FF7Music + Xpadder incompatible together?

[Moozhe]

I'm using an Xbox 360 Wirless Controller and the game does natively detect it as a Joystick, however it doesn't respond to the POV-hat directional pad and it treats the left analog joystick as the d-pad.

Therefore I used xpadder to map my POV-hat to keyboard keys and it was working fine.  Then I started using the FF7music mod (which launches the game for me and keeps a console log window open in the background) and xpadder stopped working.  The weird thing is that if I alt+tab out of the game and have it running in the background, it responds to the xpadder commands.  Only when I activate the game window does it stop responding to xpadder.

I tried Joy2Key as well and had the same problem.

As a programmer, I assume that this FF7music launcher is filtering the Windows message queue for the game executable whenever it has focus (it makes a note of WM_ACTIVATEAPP in the console).  Programs like xpadder and Joy2Key both use the Windows message queue to post fake keystrokes to an application window.  For some reason FF7music is blocking these messages.

My questions are:

- Is there a known quick fix to this issue?

- Is the source code for FF7music public so I can try to fix it myself?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

EDIT: FF7Music seems not to be the issue.

 

[Kranmer]

I have the Xbox 360 Wired Controller and use XBCD driver which allows the user to select what buttons do what (so you can set your D-pad to Analog or vise versa and set things like the A button to the X button etc) and i use this to customize my controls for FF7 and other games like Metal Gear Solid 1 and Dino crisis for PC, i am not sure if XBCD driver works with the wireless controller but you could try it, or you could try the custom driver for the wireless controller called "x360wc" which can apparently do the something similar. I hope this helps.

 

[ficedula]

Hi,

FF7Music doesn't filter the message queue; it monitors the debug output from the FF7 exe. FF7 logs some of the messages it's processing - among a variety of other stuff - and so that's why you're seeing various messages appear in the output. Since it's not filtering messages, though, I'm not sure why it would stop your input remapper from working.

One thing perhaps worth trying; I don't believe you actually have to run FF7 from the launcher to have FF7music work; you should be able to run FF7Music, then run FF7.exe yourself. If that works, then ... it's something weird to do with the way the launcher is loading FF7, but at least you'll have a workaround. Also make sure you don't have FF7 set to run in any sort of compatibility mode? On my machine, running it in compatibility mode isn't necessary with Aali's driver, and turning compatibility on actually causes some weird problems. Of course, YMMV with whether compatibility mode is needed or not...

 

[Covarr]

Old versions of my installer set compatibility mode. I can't remember why, but I thought I removed it. I'll double check that when I get home around to it.

As for the launcher, I'm almost positive it's not doing it. It was written in AutoIt 3, which works fine with xpadder, at least in other applications I've used. All it does is launch ff7music minimized, launch ff7, and then hide in the background until ff7 is closed so it can close ff7music at the same time, to make the whole thing a bit more transparent and seamless. Nothing more than a cheap workaround to make things prettier, but also simple enough that I can't imagine why it would cause that.

Most likely, I meant to unset compatibility mode but forgot. I really need to keep better notes on my stuff, I have no clue why I made some of the decisions I made. At any rate, I will look into fixing it in future installers.

 

[PitBrat]

Did launching FF7.exe separately solve this issue?

Also, is there a definitive answer as to whether ff7.exe should run in compatibility mode?
I've heard arguments and examples for both sides.

 

[Moozhe]

I did a full reinstall and FF7music seems to no longer be the issue.  The issue is now there regardless of whether I launch FF7music or not.

Apologies, it must be an issue related to something else in the "Remix" installer.

 

[Covarr]

Don't be so sure of that. If you reinstall to the same location, Windows will remember your compatibility mode settings.

 

[Isuldor]

Xpadder will need administrative privileges to send input to a game running in compatibility mode.  You can use the "Run as administrator" context option to launch Xpadder.  e.g.:

I also use Xpadder and an X360 Controller to play FF7.  Among other things, I set it to use the dpad to send numpad keys.  It beats navigating menus with a stick.