific group of 2 trays assigned to 1-4 and numpad1-4 with either left or right alt or control depending on their position, but eventually had to switch to using more keys for each (1-8 and numpad1-8) to account for the decrease in available chord keys.  This is more of an organizational and readability annoyance than anything else, but help on the subject would be appreciated.

 

2) For Joy2Key, in order to get the correct key presses when triggers are held, the triggers are set to swap to different joystick configurations. Joystick1 is set to normal keypresses, Joystick6 is set to mouse movement, and Joystick2-5 are for activating powers using a combination of the triggers and the face/d-pad buttons:

 a) Right trigger alone shifts to joystick2, where the face buttons will activate the corresponding powers in trays 1&2.

 b) The Left trigger alone shifts to joystick3, where it'll activate the powers in tray 3&4.

The issue that I ran into was the dual trigger presses. This is how the progression works for activating tray 5 and 6 powers:

 c) Left Trigger activates joystick2 -> in the joystick2 configuration, pressing the Right Trigger then sends it to joystick5 -> joystick5 corresponds to the buttons in trays 5&6. This actually worked as intended.

The issue, though is when I try to do it the other direction to activate trays 7&8:

 d) Right trigger activates joystick3 -> in joysticks 3 configuration, pressing the left trigger sends it to joystick4 -> in joystick4, powers in trays 7 and 8 will be able to be activated.

To my consternation, whatever order I pressed the triggers in, it would always activate the powers in tray 5 and 6. I tried a bunch of different combinations of keybinds + joystick SHIFTS to try to get it to work, but never could. Eventually I just settled on making the triggers + a held button press activate trays 7&8, which isn't really what I was going for.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, or if there's some program limit to joy2key that's preventing it from working as intended, but I was stumped for a few hours working on it and eventually gave in. Help on that would be appreciated.

 

3) Aesthetically, it would be nice to hide the trays completely with the exception of the power icons. I found how to make the opacity 0 (which still has them visible to a degree), but doing that also makes text windows quite hard to read and I haven't figured out how to set the extra tray opacity separate from the other trays. Some way to mod the look of the hotbars to be closer to the FFXIV design would be best, but I'm not sure how easy or applicable that would be.

 

I attached the keybinds and joy2key config for anyone that wants to help, or wants to try it out for themselves (warning, it's a bit of a mess after all the troubleshooting I was doing). The whole thing seems to work as intended, if not precisely like the FFXIV controls (I tried to make it as close as possible, but changed little things, like L3 being the map, R3 being a mouse press, (X) on XBOX targeting nearest friendly and the back button cycling through pets).

 

Feedback and ways to improve it would also be appreciated. Thanks!

 

keybinds.txt CoHCrossHotbarJoystickShifts.cfg

wdw.txt

Edited July 8, 2020 by SambaMike
Added window settings

[Patti]

But you are limited to not many powers this way?

[SambaMike]

You have access to 36 slots through the controller this way. You can also use hotbar 9 for less frequently used powers/toggles and can even assign them to double presses if you want (I have tray 9 slots 8, 9, and 10 assigned to double presses of [A], [X], or (B). Seems to be enough for my purposes and I'm playing a Mastermind. Probably not the best solution if you're heavy into macros or want to really fine tune your pet control, but works well enough for general comfort.

Edited July 8, 2020 by SambaMike

[GlaziusF]

On 7/8/2020 at 11:46 AM, SambaMike said:

I came across some issues, however, that I'm hoping someone more experienced with either Joy2Key or the bind system in general could assist with.

 

1) The lalt, ralt, lctrl, rctrl chord keys don't appear to bind properly. They seem to default to a generic alt or ctrl, regardless of what I do. I've tried binding in game, or directly writing the commands into the keybind.txt fiile then loading it, and both result in the keys becoming generic. I originally had each specific group of 2 trays assigned to 1-4 and numpad1-4 with either left or right alt or control depending on their position, but eventually had to switch to using more keys for each (1-8 and numpad1-8) to account for the decrease in available chord keys.  This is more of an organizational and readability annoyance than anything else, but help on the subject would be appreciated.

 

3) Aesthetically, it would be nice to hide the trays completely with the exception of the power icons. I found how to make the opacity 0 (which still has them visible to a degree), but doing that also makes text windows quite hard to read and I haven't figured out how to set the extra tray opacity separate from the other trays. Some way to mod the look of the hotbars to be closer to the FFXIV design would be best, but I'm not sure how easy or applicable that would be.

I can help you with these two.

 

For #1, l/r alt, control, and shift by themselves will bind to individual presses of those keys, but when it comes time to chord they're only recognized as alt, control, and shift; the side doesn't matter.

 

For #3, does it help or hurt to use a single 6x2 tray? You can arrange power icons on it like: 

 

 

This will at least reduce the amount of screen real estate your overlay takes up.

 

Also as far as #2 goes, have you seen the experimental controller binding stuff that was up on the test server? You may not need Joy2Key at all.