Please expand manual

[Kubrix]

How do I track movements of JoySticks?
Like what is the analog for

gamePadState.ThumbSticks.Left.X

[AderitoSilva]

Improving the Wiki is really something that is in the TODO list for quite some time now. I hope to have the time to work on it someday.

Regarding your specific question, the more convenient way to track movement of the joysticks is by using the XGamepad class. That is the class you would use for most things. You have several ways of doing that. It all depends on what is more convenient for your use case. The following are some of the ways you can track the movement of the joysticks:

Solution 1 - Subscribing to XGamepad.LeftJoystickMove and/or XGamepad.RightJoystickMove

// In a global variable somewhere in your code, keep an instance of XGamepad.
XGamepad gamepad = new();

// Subscribe to the joystick events.
gamepad.LeftJoystickMove += (sender, e) => LeftJoystickMoved;

private void LeftJoystickMoved() 
{
    // Get properties about the movement. For example:
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.X
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Y
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Angle
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Radius
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Delta  // This represents the change in movement since the last movement.
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Direction  // Left, right, top, bottom
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.MovementSpeed  // Movement per second
   
}

The example shows how to do it for the left joystick, but it is similar for the right. Just do the same for RightJoystick.

Solution 2 - Subscribing to specific events of XGamepad.LeftJoytsick or XGamepad.RightJoystick

XGamepad class has the LeftJoystick and RightJoystick properties, that provide a Joystick object. The Joystick object exposes events like:

• Updated - Is called whenever the joystick is updated.
• PositionChanged - Is called whenever the X or Y properties change.
• AngleChanged - Is called whenever Angle property changes.
• RadiusChanged - Is called whenever Radius property changes.
• DirectionChanged - Is called whenever Direction property changes.
• IsMovingChanged - Is called whenever IsMoving property changes, and is useful to know when the joystick starts moving or stops moving.
• IsPushedChanged - Is called whenever IsPushed property changes. It's useful to know when the joystick is at rest or is being pushed by the user.

Example

// In a global variable somewhere in your code, keep an instance of XGamepad.
XGamepad gamepad = new();

// Subscribe to the joystick events.
gamepad.LeftJoystick.PositionChanged += (sender, e) => LeftJoystickMoved;
gamepad.RightJoystick.PositionChanged += (sender, e) => RightJoystickMoved;

private void LeftJoystickMoved() 
{
    // Get properties about the movement. For example:
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.X
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Y
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Angle
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Radius
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Delta  // This represents the change in movement since the last movement.
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.Direction  // Left, right, top, bottom
    // gamepad.LeftJoystick.MovementSpeed  // Movement per second
}

private void RightJoystickMoved() 
{
    // Get properties about the movement. For example:
    // gamepad.RightJoystick.X
}

Solution 3 - Subscribe to XGamepad.Updated event.

XGamepad.Updated event is invoked whenever the gamepad is updated with new information from the device. You can subscribe to that event and access XGamepad.LeftJoystick and XGamepad.RightJoystick properties on the event handler.

Other solutions

There are other ways of getting joystick movement, but the ones I described are the most straightforward. Other solutions include:

• Subscribe to the Updated event of XInputDevice.
• Get the current state of the gamepad by calling XInputDevice.GetSate() method and compare the joystick position on the state with a previous state. This one is more low-level.
• Using XGamepad.RegisterInputEvent method with a custom InputEvent, for advanced user specific events that fire when specific user defined conditions occur.

Note

Remember that, all the examples above require that you are running an input loop for the events to trigger. You do this
by calling XGamepad.Update() or XInputDevice.Update() method on every frame of your game or application. If your application doesn't tick on every frame, you can always use a regular .NET timer that ticks every 1/60 seconds or so.